Poets are good at putting subjective feelings into concrete images and forming images with unique feelings. For example, in the first poem of Gitanjali, "You empty my heart cup again and again, and you fill it with brand-new life again and again". The image of the heart cup is cast in the mold of Indian traditional aesthetics, which vividly explains the internal relationship between soul and life. The image of "lightning of love" in the sixth poem of The Ferry Collection shows the great role of love and embodies the poet's life pursuit of transforming and perfecting the world with love.
Symbolism is one of the artistic features of Tagore's English version. The first poem 17 in the balance spring collection is a typical symbolic poem. Islands, crops, rivers, wooden boats and village girls are symbols of human habitat, achievements of human life, river of time, boat of time and gods driving the boat of time respectively. Everyone's achievements, pain, joy and dedication of love can be loaded on the ship of time and passed down from generation to generation. But there is no "foothold" on the ship of time, and everyone is bound to be abandoned by the years and soon disappear into the abyss of forgetting.
Comparing the Bengali English version of Tagore's poems with the original, it is not difficult to find that the poet did not translate word for word, but rewritten it drastically. Compared with the original, the length of English-translated poems has been shortened. Poems 45 to 48 in the Collection of Picking Fruits are a group of mourning poems. Originally a sonnet in memory of the poet's wife, Mullini, the whole poem is full of sadness. The poet translated without background introduction. Song 48 wrote: "Woman, send beauty and neatness back to my lonely life, just like when you were alive, bring them to my home/clean up the debris of dusty time, fill the empty jar with water, and restore everything that has been ignored/then, push open the door of the temple, light candles, and we will meet quietly in front of the great god."
The word "wife" in the original text is changed to "woman" in the translation. There is no sadness in the translation, which can be completely understood as expressing the joy of reunion after parting. This flexible change, although slightly divorced from the original poem, has expanded the capacity of the poem, leaving readers with a huge space for re-creation, thus increasing the connotation of the poem.
Tagore fully considered the aesthetic needs of western readers when translating his works into English.
Tagore believed in Brahma, whose classics were classical Upanishads, and regarded Brahma, who created the great god, as the only true god. Brahma and Christianity, which westerners believe in, are completely different religious systems, and Brahma and God are also completely different religious concepts. Brahma's literal translation in his original works should be Brahma, but the poet translated it into Lord or God, and Brahma, a thing known only to Indians, became a god familiar to western readers.
Tagore dealt with some Indian proper nouns in his English translation of poems. For example, the gardener's collection number 78. In the original book, the young farmer named his buffalo "Butu". When the poet translated it, he changed it to my darling, which made the reader feel very cordial. The 25th song of Fruit Picking Collection says: "Before dawn, the night dragon was still pestering its dark and cold body in the sky. Where did the early bird find the lyrics of dawn?" The original text is the first song in Ji Ji, and the poet translated the "night python" in the original text into "night dragon" so as not to arouse readers' disgust.
Tagore's English translation downplays individuality and strengthens * * *; It plays down the nationality and strengthens the world. For example, the thirty-fifth poem of Gitanjali: "There, the heart is fearless and the head is held high; There, knowledge is free; There, the world is not separated by the walls of narrow inner rooms; There, words come from the depths of truth; There, the tireless struggle stretched out its arms to perfection. There, rational spring did not dry up in the desert of dead bad habits; There, the soul is led by you and rushes to the expanding thoughts and behaviors-step into the paradise of freedom, father, let my motherland wake up! " The original Bengali version of this poem is the 72nd in Sacrifice Collection. In the original work, the poet prayed to the Great God to strike hard at "India" under colonial rule and make it as beautiful as the translation said. In the English version, "India" can be translated into "my motherland", which makes this poem jump out of the threshold of the country and has the characteristics of the world.
As an outstanding poet, Tagore skillfully recreated his original works with poetic skills on the basis of a profound understanding of western cultural traditions and aesthetic tastes, and refined them into masterpieces full of philosophy and aesthetics, which won wide recognition from foreign readers and opened the way for him to win Nobel Prize in Literature.
Tagore's successful experience tells us that poetry is best translated by the poet himself. If a translator is not a poet, he should at least know and use poetic skills. Don't stick to "Cinda" in translation, but try to be "similar in spirit" rather than "similar in shape". No matter poets or other translators, they should fully understand the cultural tradition and narrative style of the country where the readers live, and their words and sentences should conform to the readers' aesthetic habits, so that the translated works can be accepted by readers.
This may be a useful inspiration for China translators who are interested in introducing China's literary works to the world.