Interestingly, one aspect of this poem is precisely the expression of the second if mentioned above, giving the answer that all poets have "I". I, who emphasizes the independent will in poetry, is unwilling to be a vassal and supporting role, and unwilling to be a helper for you to achieve yourself and narcissism and self-pity. Even from the most direct level, that is, "I" doubt your feelings, it does not mean that "you" behave differently and deceive "I", but talk about the primary and secondary arrangement of an image: I like rain, because only rain can hold up an umbrella; I like the sun, because only the scorching sun can highlight the beauty of the shade; Only the wind makes the doors and windows have the meaning of sheltering from the wind and rain ... where is "me"? Is it just a platform for you to show yourself?
Let's briefly talk about English poetry itself, and then talk about translation. As mentioned above, the words and sentences in this poem are scattered, but there is rhyme at the end of the sentence, which keeps the lowest level of phonological rhythm. The "ordinary version" translation, translated with the same straightforward words, has no rhyme constraints, so it is called poetry. Prose poetry at best. You know, even those modern Chinese poems that don't rhyme, the words are still concise (compared with Gu Cheng's generation), and when using parallelism, there are often progressive and cyclical momentum and emotions (compared with Shu Ting's Oak Tree). Is there one here?
In fact, the rigorous structure of ancient poetry solidified the steps of emotional transformation of poetry in the form of musical rhythm (people have corresponding feelings about a specific acoustic structure), so people can clearly know the location and when the evolution of poetry begins and ends from the perspective of rhythm and prosody. Poetry has developed from strict metrical form to today's metrical form, and even some poets are good at poems without metrical and rhyming, just as music has gradually developed from a fixed beat to a beat structure, which puts forward higher requirements for poets' ability to control the rhythm of language.
If the problem of "ordinary edition" is not like poetry, but like prose taken out of context, at least it means expression, but it is too straightforward, then the problem of "literary edition" is even bigger. The literary version is piled up with a lot of gorgeous words, deliberately creating a vague and implicit aesthetic feeling, which is itself a superficial and vulgar expression, not to mention that this translation does not involve or care about the theme of the original poem at all. This rude and predatory "borrowing" is wrapped in the cloak of "beauty", "elegance" and "obscurity", which makes people feel extremely disgusting-and this is the original.
The problems in The Book of Songs and Li Sao are the same. Textual research scholars tend to pursue details. In this complicated and time-consuming process, they often lose themselves and forget the details in layers. They are integrated according to specific logic and serve a whole. Losing this whole set of logic and simply listing the details in a self-righteous way will cause huge problems. Judging from these two versions, the translator's understanding of these two representative works of China's early poems is quite limited. What they pursue is the surface of the text structure, but they lose the unique emotion of the poems in these two collections-the book of songs has no rhyme (translation is not stressful), and the taste is not as good as chewing wax. It's just bagasse. There is no sugar, but it tastes like saliva. At first glance, the version of Li Sao rhymes neatly, but the sentences of Chu Ci often have the beauty of uneven level, but here it is stiff and rigid, and it has been brushed four times in succession, which is a far cry from playing cotton and symphony.
Finally, there are seven out-of-print editions and seven French editions. We don't care about parallel lines, and we don't question that there is no opposition between parallel couplets and necklaces. "Seven verses" is nothing more than adding the translator's personal part, but it embodies the different levels of the original poem and the language is concise. Although the sense of flatness is still abrupt, there is no sense of two sentences being even, but at least it is framed by a simple rhyming fixed structure, which feels like poetry-the version of Li Sao is very similar in comparison, but there is no ".
The seven-law edition has a stronger sense of hierarchy than the seven-out-of-print edition, but the translator adds too many "spices" and blurs the theme. Moreover, this translation also limits or strips off the artistic conception of the original poem, completely limiting the poem to the boudoir. Such translation, when the original poet knows it, will be a curse-of course, like the literary version, the author probably won't bother to curse it.