China's construction of Tagore's image

Tagore was the first Asian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and made great achievements in poetry, novels, dramas and other genres. Ever since his works were translated into China, Chinese have always had an impression of Tagore: the poetry of "love and beauty" brewed, and the idyllic poet who advocated idealism. This impression differs from the complexity of Tagore himself. Ji Xianlin believes that Tagore is on the one hand the light and the wind, on the other hand, he is angry-eyed King Kong; due to the incomplete translation of his works, Chinese lack of understanding of Tagore's angry-eyed King Kong. However, even after the publication of two sets of Chinese translations of Tagore's complete works in the 21st century, Tagore's image in Chinese mind has not fundamentally changed. This shows that translation is an important factor influencing Chinese's perception of Tagore, but it is not the only factor. Starting from a broader perspective, the exchange and dialogue between cultures of different countries can be included in the scope of investigation, which can have a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the formation process of Tagore's image in the hearts of Chinese.

Needless to say, translation is an important factor in influencing a writer's image in a foreign country. In recent years, cross-border research combining translation science and iconography has been in the ascendant, and its academic basis is that both agree with the constructive nature of image. Translation plays an important role in constructing the writer and the image of the work, and as Lefville said, translation can not only project the original author and the image of the work in the target language culture, but also create images about the author, the work, a certain literary category or even the entire literature of a particular period.

For the first time in China, Tagore was translated, and the works of Tagore from the English-speaking world were selected. Therefore, tagore's image in China is more closely related to the image of Tagore in the West. At the beginning of the 20th century, Tagore selected some of his works in his Bengali poem "Song Collection" to translate themselves into English and put them into a volume, named "Jitanjali". For this collection of poems, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. After winning the prize, Tagore's other poetry collections and some of his novels and plays were translated into English. In general, Tagore's works translated into the West during this period are mainly poetry, the language style is fresh and elegant, and the content presents the "love and beauty" of the world, as well as mystical religious feelings.

When translating Tagore's works in the West, the choice of form and content was mainly based on the social situation in the West and the needs of poetic transformation. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, Western society was in a turbulent historical turning point: colonial plunder caused contradictions between countries, and war was about to break out; material civilization was highly developed, but the value of "people" was denied, Western society contained a strong spiritual crisis, and intellectuals with a critical spirit began to seek ideological enlightenment from Eastern culture. Tagore's poetry depicts the ideal world, bringing spiritual comfort to people anxious about the threat of war. In addition, the beginning of the 20th century was also a period of transition in Western poetics, traditional poetics was questioned, and modernist poetics was being nurtured, which was embodied in the breakthrough of formal elements such as "rhyme" and the pursuit of free expression. Tagore's English poetry expresses sincere emotions in prose style, bringing a fresh and simple poetic style to the dull Western poetics community and triggering "Tagore fever". In this context, Tagore was constructed by the West as an Eastern poet who wrote the poetry of "love and beauty".

After the translation of the "May Fourth" intellectuals, Tagore was introduced to China as a poet who created the poetry of "love and beauty". On the one hand, this is related to the image of Tagore constructed in the West, and on the other hand, it is also closely related to the cultural trends and literary creation needs of China at that time. Translation played an important role in the formation of the image of Tagore in China. Among the many Chinese translations of Tagore's poetry, Zheng Zhenduo's translation of the "New Moon Collection" is widely circulated and highly accepted, and it is still a classic of Chinese translation literature, which has played a great role in the formation of Tagore's image in China.

The Crescent Moon collection is one of Tagore's masterpieces, "a collection of the best poems that describe children's psychology and children's lives." When Zheng Zhenduo translated Tagore's poetry collection, he adopted a faithful translation strategy, that is, on the basis of being easy for readers to accept, he tried to make the translation closer to the original text in terms of expression form: stylistic level, retaining the poetic presentation mode of the prose style of the original text; at the sentence level, retaining the word order and sentence structure of the original text, and the translated language has European characteristics. "Faithful" is Zheng Zhenduo's translation standard, although he is not very satisfied with his translation, but he is confident that he is "still very faithful, and not so that he can't understand it." It is also this "faithful" translation strategy that better presents Tagore's image as a poet who created "love and beauty" poetry.

Tagore's works aroused great interest among the May Fourth poets, and "Tagore fever" also appeared in China. During the May Fourth period, the ideas of "love", "harmony" and "human family" expressed in Tagore's works were to a certain extent in line with the ideological trend of the society at that time, so they were widely accepted. In terms of poetics, when Tagore's poetry was translated into China, China was carrying out the New Vernacular Poetry Movement. Hu Shi and other early pioneers of new poetry got rid of the formal barriers of old style poetry, but they were straightforward and shallow in artistic expression, and the artistry of poetry was not enough and lacked "poetic flavor". The translated Tagore poetry provides inspiration for the creation of new Chinese poetry, and the poetic form of prose and the emotional quality of "love and beauty" can provide reference for the creation of new Chinese poetry. Therefore, Tagore's image as a poet who created the poetry of "love and beauty" was also the result of the active construction of Chinese out of their own needs at that time.

In addition to being influenced by translation, the similarities between Tagore's thought and Chinese culture are also important factors affecting its image in China. The Chinese translation of Tagore's works has experienced three climaxes: first, during the May Fourth period, China translated Tagore's works from Western languages, and the genre was mainly poetry; second, after the reform and opening up, more Tagore's works were translated, and China began to directly translate Tagore's poetry from Bengali; third, since the 21st century, two sets of Tagore's complete works directly translated from Bengali have been published. Although all of Tagore's works have now been translated into Chinese, in China, his image has not changed, but has been further solidified. This reflects China's deep identification with Tagore's image as a poet who wrote "love and beauty" poetry.

There are similarities between Tagore's ideas and China's cultural claim to harmonious coexistence. Tagore's poetry depicts the ideal world of "love and beauty" and expresses the ideals of human equality, freedom and harmony, which is in line with the social ideal of "unity under heaven" in traditional Chinese culture. The human ideal expressed in Tagore's poetry is related and homogeneous to China's concept of "universal unity", which should be one of the reasons why his image as a poet who created "love and beauty" poetry has gradually solidified into a "social collective imagination" of Chinese.

Through the analysis of Tagore's image generation process in China, it can also be found that the image of a writer in a foreign country is on the one hand subject to whether the translation of his works outside the territory is accurate and comprehensive, and on the other hand, it is also related to whether his literary style and ideological propositions are consistent with the literary situation and cultural concepts of the target language country. These experiences can provide reference and enlightenment for promoting the overseas dissemination of Chinese literature.

(This article is the phased result of the Free Exploration Project of Shaanxi Normal University " Dialogue between Translating Literary Classics and Poetics: Research on the Chinese Translation of Tagore Literature" (2020TS108))

(Author Affilications:College of Foreign Chinese, Shaanxi Normal University)

Editor: Liu Xing