Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a world-renowned poet, philosopher, and social activist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the first Asian to receive it. In Tagore's hometown of Old City of Kolkata in Bengal region, he was revered as "Thakur", a title worthy only by spiritual masters of extraordinary spiritual excellence. He spread The greatest spiritual tradition of Bengal, Bhakti, the spirit of devotion to love, spread throughout the world through his poetry.
Tagore's poems express a unique reflection on life, the universe, and nature, and the new translation translates Stray Birds as "Birds of The Lost", which not only embodies Stray's meaning of "outliers", but also echoes the structural characteristics of the poems that are mostly fragments and fragments of the poets. Under the premise of precise intention and exquisite form, the translation strives to restore the Indian charm of Tagore's poetry and present the fresh and timeless style of the original work.
Tagore's poems are contrasted in Chinese and English
Translated by Fu Hao
“
The lost birds of summer came to my window, sang and flew away.
The autumn yellow leaves have no song, and a sigh falls there.
”
Stray birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away.
And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh.
Tagore paintings
In the face of lovers, the world takes off the vast mask.
It became as small as a song, like an eternal kiss.
The world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover.
It becomes small as one song, as one kiss of the eternal.
The mighty desert is passionately courting a blade of grass;
Blade of Grass shook his head, laughed, and flew away.
The mighty desert is burning for the love of a blade of grass who shakes her head and laughs and flies away.
Dancing in the water, the gravel on the way begs you for song and rhythm.
They are limp, are you willing to carry this burden?
The sands in your way beg for your song and your movement, dancing water. Will you carry the burden of their lameness?
Once dreamed that we were strangers to each other.
Wake up to find that we are in love with each other.
Once we dreamt that we were strangers.
We wake up to find that we were dear to each other.
Some invisible fingers, like idle breezes,
Ripples of music played on my heart.
Some unseen fingers, like an idle breeze, are playing upon my heart the music of the ripples.
Listen, my heart, the whisper of the world, expressing love to you.
Listen, my heart, to the whispers of the world with which it makes love to you.
Don't let love sit on it because the cliff is high.
Do not seat your love upon a precipice because it is high.
These little thoughts are the fluttering of leaves;
Their cheerful whispers occupied my heart.
There little thoughts are the rustle of leaves;
they have their whisper of joy in my mind.
My wish is some fools who roar and disturb your song, Master.
Let me just listen!
My wishes are fools, they shout across thy song,
my Master. Let me but listen.
The person with the lantern behind him threw the shadow in front of him.
They throw their shadows before them who carry their lantern on their back.
"We, the fluttering leaves, have the sound of the response and the storm, but who are you, so quiet?"
"I'm just a flower."
“We, the rustling leaves, have a voice that answers the storms, but who are you so silent?”
“I am a mere flower.”
Preface to Birds Out of Herd (Excerpt)
Translated by Fu Hao
The shell of Birds Of Herd is in English, but its spirit is Indian. Moreover, some of the poems in this collection were translated by the poet from his collection of Bengali poems, Kaṇikā (1899). Therefore, when translating it into Chinese, how to reflect its Indian spirit is something I deliberately focus on.
As we all know, Hinduism believes in polytheism, not like the Judeo-Christian faith in the one God. Among them, the head of the gods, Indra, is generally translated in Chinese as the Emperor of Heaven or Emperor Shi Tian, who is not the supreme god; the highest god is the so-called three-phase god, that is, the Brahma created by Si, Vishnu who is protected by Si, and Shiva who is destroyed by Si, which is generally translated as the Great God in Chinese. There are two translations of the Judeo-Christian One God in Chinese, one for God and one for God. The great god of Hinduism is the personality god, with various incarnations or doppelgangers that can play different character roles, while the Judeo-Christian god is a non-personal god, formless and formless (the Trinity is a later development). Traditionally, there has been a special relationship between man and god in the beliefs and literatures of India and the Middle East, that is, believers can arbitrarily imagine the gods they worship as fathers, mothers, lovers, guides, and even enemies, and make corresponding emotional expressions. Tagore's collection of poems is mainly a metaphorical relationship between man and God, rather than a simple relationship between people and people. As the British writer Thomas Stecht Mohr, who nominated Tagore as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, pointed out, the unique theme of Tagore's poetry is "love for God." Although Tagore's beliefs are not limited to traditional Indian sects, they are also not separated from traditional Indian concepts, for example, the collection of poems deals with the three worlds, reincarnation, worlds, and other unique Indian religious-philosophical concepts. Therefore, it is obviously inappropriate to translate "God" or "gods" or "Lord" as "God", which is easily reminiscent of the Judeo-Christian faith. It is equally inappropriate to translate "Master" as "Lord." In Hindu mythology, the great god Shiva was also the creator of musical dance, so in the context of music, the translation of "Master" as "Master" may be more appropriate than "Lord".
Tagore's handwriting
Correspondingly, many of the poems in this collection are appealed to the second person, mostly in the form of prayer sentences, and the content expressed is mostly prayers, cries, teachings, confessions, etc., which is what Roman Jacobson called a message with "intentional function", which is one of the characteristics of the traditional Hindu Vishnu devout poems. Such poems usually have an effect similar to that of a spell. In many cases, the person speaking or the recipient should be understood as God or various personifications of God, rather than as a specific individual. Even if some of these verses do not use any object or call to indicate the object of speech, it should be understood that it is addressed to an implicit second person, such as the 206th, 208th, 217th, etc. The characters in traditional Indian poetry are mostly typed and less individualized. Tagore's work undoubtedly inherits and embodies many of the characteristics of traditional Indian poetry.
There is a class of compound words in Sanskrit, the old translation of the karmic interpretation, which is composed of two isotopic nouns, and can also be regarded as a rhetorical technique of noun modification of nouns. This technique has already entered and influenced the Chinese language along with the translation of Buddhist scriptures. For example: "willow eyebrows" and "apricot eyes" mean eyebrows shaped like willow leaves and eyes shaped like apricot cores. Two nouns are juxtaposed, and there is no need for prepositions such as "of" and "of" in between. Sanskrit is to many indian dialects (or colloquialisms) as Latin is to European colloquialisms, and its influence goes without saying. Tagore's Bengali language is in the same vein as Sanskrit, and naturally there will be similar rhetorical techniques. This compound word is often translated into English as a noun phrase consisting of two isotopic nouns connected by a preposition "of". Then, when retranslated into Chinese, it is often possible to restore the compound word structure like Sanskrit or Bengali, directly juxtaposing two isotopic nouns and omitting prepositions such as "of" or "of". For example, the "flame of darkness" in the eighty-one poems should be translated as "dark flame" and not "flame of darkness", because the two terms are isotopic relations, not affiliation relationship; the poet uses flame as a metaphor for darkness, which means darkness is (or as) fire, not that darkness has a flame. Another example is that the "coin of life" in the ninety-ninth song is appropriate to translate as "life coin", and the translation as "raw coin" is not good, the same is true.
Sanskrit poems are generally four verses and one chant, most of which have an equal number of syllables per sentence, with pauses in between and no rhymes. The structure is equivalent to the tetragrammatical eight sentences of Chinese near-body poetry. It is said that the development of Chinese near-body poetry was indeed influenced to some extent by Sanskrit poetics. This is presumably even more so in Bengali poetry. Measured by English poetry, the poems in "The Lost Birds" can be said to be mostly prose poems and a small half free poems. The latter is arranged in a branched form, which should be mostly translated poems from Bengali, so the original poem is generally retained, although it does not seek rhythm. This can be seen in the confrontation between the structure and meaning of the verses. Sometimes, the content of a poem is only a half-ode to the original poem. For example, the fifty-third and one hundred and seventy-second poems are derived from the same Original Bengali poem. Therefore, in this case, the humble translation tries to align with the farther source and the imaginary Bengali original, so that the form is more neat than the English original (in fact, it is also a translation).
In addition to the above methods, there is another way to add some Indian flavor to the translation of poetry. We know that there are a large number of words in Chinese that were created during the translation of ancient Buddhist scriptures, such as "world", "concept", "reality", "present", and so on. In modern times, Buddhist texts have also been gradually translated into English, and some of them have been translated from Chinese due to the loss of original texts such as Sanskrit. Over time, some noun terms have gradually developed a recognized fixed translation, such as "sorrow" to "trouble", "liberty" to "liberation", and so on. Then, when translating Tagore's poems from English, the appropriate use of some such foreign words that were originally imported from Indian culture will naturally produce corresponding associative effects. For example, the phrase "all worlds" in the 203rd song, translated as "great worlds", is more in line with the concepts and sayings of Indians than the translation of "the whole universe" by others, and it is more Indian. Another example is the phrase "reach the shore" in song 242, which is translated as "to the other shore" instead of "to the shore"; the phrase "heaven's flowers" in song 249 is translated as "the flowers of the heavens" instead of "the flowers of the heavens". These all give people associations related to Indian culture.
Birds Out of Herd was published in 1916 by Macmillan Publishing Company in New York, USA. Some of these poems were translated by Tagore himself from his own collection of Bengali poems, The Collection of Detritus. These poems belong to nineteenth-century Bengali literature heavily influenced by Sanskrit and Persian poetic maxims and didactic traditions, and although the poet's English translations are prose or free verse, traces of the structure of the original text can still be seen through the content. Another part of the poem, probably written during the poet's visit to Japan in 1916, is mostly available in Both Bengali and English, with a smaller part written directly in English. These poems were later published in conjunction with some of the poems written in China in 1924 in the poetry collection Lekhan (1926). The poet states in the preface to the book that "in China and Japan, the author was asked to write poems on the fan or spa"
Some people say that these poems are "obviously" influenced by Japanese haiku, which is obviously speculative. Although Tagore praised the concise condensation of Japanese haiku in his travel journal The Japanese Tourist (1919) and commented on Matsuo Basho's famous work "Ancient Pond", there is no evidence that he absorbed haiku in his poetry. His poems are clearly derived from the genres, forms, and styles inherent in traditional Indian literature, but only diluted by the English language. Of course, Tagore was also heavily influenced by English poetry, and it is said that his favorites were the nineteenth-century Romantic poets William Ottsworth and John Keats. Tagore's English has its own unique style, a half-written nineteenth-century written language mixed with traditional poetic language, measured by the standards of English literature, which is obviously not superior, and even somewhat crooked and not authentic enough. Therefore, his English poems can be said to be better than the text, and some of them are obviously losses caused in the translation process.
Tagore's initial popularity with Western literary circles and his eventual nobel prize in literature was strongly promoted by the international literary circles in London, England, especially william Rosenstein and William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound. Yeats praised Tagore's self-translated poems in English, claiming that he did not know who contemporary English writers could match. He not only prefaced Tagore's first collection of English-translated poems, Jitanjali (1912), but also helped Tagore edit a number of English-translated poems, including Gitanjali, The Gardener's Collection (1913), and The New Moon Collection (1913), changing many of its archaic words, inverted sentences, and elegant and pretentious expressions. Tagore was grateful on the one hand, and on the other hand, he was not without complaints, thinking that he had modified too much and was too outrageous. Yeats was also unhappy with Tagore, saying that he "didn't know English." Years later, when Yeats met with other Indian writers, he warned them in person that they should write in their native language and not in English, because no one can think and write with musicality and vitality except in their native language. His sentimental, implicitly pointed remarks were made precisely because of Tagore. However, "Birds out of Herd" does not seem to have been polished by Yeats.
Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. The Swedish Academy's award commented: "Because of his most sensitive, fresh and beautiful poems, which are derived from superb skill and expressed by himself in English, his poetic ideas have become part of Western literature." ”
Birds Out of Herd
[India] Tagore by Fu Hao, translated
Chung-Spanish Bookstore July 2020
This book is a new translation of the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore's Stray Birds, in the form of a chinese-English cross-referenced issue, illustrated with Tagore's paintings. The collection contains 325 beautiful poems, which are free in form but full of philosophy, reflecting Tagore's unique thinking on life, the universe and nature under the influence of Indian tradition. The new translator translates this collection of poems as "Birds of the Lost", which not only embodies Stray's meaning of "outliers", but also echoes the structural characteristics of the poems that are mostly fragments and fragments of the poets. Under the premise of precise intention and exquisite form, the translation strives to restore the Indian charm of Tagore's poetry and present the fresh and timeless style of the original work.
【Translator's Profile】Fu Hao is a researcher and doctoral supervisor at the Institute of Foreign Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and a member of the Chinese Writers Association. He won the Translation Award of the 4th, 5th and 7th Liang Shiqiu Literary Awards. His major works include: the poetry collection "Secret: How I Compose Poetry", the literary research monograph "Yeats Commentary", "British Movement Poetics", the translation of "Amulu Hundred Songs" (Sanskrit-Chinese comparison), "Selected Works of Xu Zhimo" (Chinese to English), "Yeats Poetry Collection" and so on.
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