Today, I'll choose a lecture for you, and take you in a different way to see how to understand ancient poems by referring to foreign languages.
1
What exactly does "heaven and earth" mean
The first step to understand poetry should be to understand the characteristics of language, and the easiest way to understand the characteristics of language is to learn a foreign language first.
It is necessary to mention a famous saying by Robert Lee Frost, an American poet laureate: "Poetry is what is lost after translation."
Although the famous saying of Frost is still controversial in textual research, in any case, it shows an essence of poetry:
The beauty of poetry comes from the art of rhetoric, and different languages have developed different rhetorical devices, which makes poetry translation often equal to the translator's re-creation.
If you are patient, you can try to choose one or two classical poems to be translated into English, and then choose one or two English metrical poems to be translated into Chinese, and experience for yourself what you have gained and what you have lost in the process of translation.
The specific method is usually as follows: first, translate classical poems into modern Chinese, and then translate them from modern Chinese into English.
but you will find that even the first half of the work is often difficult to complete, because ancient Chinese and modern Chinese are not the same language.
We can take a look at a famous sentence by Li Yu, the empress of the Southern Tang Dynasty: "Flowing water, falling flowers and leaving in spring, is heaven and earth."
Li Yu's ci style is famous for its clarity, neither carving words nor piling up allusions, but even so, no one can tell what the word "heaven and earth" means: does it mean heaven and earth, or does it mean that the difference between the past and the present is like heaven and earth? Of course, there are other explanations. These four words are unclear and unclear, but they are also confusing.
From the grammatical point of view, "Heaven" is a noun compound word, which can be treated as a noun, and "Ren Jian" is also a noun, and two nouns are juxtaposed in one place, which can not form a fluent sentence with complete grammatical structure.
The reader must complete the grammatical structure in his mind before he can understand it, but how to complete it, whether to add a "de" between "heaven" and "earth" or to make it more complicated and make it "the difference between the past and the present is like the difference between heaven and earth" depends on the reader's mind.
If it is translated into English again, it is literally translated into heaven earth, or, more quaint, heaven time, which is totally inexplicable nonsense. Therefore, it is necessary to supplement the complete subject-predicate structure, show tenses and singular and plural numbers, and add definite articles or indefinite articles.
In this way, the meaning of the sentence is bound to become accurate and will not bring ambiguity, but the problem is that without ambiguity, the original poetry will disappear.
There are many similar examples. I choose two sentences with clearer meanings: Wen Tingyun, a poet in the late Tang Dynasty, famously said, "A chicken crows in a thatched shop, and a man walks on a bridge with frost." There are nothing but six nouns in ten words.
There's Lu You's famous sentence, "It snows overnight in the building, but the autumn wind is scattered in the iron horse". Fourteen words are also filled with six nouns, and you can't see the "subject-predicate-object complement" at all. Any literal translation is bound to be a confusing sentence.
This is a major feature of ancient Chinese. In poetry, a noun is an image, and the juxtaposition of several images constitutes a freehand brushwork picture. As for how the images are put together, which is lighter or heavier, and what kind of emotions they point to ...
The more vague the poet's language, the greater the reader's imagination.
There is a subtle proper limit in how vague the language is and how much imagination it should leave for others, which tests the poet's means. On the reader's side, the so-called sensitivity to the beauty of poetry also depends on the subtle discretion in the imagination space.
To give a simple example, He Zhu, a poet in the Northern Song Dynasty, famously said, "How many worries are there? There is a stream of tobacco, and the wind is blowing all over the city, and plums are raining when it is yellow."
The language is very simple. First, a question is asked to ask how much leisure worries there are, and then a metaphor is used to answer that leisure worries are as much as Sichuan tobacco, as much as the wind in the city, and as much as plum yellow rain.
using three images to describe the same thing is called metaphor in rhetoric. Metaphor is not common, so once it is used brilliantly, it is praised by people. It is because of this metaphor that He Zhu got the nickname "He Meizi". However, is this understanding really correct?
2
The uncertainty of ancient Chinese makes poetry intriguing
The above-mentioned understanding is right and wrong, because the three images of "Yichuan Tobacco" can be both metaphors and realism. If you only understand them as metaphors, you will understand them too rigidly.
The words "like ... and like ... and like" were not in the original text, but were added by the reader's brain. If we don't do this brain tonic, we can completely take "a stream of tobacco, a city full of wind and catkins, plums in yellow rain" as the writing method of "bonding feelings with scenery" It is not surprising that this is a common routine in poetry.
The so-called "ending feelings with scenery" means that when the feelings are expressed to a certain extent, it is time for the poem to end. At this time, it is just a matter of time to end the poem with a seemingly unemotional description of the scenery.
For example, Yuan Zhen heard that his good friend Bai Juyi had been demoted from office, so he wrote a small poem with only four sentences: The remnant lamp has no flame, and this evening I heard that the monarch was demoted to Jiujiang. Sitting up in a dying illness, the dark wind blows rain into the cold window.
The first two sentences said that I heard the bad news one night, and the third sentence expressed strong feelings, saying that although I was dying of illness, I was shocked by the news and sat up. What happens after sitting up? Judging from human nature, you can either cry or scold, in short, your mood will go further, but Yuan Zhen didn't write that, just saying that "the dark wind blows the rain into the cold window", and that's the end.
The so-called "dark wind blowing rain into the cold window" is not only the real scenery Yuan Zhen saw after sitting up, but also a portrayal of his mood and feelings about the current situation. As for the mood and the current situation, I don't know, let you appreciate it from the atmosphere of the scenery. How deep you can appreciate it depends on your own feelings.
Then He Zhu's sentence can also be understood in this way. "How much leisure is there?" The question was asked, but it was not answered. Then, it was written to describe the current scenery of "a stream of tobacco, a city full of wind and a yellow rain of plums", and you were asked to feel the author's emotions from these scenery.
which understanding path is right, metaphor or "bonding feelings with scenery"?
the answer is: both are true, and both are true at the same time.
If you have a strong sense of logic, you may ask, "The three images of' Yichuan Tobacco' are either metaphors of metaphor or realistic scenery, so this must be different."
However, the fuzziness of ancient Chinese just shows its charm here, and the vague language is to be understood vaguely. In the vague understanding, either one or the other becomes a kind of * * * existential relationship full of uncertainty, and the other is at arm's length.
No matter from the author's or the reader's point of view, the feeling of poetry can be regarded as a kind of "controllable out of control", just like the drift of racing drivers.
it is this sense of uncertainty that makes poetry particularly intriguing, with many people who can understand it and few who can explain it. It is precisely because there are few people who can explain it that translation becomes even more difficult.
3
English poems and translation problems
If we try to translate English poems into Chinese, we will also encounter the above troubles.
Shakespeare's dramatic lines are mostly written in plain poetry, which is a poetic genre between prose and poetry. But even such poems often leave translators with no choice but to re-create.
Take a look at Hamlet, which we are most familiar with. The heroine O 'filia believes that Hamlet is crazy. She has a self-pity line: O, Woe is me, to have seen what I have seen, see what I see.
You might as well experience the feeling of English duality. The literal translation will be like this: "Ah, sadness is me, seeing what I have seen and seeing what I have seen." Of course, it doesn't sound like a Chinese sentence.
So Zhu Shenghao's translation is: "Ah, I am so bitter. Who expected the prosperity of the past to become the soil of the present!" The two nouns "prosperity", "dirt" and the verb "variation" in the translation are all added by the translator. Although the meaning becomes clear and smooth, it is clearly using the China way to speak the English meaning, and it also makes the original implication straightforward and the original complexity simple.
We can also refer to Liang Shiqiu's translation: "Ah, I am so blessed. After seeing what I saw before, I have to look at what I see now." This translation is more in line with the original text, but on the one hand, China people will feel uncomfortable, and on the other hand, the tense in the original text is barely expressed because so many words such as "once upon a time", "now", "later" and "these" are added, which makes the original set of concise and powerful antithetical sentences bloated.
The rhetorical feature of Shakespeare's original text is to use temporal changes to form duality. Although antithesis is the most common rhetorical device in ancient Chinese, it is also the most qualified rhetorical device in other languages, but we still can't translate Shakespeare's antithetical sentences without damaging poetry.
In any language, poetry is the most exquisite language form, which will bring the potential of the language into full play.