Chinese Poetry in Translation's Present and Future

At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lucas Klein keenly investigates the present reputation of Chinese poetry in translation. While translation does afford writers with the opportunity to vicariously travel, Klein notes: "Today, around the globe, even the general public now agrees with Arnold: translation, like the understanding of other cultures, should aspire to scholarship, and scholarly judgment is the best judgment for translation. Of course, scholars are often as misled by their own cross-cultural fantasies as they are devoted to hard science." More:

POETRY TRANSLATION, though Americans generally pay little attention to it, is a contentious domain. Consider Matthew Arnold and Francis W. Newman’s argument about the essence of a translated literary work, and whether taste or scholarship should determine poetry translations. In “The Translator’s Tribunal” (1861), right after the Second Opium War (1856–’60) and the British army’s burning of the Summer Palaces in Beijing, Arnold wrote against popular and popularizing poetry translations such as Alexander Pope’s of Homer (1715–1720, 1726), claiming that the translator “is to try to satisfy scholars, because scholars alone have the means of really judging him.” Newman responded nearly a decade later, in 1870, that scholars may constitute “the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste the educated but unlearned public is the only rightful judge.” Though they were not writing in direct reference to Chinese literature, or even imperialism and trade, their debate nevertheless has shaped much current thinking not only about translation, but also about China.

Today, around the globe, even the general public now agrees with Arnold: translation, like the understanding of other cultures, should aspire to scholarship, and scholarly judgment is the best judgment for translation. Of course, scholars are often as misled by their own cross-cultural fantasies as they are devoted to hard science. Nor do they necessarily agree about how to represent their erudition in translation, a trait illustrated by an argument between two academic specialists in medieval Chinese poetry almost 40 years ago: when Paul Kroll criticized Stephen Owen’s “imprecision in translation,” including his “tendency to translate hendiadys by a single word,” Owen replied that Kroll’s sense of poetry was “a bizarre and erroneous one in which all Chinese poetry sounds like early Wallace Stevens.” More objectively, Owen continued, “Kroll feels that I am insensitive to Chinese poetic language; I feel that he is; we simply have different views of what Chinese poetry is.” And since “American sinology seems roughly divided” between convictions that “at times seem to approach the religious, and are not susceptible to rational persuasion,” this conflict may never be brokered. (The dispute kept the two most respected scholars of Tang poetry in North America from cooperating or even speaking with each other for decades.) There is much room for disagreement inside the agreement that translation should satisfy scholars.

Continue at Los Angeles Review of Books.