On Ezra Pound's Translation of Classical Chinese Poetry

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On Ezra Pound's Translation of Classical Chinese Poetry ON EZRA POUND’S TRANSLATION OF CLASSICAL CHINESE POETRY IN CATHAY Ming Ming Du A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Graduate Program in Translation Studies York University Toronto, Ontario August 2018 © Ming Ming Du, 2018 ii Abstract This thesis focuses on Ezra Pound’s translation of Classical Chinese Poetry in Cathay. A comparative study of Pound’s translations with the original Chinese poems and versions by other translators is conducted. The theoretical framework adopted is Toury’s (1995) Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS): an important concept, ‘shifts’, is used for the analysis. Lefevere’s (1975) seven strategies for translating poetry and Chesterman’s (1997) categorization of shifts on syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels are incorporated as the secondary framework to make the analysis more specific and comprehensive. The thesis reveals that regardless of some considerable deviations from the original, Pound’s translations have successfully reproduced the essence, the delicate shades of meaning, the musicality, the sharp imagery, the precise diction, and the succinct style of the source texts, which has enabled Cathay to become a popular collection of translation since its first publication in 1915. iii Acknowledgments Special thanks are due, first of all, to my thesis supervisor, Professor Julie McDonough Dolmaya, who guided me through this wonderful journey of academic research by providing a lot of valuable feedback and consistent support. I am also very grateful for the encouragement of Professor María Constanza Guzmán, who offered supervision over the initial stage of my research, and for the advice of Professor Marie-Christine Aubin and Professor Aurelia Klimkiewicz, who read my thesis and put forward a number of constructive and enlightening suggestions especially for future research. iv Table of Contents Abstract .........................................................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................................iii Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................................ iv Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1. Cathay – Bridging Gaps between East and West ........................................................................5 1.1 The Book Cathay and the Original Poems Involved .......................................................................5 1.2 The Chinese Poets ...........................................................................................................................8 1.3 Ezra Pound the Translator .............................................................................................................10 1.3.1 Pound’s Translation from Italian, Provençal, and Japanese ...............................................12 1.3.2 Pound’s Translations from Chinese ....................................................................................13 1.3.3 Pound’s Unique Poetic Style ..............................................................................................15 1.4 Critical Reception of Cathay .........................................................................................................17 1.4.1 On Imagism ........................................................................................................................18 1.4.2 Positive Reception ..............................................................................................................20 1.4.3 Negative Reception .............................................................................................................21 Chapter 2. Theoretical Framework and Methodology ................................................................................23 2.1 Literature Review ..........................................................................................................................23 2.1.1 Strategies, Art, and Guidelines for Translating Classical Chinese Poetry .........................24 2.1.2 Analyses of Pound’s Translation of Chinese Poetry ..........................................................32 2.1.3 Gaps in the Theoretical Literature ......................................................................................37 2.2 Theoretical Framework .................................................................................................................38 2.2.1 Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) ...............................................................................38 2.2.2 Shifts ...................................................................................................................................41 2.2.3 Lefevere’s Seven Strategies ................................................................................................44 2.3 Methodology .................................................................................................................................47 Chapter 3. Analysis of Pound’s Translations in Cathay .............................................................................50 3.1 Poem One: ‘Song of the Bowmen of Shu’ ....................................................................................51 3.2 Poem Two: ‘The Beautiful Toilet’ ................................................................................................58 v 3.3 Poem Three: ‘The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter’ ...................................................................66 3.4 Poem Four: ‘The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance’ ...................................................................................73 3.5 Poem Five: ‘Separation on the River Kiang’ ................................................................................80 3.6 Poem Six: Wang Wei’s Poem under the Theme of ‘Four Poems of Departure’ ...........................89 3.7 Global Analysis .............................................................................................................................95 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................105 Bibliography..............................................................................................................................................113 Glossary ....................................................................................................................................................123 1 Introduction A widely quoted saying goes: ‘Poetry is what gets lost in translation’ (Wechsler 1998, 51), illustrating one representative opinion about the untranslatability of poetry. People think so because poetry is so closely related to the specific language and culture that once transformed into another language many key features of the original may suffer a loss. Especially when the target and source languages are English and Chinese, which belong to two genetically unrelated families, there are huge differences to challenge translators’ knowledge and skills such as: the writing systems – one alphabetic, the other ideographic; the syntactic traditions – one inflectional, the other free from inflections and thus much looser and flexible; the sound systems – one can have clusters of consonants in one single word, while the other cannot due to a monosyllabic nature; let alone more complex cultural factors such as different ways to express feelings and instruments of expression. Under such circumstances, Pound set a good example to prove the translatability of poetry through his Cathay which was first published in 1915. With little previous knowledge of the Chinese language, Pound finished his translation based on the posthumous notes of American orientalist Ernest Fenollosa. Although being criticized for inaccuracies, Pound’s translations received wide acclaim for their elegance, simplicity, and directness. As Mary Caws mentioned in her Surprised in Translation, ‘Pound makes a “slightly wrong meaning” into a “completely right feeling”’ (Caws 2006, 25). With a poet’s keen insight, sophisticated writing skills, and a deep understanding of classical Chinese poetics, which coincidentally echoes the principles of Imagism, Pound captured the essence of the original poems and reproduced their unique supreme 2 aesthetic. It is worth exploring questions such as what makes Pound’s translations in Cathay so popular and remarkable regardless of the criticism, and what characteristics of the translations can be observed and summarized. Over the years, researchers have studied Pound’s translation in Cathay; however, the depth is insufficient. Many discuss Cathay as a development stage of Pound’s poetics and translation skills. Others compare and analyze the poems in Cathay with others that are not from Cathay such as poems of Browning or poems in Pound’s The Cantos (e.g. Eliot 1928, Xie 2015). Among those who have studied Cathay as a solo research object, most of them (e.g. Wang 1965, Peng 2015) have only explored very limited aspects by analyzing just a few of Pound’s translations in Cathay. Overall, among all the researchers, few pay attention to the
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