MCLC: Poetry translation forum (1,2)

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Poetry translation forum (1,2)
English is a lion, German is a mouse. In German speaking countries we translated everything of Chinese literature. The English speaking countries have no chance to compare. No chance at all. But English is cultural imperialism. English seems to be everything, but it s not. English is a mouse. Compared with what we did in German. No one wants to know this. This is not only our tragedy, this is also the tragedy of English speaking countries which do not know what we are doing in German. We do not exist for them! Neither for US nor for China. English is No. 1. Really? Compared to what we did in Geman for Chinese literature: NO! English speaking countries have no chance to compare! No chance!
Wolfgang Kubin <kubin at uni-bonn.de>
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Interesting that the ultrachauvinist Global Times is writing about poetry now (in between their editors working hard to put down the Chinese diplomats who are trying to have the damaging GT warmongering rhetoric toned down, cf. http://chinascope.org/main/content/view/7825/104/ ; http://chinascope.org/main/content/view/7826/104/ ; http://chinascope.org/main/content/view/7838/104/ ).
A comment on poetry. In the 1980s I was part of publishing some translated poetry into Chinese, in China. The supposedly respectable Shikan [Poetry] published a translation of poems by the early 20th c. Swedish-language poet Edith Södergran whose minimalist language in the original has an almost unparallelled clarity and force. One of her poems is "Livet" [Life] which consists a series of one-liners capturing what life is like, all starting with "Life is, . . . "  And one line goes, "Life is, to miss out on that one and only opportunity." The Shikan editors could not bear such a line in Chinese, so they re-wrote (cf. no. 5, 1983), "Life is to NOT miss out on that one and only opportunity" = adding the Chinese word "bu". Almost needless to say, the shameless Shikan editors did not bother to ask the translators if it would be OK for them to rewrite Södergran's poetry in this way! And this was only one of several ghastly moves they made . . .
The moral of the story is: The texts we see aren't the authors' or the translators', unless they are pure samizdat. Everything that passes thru the hands of editors and appears in print, must be assumed to have been ideologically cleaned up into Chinese Newspeak. There should be websites listing original poems vs. the published original poems, much like there now seems to be a whole cottage industry growing up listing the omissions in foreigner's books published in China, where everything remotely subversive has been removed in published Chinese versions -- listings made in the spirit of James Loewen writing on the Chinese fate of his classic book, _Lies My Teacher Told Me_, http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=2158
Magnus Fiskesjö  <magnus.fiskesjo at cornell.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on April 26, 2016
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