thesis when poetry argues: on the translation of argument in classical chinese poems and revisiting

388 Pages·2017·3.58 MB·English

THESIS

WHEN POETRY ARGUES:
ON THE TRANSLATION OF ARGUMENT IN CLASSICAL CHINESE POEMS
AND REVISITING THE NATURE OF POETRY TRANSLATION

Submitted by
Shiao Ying Sharon CHU
UCL Centre for Applied Linguistics, Department of Culture, Communication and Media

In partial fulfillment of the requirements
For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
UCL Institute of Education
London, England
Summer 2018

Doctoral Committee:
Principal supervisor: Dr. John O’Regan
Subsidiary supervisor: Dr. Myrrh Domingo

Professor Li Wei
Dr. Charles Denroche
DECLARATION

I, Shiao Ying Sharon Chu confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own.
Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been
indicated in the thesis.

Date: August, 2018 Shiao Ying Sharon CHU
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to my principal supervisor, Dr. John O’Regan for
his patience and good guidance, without which the path of my Ph.D. studies would
have been much more difficult than it has been, and also to my subsidiary supervisor,
Dr. Myrrh Domingo, who has offered me the most sensible advice on what it is that is
required of a readable and coherent thesis.

My sincere thanks also goes to Professor Richard Andrews, Mr. Brian Holton, Professor
John Minford, Professor Yau Yuk Chong, Dr. Agnes Lam, Dr. Max Hui-bon-hua,
Professor Sin Wai Chan, Professor Gilbert Fong, Professor Serena Jin, and Dr. Lucas
Klein, who have offered me their own valuable views on poetry translation, which have
opened my eyes to multifarious perspectives on a subject which is so complex and yet
inspiring.

Last but not least, I would be very much amiss if I do not also thank my parents, Lai
Kam Helen Fok and Kwok Wai Chu, for their care and support all along, which have
given me the persistence and confidence much needed for the past five years.
ABSTRACT

The assumption of the importance of the translator’s talent has often led to the result
that poetry translation appears unfathomable, in particular the view exists that poetry
translation can only be successful as a form of rewriting or re-creation (Bassnett, 1998),
while the difficulties and intricacies involved in poetry translation may have led to the
subjectivity and ‘isolatedness’ of numerous relevant studies. In this research study, I
propose the ‘argumentative perspective’ to analyze classical Chinese poetry, by which I
argue that description of the nature of poetry translation can be described in a relatively
objective manner. Seemingly incompatible with the strong lyric tradition of classical
Chinese poetry (Liu & Lo, 1975) but nevertheless a long-standing concept in Western
literary studies (Kertzer, 1988), ‘argument’ is defined in this study as having a structural
and meaning dimension. Using the comparative approach in translation studies
(Williams & Chesterman, 2002), I discuss how different translations of the same poem
can be judged against the threshold of whether or not the poetic argument of the source
text is transferred as far as possible. While different translation issues are foregrounded
as I discuss the two dimensions of poetic argument, the discussions concerned are given
coherence by the common aim of demonstrating the usefulness of the argumentative
perspective in achieving my research purpose of an objective description of poetry
translation, as well as how such a description leads to a simple and accommodating
theory, the latter I propose in particular to be contribution to the field of translation
studies. All in all, the conclusions derived from adopting the argumentative perspective
should have generalizing power, and allow poetry translation to be understood in a
way which is rid of the mysticism, subjectivity, and isolated nature associated with
previous studies.

Keywords: poetic argument, classical Chinese poetry, translation
Table of Contents

NOTES ........................................................................................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER 1: Basis of Discussion of the Poetic Argument and Overview of this Study .............................. 5
I. Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 5
II. Poetry translation— what are the difficulties about? ................................................................. 8
III. Poetry – its translatability and the goal of its translation acknowledged ................................. 11
IV. Defining the nature and standards of translation objectively – what are the problems? ........ 12
V. Problems with poetry translation studies – the prescriptive paradigm .................................... 16
VI. Problems with poetry translation studies – the descriptive paradigm ..................................... 20
VII. Research objective: what makes the poetic argument useful? ................................................. 26
VIII. The argumentative perspective: what it has to offer for translation studies ........................... 29
IX. An overview of this research study ............................................................................................ 36

CHAPTER 2: Poetic Argument – Delineating its Meaning and Substance ................................................ 40
I. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 40
II. Argument and its traditional senses .......................................................................................... 42
III. Argument as understood in Western poetry ............................................................................. 45
IV. Argument as understood in classical Chinese poetry ................................................................ 47
V. Defining the poetic argument in its broad sense ....................................................................... 50
VI. The specifics of poetic argument ............................................................................................... 52
VII. Argument as a structure of meaning ......................................................................................... 55
VIII. The poetic argument – its structural and meaning dimensions ................................................ 58
IX. Argument and argumentation ................................................................................................... 63
X. Summary of chapter .................................................................................................................. 65

CHAPTER 3: About Poetry (Shi) and its Selection for Analysis.................................................................. 67
I. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 67
II. Poetry as literature in China ...................................................................................................... 67
III. The genre of classical Chinese poetry ........................................................................................ 70
IV. The form of classical Chinese poetry ......................................................................................... 74
V. The theme of classical Chinese poetry ....................................................................................... 78
VI. Genre, form, theme, and the poetic argument ........................................................................ 80
VII. Selecting the poems for analysis ................................................................................................ 81
VIII. The method of analysis and sources of poetry translations ...................................................... 85
IX. Summary of chapter .................................................................................................................. 86
CHAPTER 4: First Aspect of the Poetic Argument: Sequential Structure ................................................. 87
I. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 87
II. The sequential structure as syntagmatic structure ................................................................... 91
III. Sequential structure in narrative poems and their translations ................................................ 92
IV. Sequential structure as poetic argument and its form-meaning relationship ........................ 106
V. Poetic argument of sequential structure as prose paraphrase ............................................... 109
VI. Sequential structure in argumentative poems and their translations .................................... 115
VII. Sequential structure as poetic argument and the new translation theory ............................ 128
VIII. Summary of chapter ................................................................................................................ 129

CHAPTER 5: Second Aspect of the Poetic Argument: Repetition ........................................................... 130
I. Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 130
II. Repetition as paradigmatic structure ...................................................................................... 131
III. Repetition and its translation – a preliminary exploration ...................................................... 133
IV. Repetition defined ................................................................................................................... 138
V. Repetition as poetic argument and its translation .................................................................. 139
VI. Poetic argument of repetition as prose paraphrase ................................................................ 152
VII. Interpretation of a poem and the emotional meaning in repetition ....................................... 160
VIII. Emotional meaning in repetition and its interpretation by individual readers ....................... 170
IX. Repetition as poetic argument and the new translation theory ............................................. 171
X. Summary of chapter ................................................................................................................ 172

CHAPTER 6: Third Aspect of the Poetic Argument: Metaphor ............................................................... 174
I. Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 174
II. The meaning and substance of metaphor as a Western rhetorical device ............................. 175
III. Metaphor – its Chinese counterparts ...................................................................................... 177
IV. Metaphor and ‘bi/xing’ – their differences .............................................................................. 182
V. The validity of using ‘metaphor’ to describe classical Chinese poetry .................................... 186
VI. Discussing the metaphor as poetic argument – why translatability matters .......................... 188
VII. Metaphor as poetic argument – its form-meaning relationship ............................................. 191
VIII. Translating the ‘truth’ of the metaphor as poetic argument .................................................. 193
IX. The translation of metaphor – two traditional proposals ....................................................... 196
X. Metaphor as poetic argument – translating its form-meaning relationship ........................... 198
XI. Poetic argument of metaphor as prose paraphrase ................................................................ 215
XII. Metaphor as poetic argument and the new translation theory .............................................. 218
XIII. Summary of chapter ................................................................................................................ 218
CHAPTER 7: Fourth Aspect of the Poetic Argument: Imagery ................................................................ 220
I. Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 220
II. Metaphor and imagery – their similarities .............................................................................. 221
III. Imagery as poetic argument and its translation – a preliminary exploration ......................... 223
IV. Imagery – how it is different from metaphor .......................................................................... 229
V. The sheer juxtaposition of imageries and its translation......................................................... 233
VI. The translation of sheer juxtaposition of imageries as poetic argument ................................ 234
VII. Imagery as poetic argument – the translation of uninflected nouns ...................................... 248
VIII. Imagery as poetic argument and the new translation theory ................................................. 253
IX. Summary of chapter ................................................................................................................ 253

CHAPTER 8: Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 255
I. Summary of the thesis ............................................................................................................. 255
II. Demystification of poetry translation ...................................................................................... 263
III. The elusive terms and phrases understood in the light of the argumentative perspective.... 263
IV. Understanding ‘readers’ response’ from the argumentative perspective .............................. 273
V. The avoidance of subjectivity and isolatedness ...................................................................... 277
VI. The objective dimensions leading to a simple and accommodating theory ........................... 279
VII. From complexity to simplicity – final words on the poetic argument ..................................... 287

APPENDIX I ............................................................................................................................................... 293
APPENDIX II .............................................................................................................................................. 318

REFERENCES ....................................................................................................................................... 323-381
NOTES

Romanization of Chinese text used in this research study:
Pinyin is used unless the word appears in cited quotations in Wade-Giles, in which case
the Pinyin is put in square brackets, e.g. T’ang [Tang].
Word-for-word crib of classical Chinese poems:
When discussing classical Chinese poetry examples I provide word-for-word cribs to
give a rough idea how closely the translations correspond to the source text:
玉 階 生 白 露，
jade stair emerge white dew
夜 久 侵 羅 襪。
night long soak gauze stockings
卻 下 水 晶 簾，
but down crystal – curtain
玲 瓏 望 秋 月。
clear – look autumn moon
The ways I mark the poems word-for-word are illustrated in detail as follows:
Correspondence –
Some Chinese terms which consist of two characters signal a single sense
unit and therefore cannot be translated word-for-word. ‘Fengjing’ (風景), for
example, is translated as ‘scenery’, and not ‘wind’ and ‘view’. Where such is
the case, the slot which supposedly belongs to the second character in the
term will be filled up by a dash (–). On the other hand, sometimes more than
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one English word is used to translate a Chinese character, in which case the
translated words are linked with a hyphen (-) to indicate that they are
translations for one word only, e.g. ‘shou’ (壽) means to ‘live-long’. In any
case, I have translated the poems word-for-word in a way that it might be
easier for the reader to work out roughly the meaning of a poetic line even
without reading the English translations.
Transliteration –
I have transliterated some Chinese words (because there is no exact
correspondence in English). The transliterated words are marked in Pinyin
Romanization and put in italics.
Word-class –
Without any change in word form as in English, a Chinese word may have
different word-class memberships, and whether a word is, say, a verb or an
adjective can sometimes only be worked out in-context. To avoid confusion,
occasionally I mark a word as belonging to a particular part of speech with
short forms (see below).
Short-forms –
As indicated above, some Chinese characters I need to transliterate. They
include prefixes, particles, quantifiers, onomatopoeias, and units of
measurement. For transliterated words as such I use a short-form to indicate
what they are.
I also use short forms to mark content words of different parts of speech.

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The short-forms used are as follows:
adj. – adjective
adv. – adverb
aux. – auxiliary
n. – noun
onoma. – onomatopoeia
part. – particle
pre. – prefix
pro. – pronoun
quan. – quantifier
u. of measure. – unit of measurement
v. – verb
Inflection –
Chinese is an uninflected language, and hence in Chinese-English translation
a verb needs to be translated as the past or present form, and a noun as the
singular or plural. Mostly I just translate a verb/noun into its base form
without inflection. The reason is that the interpretation of the poem may not
rule out either the past or present, or the singular or plural. However, if the
verbal context necessitates the use of a particular inflected word form I just
translate accordingly, e.g. if there is a time adverbial like ‘qunian’ (‘last year’;
去年) preceding the verb, then the verb is translated with past tense. In
addition, if there is a numeral above ‘one’ modifying a noun, or if in-context
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