Translating Tagore's Stray Birds into Chinese

Applying Systemic Functional Linguistics to Chinese Poetry Translation

Yuanyi Ma, Bo Wang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367415457
• eBook ISBN: 9781000259643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

Translating Tagore's 'Stray Birds' into Chinese explores the choices in poetry translation in light of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and illustrates the ways in which readers can achieve a deeper understanding of translated works in English and Chinese.

Focusing on Rabindranath Tagore's 'Stray Birds', a collection of elegant and philosophical poems, as a source text, Ma and Wang analyse four Chinese target texts by Zheng Zhenduo, Yao Hua, Lu Jinde and Feng Tang and consider their linguistic complexities through SFL. This book analyses the source text and the target texts from the perspectives of the four strata of language, including graphology, phonology, lexicogrammar and context.

Ideal for researchers and academics of SFL, Translation Studies, Linguistics, and Discourse Analysis, Translating Tagore's 'Stray Birds' into Chinese provides an in-depth exploration of SFL and its emerging prominence in the field of Translation Studies.

1
Delineating the specificity of poetry translation

This chapter serves as a background for the book by briefly introducing poetry and poetry translation. We first define poetry and relate the concept of poetic style to the notion of foregrounding in linguistics. We then highlight some translators’ opinions on poetry translation, including both translators in the East and the West in the last century. Further, we conduct a survey on poetry translation to investigate the current status and the research topics in papers published between 2002 and 2019 in journals indexed by the Web of Science database.

1.1Understanding poetry

This book deals with poetry translation, specifically the translation of a collection of poems titled Stray Birds by Rabindranath Tagore in the Chinese context. In history, poetry translation has often been regarded as “a difficult job” (Jones 2011: 1; cf. Bassnett 1980; Boase-Beier 2006, 2009). Robert Frost (1997: 856), one of the most famous American poets known for his depictions of rural life, has made the following remark on poetry translation: “I like to say, guardedly, that I could define poetry this way: It is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.” Similarly, Roman Jakobson (1959: 238), a Russian-born American linguist and the founder of Prague School, has admitted that “poetry is by definition untranslatable.”

In general, poetry has been found to be difficult to translate because of poetry’s “resistance to facile communication” (Shepherd 2007: 71). The concept of poetry varies according to culture and evolves with time. Literary critics, since Aristotle’s time, have come up with a number of varied accounts of poetry. Various notable poets, such as Philip Sidney, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Matthew Arnold, and T.S. Eliot, have proposed a number of definitions of poetry (see Strachan & Terry 2000; Wainwright 2011).

In the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), poetry is defined as “[t]he art or work of the poet,” with the creativity of the user of language, (i.e. the poet), being highlighted (see Strachan & Terry 2000: 10). In addition, the OED interprets poetry as “[c]omposition in verse or metrical language, or in some equivalent patterned arrangement of language, usually also with choice of elevated words and figurative uses, and option of a syntactical order, differing more or less from those of ordinary speech or prose writing” (ibid.). From these definitions, it is deducible that poetry is regarded as a form of elevated language that is different from everyday usage or ordinary language. According to Strachan and Terry (2000), the above-mentioned characteristics of poetry are rather patterns that are realized by sound in English poetry, with free verse being an exception.

One of the key features that distinguishes poetry from prose and common language is meter or the regularity of rhythm identified within the recurring sound patterns (Wainwright 2011). Example 1.1, selected from the first stanza of “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth, illustrates the language of poetry. Written in a stanza that is composed of six lines, the poem rhymes with the end words in each line, following a regular pattern of “a b a b c c”. Also, it can be observed that the poem is written in iambic tetrameter. Each line of the poem consists of four metrical feet and each metrical foot consists of two syllables – a short one followed by a long one.

Example 1.1

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

(Wordsworth 2010: 265)

However, in Example 1.2, which is selected from the first paragraph in the preface of Michael Halliday’s (1985a) monograph titled Spoken and Written Language, there is the absence of rhyme and the regular rhythmic patterns, and the passage has not been arranged in the style of a poem like Example 1.1. Although the language is simple and reads fluently, as Halliday (1985a: 1) intends to do so during his process of writing, it is not regarded as poetry.

Example 1.2

We live in what is called a “literate society”, which means that a reasonably large proportion of older children and adults in the community use language in a written as well as in a spoken form. They have learnt to read and write. Speaking and listening come naturally, unless one is born deaf; they also have to be learnt, of course, but – like walking and running – they are learnt young and without benefit of instruction. To get to read and write, however, one is usually taught; this is one step, perhaps the most important step, in the process of education. Reading and writing are associated with educated practice from the start.

Although the choices of sound pattern are essential to poetry, there are poems that do not conform to this tradition – for example, poems written in free verse (also called nonmetrical verse or vers libre). As a rebellious offspring of the conventional meter, free verse does not conform to the regular meter and the choices of rhyme and fixed patterns of line length are also optional (cf. Wesling & Bollobaś 1993; Strachan & Terry 2000).

Besides the sound patterns, poetry is characterized by the meaning and feeling expressed. As seen in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, poetry is defined in the following manner: “A poem is an instance of verbal art, a text set in verse, bound speech. More generally, a poem conveys heightened forms of perception, experience, meaning, or consciousness in heightened language, i.e. a heightened mode of discourse” (Brogan 1993: 938).

The heightened language discussed in the previous definition coincides with what William Wordsworth suggested in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads in 1800: “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…” (Wordsworth 1991: 237). In 1816, Wordsworth further made the following remark, emphasizing the importance of meaning in poetry: “Poetry proceeds … from the soul of man, communicating its creative energies to the images of the external world” (Strachan & Terry 2000: 13).

The data of the present study (i.e. Stray Birds written by Rabindranath Tagore) belongs to the category of poems that evoke powerful feelings. As shown in Example 1.3, even though the poem neither rhymes nor conforms to a traditional format, it reveals an optimistic state of mind, informing readers to face their sufferings positively instead of making complaints.

Example 1.3

The world has kissed my soul with its pain, asking for its return in songs.

(Tagore 2010: 85)

Poetry, as one form of verbal art, is made of language and can thus be accessed by analyzing language from the perspective of linguistics with reference to descriptions of linguistic systems in the context of culture. There have been various engagements of literature in general and poetry in particular with the help of linguistic theories. For instance, Jan Mukařovský (e.g. 1964, 1977), one of the leading figures among Prague School scholars, engaged with literature from a linguistic point of view by developing the formalist concept of “defamiliarization” into a more systematic “foregrounding” and examined the “aesthetic function” of language (see Halliday 1982 for investigations of de-automatization based on insights from the Prague School; cf. Selden et al. 1997; Verdonk 2002). In addition, Jakobson (1959: 238; cf. Jakobson & Jones 1970 for an overall inquiry of one sonnet by William Shakespeare) has summarized the uniqueness of poetic language as follows:

In poetry, verbal equations become a constructive principle of the text. Syntactic and morphological categories, roots, and affixes, phonemes and their components (distinctive features) – in short, any constituents of the verbal code – are confronted, juxtaposed, brought into contiguous relation according to the principle of similarity and contrast and carry their own autonomous signification. Phonemic similarity is sensed as semantic relationship. The pun, or to use a more erudite, and perhaps more precise term – paronomasia, reigns over poetic art…

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), as one kind of appliable linguistics (see e.g. Halliday 2008; Matthiessen 2014a for discussions on appliable linguistics), is suitable to be employed in the analysis of poetry (e.g. Butt 1984a, 1984b, 1988; Halliday 1988; Hasan 1985, 1988; Lukin 2003; Webster 2015). Such linguistic studies of poems or literature in general are based on the description of language as a whole rather than on the personal or arbitrary statements. Also, the SFL perspective allows for the comparison of these texts with other texts, whether written by same or different authors and whether in the same or different genres (Halliday 1964).

Following this approach, linguistic analysis has been applied to the investigation of poetry. For instance, Halliday (1987) approaches the central passages in Tennyson’s In Memoriam from the perspectives of logical structure, transitivity, and mood, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Abbreviations and symbols
• Abbreviations for Interlinear Glossing
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Delineating the specificity of poetry translation
• Chapter 2: Demystifying translation as recreation of meaning through choice
• Chapter 3: Translating on the expression plane of language: Graphological and phonological choices
• Chapter 4: Translating on the content plane of language: Lexicogrammatical choices
• Chapter 5: Contextual considerations in translation: Analyzing field, tenor, and mode
• Chapter 6: Conclusion: Exploring poetry translation with Systemic Functional Linguistics
• References
• Index