Translating poetry involves striving for accuracy, as well as aesthetic pleasure

Translating poetry involves striving for accuracy, as well as aesthetic pleasure– and definitions of both of these goals are up for you to articulate. The issues you should consider while translating and developing your statement include: Accuracy. What does it mean to stay “faithful” to the original: to be literally correct, or to evoke the same thoughts and feelings in today’s readers that this text may have evoked in its original context? Content. What is the poem’s message, on the most basic level (what story does it tell? how ambiguous or how concrete are the details in this story)? Which shades of meaning are implied, but not explicitly stated? On a higher level, what are the poem’s cultural references – the associations that Wang Wei’s intended audience may have had? How do you transmit this cultural information to your reader (footnotes? preface? specific word choice?) How much of this cultural backdrop is necessary to appreciate the poem? Form. In the format presented in your book, Wang Wei’s poem has a conspicuous form: twenty one-syllable words arranged into four lines, like a perfect square on the page. Should you replicate this laconic elegance, and if so, how? Would English genres, such as a sonnet or a limerick, be suitable? Furthermore, the poet uses rhymes and other poetic devices. Which of these formal features will you preserve, and which will you omit? Will you use rhyme or blank verse, and why? The grammar of Wang Wei’s Chinese differs greatly from modern English: what is lost, and what is gained when his impersonal sentence structures are converted into Subject-Verb-Object phrases? Medium. Is it important to evoke the sensory quality of the original’s medium? Is it relevant that the original was likely a calligraphic inscription in a scroll with ink paintings (would you replicate this for your readers?) Is it relevant that it is written in an antiquated language (would using Old English be a good equivalent, or bad?) Audience. Who is your ideal reader – what is their cultural horizon? What are they likely to relate to and why? Are you addressing an audience of your friends , scholars of Chinese literature, lovers of contemporary American poetry, Shakespeare aficionados, etc.? How does your idea of your audience impact your style? Transparency vs. authenticity. Should the poet domesticate the poem’s foreignness and make it palatable for a contemporary reader? Or should she preserve the “difficulty” of the foreign text – that is, foreground, rather than conceal the non-equivalence of English and Chinese expressions? Why? Translator’s status: invisible or assertive? Should the translator be constrained by the original? Should she aim to efface her own presence from the page and let the original poem speak for itself as much as possible? Or should she rather assert herself as an equal author, a creator? Presentation. Will you print the original poem next to your translation, or not? What effect does your choice achieve? The second part of the assignment – the accompanying statement – is an opportunity to address these questions and explain the goals and motivations underlying your approach. You may present your statement either in the form of a diary (a documentation of your creative quest and the choices you have made along the way, followed by an overall evaluation of your strategy), or a manifesto (which opens with your overall goals as a translator and then proceeds to illustrate how you have achieved them though specific examples).