Fu Hao
Zhou Ying: The Irish poet and playwright Yeats was the winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature and an extremely important poet in the transition period of Western literature from Romanticism to Modernism. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, China introduced and translated him, and Mao Dun once translated his play "Hourglass". For some time afterwards, the study of English and American literature was almost at a standstill. More intensive translation and really in-depth research should be after the 80s. When did you start translating this poet's work?
Fu Hao: Yes, the Chinese people should re-understand Yeats began with the translation of seven Yeats poems by Mr. Yuan Kejia in "Selected Works of Foreign Modernists" (1980). I started translating Yeats in 1983, when I was in my second year of college. When I was in my third year of college, I went to a publishing house with a self-translated manuscript of "Selected Poems of Yeats", and the editors had not yet heard of Yeats's name. Two years later, five translated poems were officially published for the first time in the quarterly journal Foreign Literature. It took 10 years before the opportunity to publish The Complete Lyric Poems of Yeats.
Zhou Ying: Is there a certain gap between the study of Yeats poetry in China and foreign countries? If so, what are the main aspects? Can you talk about the current state of Yeats's translation and research in China?
Fu Hao: Of course, the gap is very large. First-hand basic research is done by foreign scholars, especially Irish scholars in English-speaking countries, such as scribner's multi-volume annotated Yeats' works, which has now become the standard text cited by Yeats's research community; the compilation of the Oxford edition of the multi-volume Yeats Epistles is still in progress. We can only try to understand Yeats and express our own views on these basis, and the common problem of domestic research is that we do not understand enough, the phenomenon of "reading in" is more, and there are many repetitions of topics. For us, translation is the first step to understanding. Yeats's works have not been translated into Chinese very much, and there are many repetitive translations, and even plagiarism. Some researchers rely heavily on translations, but are not able to distinguish between good and bad translations.
Zhou Ying: Your new book" "Commentary on Yeats's Poetry" provides detailed explanations and introductions, and I think it can be regarded as an effort to change the current status of Yeats research. I have noticed that you have compiled several books of Yeats's poems and anthologies, and have also written his commentaries, how is this one different from the previous works?
Fu Hao: Yes, this book focuses on the understanding of the text, aiming at the original intention of the author of Yeats's poem, although this goal seems to never be achieved in practice, because even if you are right, the author cannot approve it from the ground up, not to mention the theoretical claims, even if the author says it. I now know and understand Yeats far better than before, and at present there are some unique discoveries in this book, correcting the fallacies of some foreign scholars, or seeing that they have never seen before, and some of the contents have been published as early achievements in authoritative academic journals at home and abroad. There is also no shortage of wild actors among foreign scholars, and as long as they have sufficient evidence, it is not difficult to refute them. I discovered a lot of new material in the process of writing this book. This book is a review of works, a collection of poems is a translation of works, and a commentary is a writer's study, which can be said to make up my Yeats research trilogy. The collection of poems has been updated. The commentary now seems a little thinner, and I am ready to start revising it.
Zhou Ying: How did you come up with the idea of writing such a book, is it a prescribed action of our unit's innovation project, or is it a self-selected topic based on your research interests?
Fu Hao: I never do prescribed actions. It is ridiculous to say that the origin of this book is gambling, because another publishing house has asked me to write a similar book without talking about it, so I started another stove to do it myself. In addition, the main reason is that Yeats has been translated into China for so many years, and the understanding of him by general readers and even academics is far from accurate and in-depth.
Zhou Ying: The title of the book is "Yeats's Poetry", and the title of the introduction is "The Necessity of Explanation".
Fu Hao: As the saying goes, poetry has no praise, and a thousand readers have a thousand Hamlets. Perhaps that's why professional commentary is needed. There is only one best kind of commentary, and that is the one that is closest to the author's intention. If literary commentary is compared to targeting, then the author's intention is the bullseye. Commentary is the proper duty of a literary researcher. Any art requires not only general appreciation, but also specialized research to invent the laws and mechanisms of artistic creation. Serious literary readers need expert guidance to "read" more of the original meaning from the text, rather than "reading" their own speculations into the text.
Zhou Ying: When it comes to the interpretation of poetry, we want to know, what needs to be explained? Was that the author's intention? The American Neo-Critical Critics Wimsart and Beardsley proposed the concept of the "fallacy of intent" and opposed attributing the meaning of poetry to the author's intention. This theory was once popular and had a great impact, and even now it is still taken as a guideline, what do you think of such a view? What kind of commentary do you think is ideal?
Fu Hao: Indeed, only the author's original intention needs to be explained, because beyond that is the reader's own understanding. It is the goal that literary hermeneutics has always pursued, even if it is only an unattainable ideal. It is also something that the average reader calls to understand. The new criticism of textual self-sufficiency, though popular for a while, has proven to be inadequate, which I will elaborate on in my introduction. The ideal explanation, of course, is comprehensive and meticulous, combining internal research with external research, not limited to the text itself, but also to everything related outside the text, but everything must be justified, not speculative, not presumptuous.
Zhou Ying: Literature and culture, whether ancient or modern, Chinese or foreign, have a tradition of interpretation. China has a tradition of scripture, and the West has a tradition of hermeneutics. How do you explain? Tell us a little bit about your research methodology.
Fu Hao: Chinese scriptures have many similarities with Western (Judaism and Christianity) and even Indian exegesis (Buddhism and Hinduism), and it can be said that they are the same, and they all have the same way of saying, both in terms of phonological exhortations, excerpts from chapters, and dead words, as well as cases of borrowing topics, wearing chisels, and making strong interpretations. I adopt an instrumentalist attitude toward all methods, and when they are applicable, I use them, so my methods absorb the reasonable components of traditional Chinese and foreign exegesis and modern literary hermeneutics, both the interpretation of individual words and allusions, and the cross-talk of paragraphs; both textual stylistic analysis and biographical psychological analysis; both socio-historical background references and comparisons of different cultural elements, and so on. In short, the method serves the purpose. The methods are scalpels, forceps, scissors, tweezers, the purpose of which is to dissect and then suture the text. This metaphor may not be appropriate. However, by merely looking, hearing, asking, and contemplating, the results may be mostly subjective impressions. Truly good poetry can stand up to careful dissection and repeated reading. I believe that after reading my explanatory analysis, the reader will feel and understand a little differently when he goes back to reading Yeats's original poem or translated poem.
Zhou Ying: In 2018, you published an updated edition of Yeats's Collected Poems, which is the most complete collection of Yeats poems in Chinese translation so far, with a total of 415 Yeats poems. "Yeats Poetry Interpretation" selects 89 of them, detailed explanation, please ask you in the selection, on what basis?
Fu Hao: Mainly to see whether the author himself has a direct interpretation of the poem or indirectly involved in the peripheral text, these are the best evidence of the author's intention. These 89 poems are the more eligible works I can find so far. In addition, the length is already large enough. Fortunately, the structure of the book is open, and if there are more discoveries in the future, it can be added when it is republished. In fact, I have now made a new discovery.
Zhou Ying: When I read Yeats's poems, I always feel a mysterious color, please explain why he gives people this feeling. Are there also influences from Eastern cultures, including Chinese, Indian, and Jewish cultures?
Fu Hao: Yeats was a very superstitious person, who liked to talk about strange forces and chaotic gods, and was keen on various magic practices such as astrological divination and séance pens. These interests and qualities are inevitably expressed in their poetry. His literary symbolism actually stems mainly from his mystical knowledge, which is the conscious application of the latter in literature. He was more influenced by Indian religious culture, and also had a good relationship with the Christian Kabala occult science derived from Judaism, and also had direct or indirect contact with some Japanese and Chinese culture, but it was relatively superficial. In his early years, he collected and sorted out many Irish folk fairy ghost stories, and after middle age, he systematically read some Western idealistic philosophical works. These more or less had an influence on his poetic creation. I have an in-depth and meticulous review of the embodiment of mysticism in his poetic creation.
Zhou Ying: When we mention Yeats today, everyone will think of his famous work "When You Are Old". Some people in China have adapted it into a popular song and sung it widely. This poem was written by Yeats to his obsessive object, Modd Gunn, and is beautifully written, sincere, and very touching and sentimental. Modd Gang has a different temperament and a different path from Yeats, and never seems to really respond to Yeats's love. How did this unrequited love affect Yeats's creation? What kind of view of love does the poet have? There are many translations of this poem, please tell us about your experience in translating this poem, or your unique insights.
Fu Hao: "When you are old" is an ill-grammatical sentence in Chinese, and now it is spread by false rumors, and the poison is very widespread, and there is a great tendency to accumulate wrongs. I have spoken publicly many times about this issue, but people's prejudices are difficult to correct, and many listeners still come to me for theories. My translation is "When You're Old." In Western lyric poetry, love is a major theme; in love poetry, unrequited love is a major theme. This poem is an example. Modd Gunn once said to Yeats, "The world will thank me for not marrying you." This means that his unrequited love affair with her has spawned many beautiful love poems. Yeats said to Mody Gunn, "I do my best/ love you in an ancient and sublime way", which shows that he has always had a quasi-platonic love for her. As for the translation and research experience of the poem "When You Are Old", please see the humble book. I have a detailed explanation in the book.
Zhou Ying: I heard you say that learning is the seed, and it is the responsibility of the reader to sow it, let it grow, and blossom and bear fruit, otherwise it will be learned in vain. Among the old gentlemen in the Anglo-American room, your teacher Mr. Yuan Kejia is also a well-known Yeats translator and researcher in China, and I think this is in a sense a kind of academic inheritance, and more specifically, the academic inheritance of the Anglo-American room. Have you translated Yeats under the influence of Mr. Yuan? How do your translation and translation philosophy differ from those of your teachers?
Fu Hao: I only learned about Yeats after I saw Mr. Yuan's translation of poems in "Selected Works of Foreign Modernists", and it was only after that I began to translate Yeats, and when I was a junior, I had already translated "Selected Poems of Yeats", which contained nearly 100 poems. When I was a PhD student from Mr. Yuan from 1987 to 1990, we never talked about Yeats. My Complete Yeats Lyric Poems (1994) predate his Selected Yeats Lyric Poems (1997). Mr. Yuan's translation is plain as words and reads smoothly; my early translation was more elegant in wording and more restrained in form, but after many revisions, many errors and inaccuracies were corrected. The translations in this book are the latest revised version, should have the fewest errors, and are styled more closely to Yeats's original poems. The language of the original poem is still some distance away from the daily spoken language.
Zhou Ying: You are engaged in the study of foreign literature, but at the same time you have a very solid foundation in traditional Chinese studies, attach great importance to traditional Chinese culture, encourage young colleagues to read more classics of traditional Chinese studies, and once gave voluntary classes to everyone in the institute, teaching "University", "Zhongyong" and "Analects", which benefited many young colleagues. Usually chatting in the room, I often listen to a mantra that you hang on your lips, "Just read the Bible on the day, read history on the soft day." Please talk about the relationship between the cultural cultivation of the mother tongue and the cultivation of the translator.
Fu Hao: I have always believed that it is the duty of scholars, especially humanities scholars, to have a certain degree of traditional cultural cultivation. In general, anyone should know where they came from. Specifically for translators, the mother tongue and foreign language are like two wheels of the car, and if the development is uneven, it will inevitably lead to a rollover accident. The cultivation of the mother tongue and foreign languages should not only understand a little contemporary language and literature, but also familiarize themselves with various genres from ancient times to the present, not only reading, but also writing. Only in this way can the two languages be easily switched. The so-called taking the law is the direction that we should all strive for.
Ying Zhou: Thank you for answering my question. Translation is difficult, and I also do some translation work myself, and I know the hardships involved. Poetry is very condensed, involves intimate experience, is quite personal, and is a very fragmented thing from a formal point of view, so it is not easy to translate poetry. Even if the reader reads the translation, he still has an unclear feeling, and your "Interpretation of Yeats's Poems" provides both a translation and a meticulous interpretation based on solid research, which should be a gospel for foreign literary researchers and readers who like Yeats.
(Zhou Ying is an associate researcher and master tutor of the Institute of Foreign Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)