Poetry, as a literary genre, reflects social life in a lyrical way, is highly concise and concentrated, and expresses thoughts and feelings with rich imagination, rhythmic language and line-by-line arrangement. Poetry is the purest art in literary works, with rhythmic, concise and implicit language, clear rhythm and neat sentence patterns. It can be said that the birth of poetry is to reflect the charm of language. It is the product of the complete natural integration of the poet's thoughts and language in his works, and has distinctive linguistic and cultural characteristics.
Since we want to talk about this aspect of poetry, we should put it into practice.
"Poetry" is just a general term for this style. Only by starting from a specific poem can we really touch poetry, understand poetry and understand poetry.
Poetry can make people realize the profoundness of language and condense the essence of a national language and culture. It contains distinctive cultural characteristics, so the translation of poetry is very difficult. The English poet Shelley once said that poetry cannot be translated, and it is futile to translate poetry. This is "like putting a violet in a crucible and trying to explore the structural principle of its color and fragrance". Literary works like poetry are closely combined in content and form, and it is difficult to separate them. So, strictly speaking, translating it will destroy the original.
However, with the development of the times, the exchange of language and culture has gradually increased. The translatable or untranslatable factors in poetry translation are not immutable. We need excellent foreign poems, and we also need to translate China's poems into foreign languages.
The purpose of translating an article is to convey the beauty of meaning, sound and form of the original poem as much as possible, so that foreign readers who read the poem can enjoy the beauty of harmony as their own readers. Since the requirements for translators are so strict, how to define the translation criteria of poetry?
Professor Liu Chongde puts forward that the highest realm of Chinese poetry translation is similarity in form and spirit.
So, what is both form and spirit?
The so-called similarity refers to keeping the translation consistent with the original in terms of words, sentence patterns, expressions and metaphors. The so-called spirit likeness means that we should strive to maintain the charm and charm of the original when translating poetry, so as to achieve the artistic effect of the original. The spirit likeness was first put forward by Fu Lei. He said: "As far as the effect is concerned, translation, like painting, pursues not formal similarity, but spiritual similarity." Zhu Shenghao also put forward the viewpoint of "keeping the original charm". He said: "The purpose of my translation of this book is, first, to maintain the charm of the original to the greatest extent possible;" To strive for second best, we should faithfully convey the interest of the original text by understanding fluent words; However, in the hard translation of word for word, I don't agree. "
Give a few examples, such as "You had breakfast.
"In your room" is a common English sentence. If you just translate it into Chinese word by word through the external so-called form, it will become "you eat your breakfast in your room." "Language is the carrier of thinking or ideological content, and the formal correspondence between the two languages is determined by the expressed content. If the ideological content or thought is compared to a central axis, then,
The expression of language will form some vague symmetry on both sides of it. Therefore, "form" refers to the whole poem, and the corresponding relationship of various "forms" is extremely complicated on the basis that they are not composed of the same language. Some translators are so bound by "form" that even basic translation skills are avoided. Or take the poem mentioned above as an example,
Compared with rigid translation, we can see the disadvantages of sticking to words.
From this perspective, spirit likeness is more important. Everyone knows how to write. We translate these poems in order to better understand their connotation and appreciate the writer's literary talent. Here, you may find it difficult to have both form and spirit. In fact, good literary works are always full of emotion, profound artistic conception, strong appeal and strong artistic effect. Of course, it is best to keep the original text when translating. But does form necessarily contradict God? The answer is obviously no. This is because sometimes spirit likeness is spirit likeness. The ideological content and emotional charm of literary works must be expressed through certain forms. The original work is vivid and appealing. Their emotions and artistic conception are vivid on the paper, and their language habits are close to the target language. At this time, maintaining the form of the original translation actually played a vivid role. By maintaining this form, translation can realize the seamless integration of form and spirit. But many times, you can't have both.
Generally speaking, poetry translation helps us appreciate those excellent works from abroad, and our colleagues convey our culture and ideas to foreign countries. On the other hand, if we don't read the original, we can't deeply understand the author's thoughts, which is not conducive to our understanding and learning. Poetry translation cannot be superb. We can only expect to create a new generation of poetry translation and a bilingual masterpiece with both spirit and form.