I really enjoyed the readings this week. This is mainly because I had to translate a poem (called “送友人" by 李白) from Chinese to English back in high school for my English class (I have attached a picture of my translation). I was proud of the final result, but I had a difficult time translating. Since Chinese, similar to the Japanese language, is really different from English, I had a hard time trying to align the tone, mood, flow, and even words to the original piece. At the end of the day, just like what Beichman said, "the aim of translation is not to produce a clone, but rather to evoke a sense of difference." It is impossible to even accurately translate a modern piece of literacy, let alone poems with fewer words. In many Chinese poems, each line has five words, and there are two lines in one sentence. Although I was able to break each sentence into two lines, the flow of the poem is still different because I couldn't have matching numbers of syllables in English. This is because each of the Chinese characters has complicated meanings behind it, and it was difficult to match it with the right English word. I think what made me really proud of this translation was the fact that I researched the background of this poem and tried to understand the author's emotion through knowing the time period this poem was written in. So I agree with what Pulvers said about how translating poems require a thorough knowledge of the original piece because poems often have a lot of deeper meanings in them and merely translating the words on the surface is not enough.
Sophia
No comments:
Post a Comment