China's modern poems can't be translated into foreign languages because there is no tone in foreign languages. Ancient Chinese is a monosyllabic language.
Therefore, every pause has a certain position. In quatrains, after the second syllable of each line; There are two pauses in each line, a short pause after the second syllable and a long pause after the fourth syllable. Of course, the conventional format can't be translated. Beautiful antitheses in metrical poems are not easy to translate into foreign languages.
Du Fu's "cicadas gather in the ancient temple and birds are too cold in the pond" can only be translated as "a singer of Cikada is in the ancient temple and a bird shadow is too cold in the pond". This translation is of course the original text of "I'm sorry" Du Fu.
With translation experience, words and Sanqu can be translated into foreign languages more easily. Of course, the contrast between horizontal and horizontal lines can't be translated, but the rhythm of long and short sentences is relatively easy to imitate. There is no way to reflect the structure and rhythm of the original text by translating China's neat five-character poems and seven-character poems into foreign languages.
Arthur waley, a famous British sinologist and translator, used a rhythm that both thomas eliot and E. Pound appreciated when translating five-character poems and seven-character poems. This rhythm is very much like a form that the English poet Hopkins likes to use. In this form, translation matches each Chinese syllable with a stressed syllable, and one or several light syllables will appear between stressed syllables in translation. Therefore, the translated sentence is often much longer than the original sentence: "15 years of conscription" can be translated into English "I followed the army in the field when I was five years old" Similarly, you can translate "the youngest leaves home and the oldest comes back" into "I left home when I was a little boy and came back when I was an old man".