Raindrops and Wind Marks, Paper and Ink: Reading Zhong's Translation of the New Edition of "The Rubai Collection"
The Beauty of the Rubai Collection, translated by Zhong Jin, Beijing Times Chinese Book Company, 2024
Although the Rubai Collection is a very thin pamphlet, it has had a profound impact on the history of English poetry. Its original author was the ancient Persian Seljuk poet Omar Khayyam from the second half of the 11th century. He wrote many of these quatrains called "Rubai" in his lifetime, and the English poet Edward Fitzgerald translated them into English is only a part of them. This collection of poems, translated into English, was published in 1859, the same year that Darwin published On the Origin of Species. According to its most popular, the fourth edition of 1879, it contains only one hundred and one "rubay", a total of just over 400 lines. This cannot be regarded as a very conspicuous work for the British poetry circle, which is rich in long poems and thousands of lines at every turn. Rhythmically speaking, when translated into English, the rhyme of this kind of quatrain is a bit novel, but all the lines of the poem adopt the traditional English poem's inhibited pentatonic step, and there is no obvious breakthrough. There were many great poets in the Victorian era in England, and it is not surprising that this collection of poems did not stir up many waves when it was first published. However, since the seventies of the nineteenth century, the pamphlet has grown in popularity, and by the twentieth century this mere 400 lines of poetry has steadily occupied various anthologies of English poetry, and the reasons for this are interesting.
In the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria (who ruled for 60 years) was at the height of her reign, Britain was at the center of the world economy, and the middle class that constituted the main production and consumption of poetry had been formed. The whole society was filled with both scientific self-confidence and a crisis of faith, various currents of thought and theories clashed violently, and the unified ideology accumulated over hundreds of years began to disintegrate. The British writer John Carey pointed out in "A Little History of Poetry": "Geologists have discovered that the earth is millions of years older than the Bible says, that continental plates are always drifting, and that not only man, but all the vestiges of human existence, may one day suddenly disappear." Many people believe that their Christian faith cannot survive in the face of this knowledge. "It was a time of paradox, and it caused unease in the minds of people – it was the best of times and the worst of times.
English poet Edward Fitzgerald.
The Rubai Collection, a collection of English poems translated from ancient Persian, is quite distant in time and space, and like other works of Oriental culture, it has a mystical flavor of its own, which has an irresistible attraction for the British and even Europeans at that time. They believe that Eastern cultures have a supernatural ability that can ease their social anxieties. The influence of this concept lasted for a long time, and it can still be found in modernist poets such as Pound, Eliot, and Yeats in the early 20th century.
The Rubai Collection was first translated into China in 1923 based on the completely different cultural demands of Chinese society at that time, and later came in various translations. In this regard, the predecessors have prepared it. Now we look at this collection of poems, which is not only full of elegant classical atmosphere, but also vaguely reveals a philosophical mourning. In order to retranslate it into Chinese, it is necessary to find a form that matches its physique, which naturally becomes a forward-looking requirement.
Chung Kam's enthusiasm and energy for the Rubai Collection of English poetry is one of the best among all scholars and translators of English poetry. As we all know, the title of the book "Rubai" derives from the poetic genre "Rubai", which, like the poetry genres of Gesuid, Ghazar, etc., is one of the many poetic genres of ancient Persian poetry. Although it happens to be similar to the quatrain in rhyme, it does not necessarily have any historical origin with the quatrain. However, due to this similarity, it is natural for many Chinese translators to think of translating this collection of poems in the form of quatrains. Zhong Jin belongs to this group of translators, although he is a latecomer, but he is the last. There is another reason for choosing the form of quatrains, that is, due to the fault line in the history of Chinese poetry and the interval between quatrains and new poems, the classical atmosphere of the quatrain form in the hearts of contemporary readers is naturally consistent with the philosophical lamentation that Khayyam and even Fitzgerald hope to express.
The rhythms of traditional English poetry are rich and colorful. Poetry is composed of multiple lines of poetry to form a poem or a stanza, and a long poem is composed of multiple stanzas. Like the poetry of most peoples in the world, English poetry is based on the four-line stanza, which has developed a number of stanza forms such as six, eight, and even fourteen, and even seven and nine lines. The rhyme pattern of traditional English poetry is often a two-line rhyme (with rhyme) or an interlaced rhyme (with rhyme or with a wrap-up). "Rubai" is a four-line poem, but its rhyme is unique, generally the first, second, and fourth lines rhyme with one rhyme, and the third line usually does not rhyme, which is fundamentally different from traditional English poetry. Fitzgerald retained this rhyme when he translated the Rubaix into English, so it retains an exotic flavor. Looking at the lines of "Rubai", each line is mostly eleven syllables, while traditional English poetry is dominated by pentatonic steps, which are mostly melanograms, containing ten (and occasionally eleven) syllables. Therefore, "Rubai" basically corresponds to the pentatonic steps of traditional English poetry in terms of length and rhythm. In my article "A Systematic Method for Translating Chinese Poetry into English", I analyzed the similarities and differences between the rhythm of English poems and the rhythm of ancient Chinese five-seven-character poems. To put it simply, the five-syllable step line in English poetry is equivalent to the seven-word poem. Therefore, whether there is a historical origin or not, the rhythm of "Rubai" and the rhythm of the seven-character poem have the effect of echoing in a hollow valley, in other words, it is very appropriate to translate "Rubai" in quatrains.
Philippine translation of the first American edition of the Rubai Collection.
Of course, there are seams in any kind of bridging, and there is no such thing as "seamless" in the world. The effect of "rubbai" and quatrain will inevitably make the translator a little constrained in terms of structure. The "rubai" in Persian poetry and the "rubai" in English poetry are mostly not stand-alone but part of a group of poems, so it is often fragmentary, and even appears to be a dialogue in four lines, which is rare in quatrains. Of course, quatrains will also have dialogue, but they are generally integrated and will not be fragmentary. The last five characters of He Zhizhang's "Where does the laughing guest come from" are often read as direct speech, but it is also okay to read it as indirect speech, so that the whole line of the poem can be understood as a declarative sentence, and it reads naturally and fluently. As a result, quatrains generally do not contain jumpy quotes such as "'Brother!' don't go wild!'", or "My wife!!" or "My wife!!" or "'Vault!' General!" (the above translation example is quoted from Bai Li's translation of "Angry Translation of Grass"). A "rubai" as part of a group of poems (or what can basically be seen as a loose group of poems), the whole four lines, even jumping quotes or fragments, are natural in the Persian or English traditions, but less so in quatrains. Translating "Rubai" into a quatrain will encounter such difficulties, making it not like a "good" quatrain, because it is mechanically inherently incompatible with the form of the quatrain. In terms of traditional poetry, quatrains pay attention to "starting and ending", and a poem "Rubai", which is composed of four lines of various fragments, is difficult to achieve because it is only a part of the whole or a part of the whole process. I feel that it is a great challenge for translators to integrate such a component into such a quatrain, a poetic style with a strong classical charm and demanding structure, and what kind of language control is needed to achieve "seamlessness". Therefore, in order to accurately translate the meaning of the original text, and to ensure that the translated poems in the form of quatrains are not too inconsistent with the style of classical poetry, the translator needs to use Dafa to make a strategic.
The beauty of the Rubai collection is translated by Zhong Jin.
As a poet and lyricist, Zhong Jin has been engaged in poetry creation for a long time, and has accumulated experience in translating foreign poems such as Baudelaire and Rilke in the form of poems, which is his unique advantage compared with other English and Chinese translators. His cultivation in classical poetry ensured that the "Rubai" he translated in quatrains had a profound classical charm. As the translator of this new edition of the Rubai, he has another unique feature compared with other translators of the Rubaix - he is also the proofreader of this collection of poems. Chung Kam made a detailed revision based on Fitzgerald's five English translations. This is the first time in China that such a comprehensive revision has been made. Looking at the various Chinese translations over the past hundred years, they are only translations of the main text of the poetry collection (including the so-called "transcreation" that is not very faithful), and the relationship between Fitzgerald's English translation and Khayyam's original Persian text is not clear, and how Fitzgerald's rewriting of the original text reveals the hidden deep meaning in the English translation. The new edition of Chung Kim's Rubait contains a valuable commentary, the Edward Heron-Allen manuscript, which I call a "translation".
Edward Heron-Allen (1861-1943), born in London, was a British scholar of Persian culture, fluent in ancient Persian, and translator and interpreter of the Rubai. Based on the earliest surviving manuscript of the time, he translated the Rubai collection of Omar Khayyam into English in a literal translation and published it in 1898. Heron-Allen examines the Persian sources of Fitzgerald's translations. In Zhong Jin's translation of the Rubai, he translated the original Persian text verified by Heron Allen according to his English translation and attached it to the interpretation, which greatly facilitated the reader's reading comprehension. This is an unprecedented event in the history of the translation of the Rubai.
Edward Heron-Allen, a British naturalist, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1919.
Chung Jin claimed that his vernacular writing was "of a lower level" than Wenyan, and that it was purely modest speech. Out of the ultimate pursuit of the "Rubai Collection", he also translated this collection of poems into the vernacular, in his own words, to try how "resilient" modern Chinese is. This translation includes his revised vernacular version, as he published one in 2019. It is a very interesting phenomenon that a translator with an aesthetic pursuit of classical poetry deals with modern vernacular poetry, which is said to have long since become popular.
If we look closely at this translation, we will find that the new edition has clearly adjusted the lines of the poems more neatly, and both the lines and the rhymes are almost all retranslations of the old version. In the first commentary, Heron-Allen points out: "From the revision of the second edition onwards, it was entirely Fitzgerald's own creation, although the spirit of the original text was still preserved. In the same way, we also feel that since this revision of the vernacular version of the Rubai, Chung Kam has begun to experiment with his own creation, although the spirit of the original text is still retained. Herron-Allen's statement proves that the author is well versed in the art of translation. There is no need to defend the fidelity of Fitzgerald's translation, because the imagery of a poem can have very different effects in the minds of readers of different language systems. Although "identical wording" is often a common excuse for translators to justify their translations, the fact that the wording is the same but the effect is different, which has been proven by numerous translation examples.
Chung Jin believes that "Chinese vernacular has an extraordinary ability to adapt to foreign Chinese languages. The "resilience" of the vernacular is equally evident in his translation. What we read is not so much about translation as it is about creation. Although Fitzgerald did not write a treatise on translation, from his treatment of the original Persian text, we can vaguely find that Chung Jin and Fitzgerald have a certain agreement in their views on translation. There has long been a debate about whether Fitzgerald's translation is superior to the original. Actually, for two excellent texts, this question is unanswerable. Both the original and the translated version can be judged independently, because there is a "common" standard of aesthetic as a basis for judging. But if both texts are excellent, the aesthetic standards of the two texts diverge, and each is judged according to the aesthetic standards within its language, and it is impossible to judge which text is superior.
When Zhong Jin translated this Rubai, as far as the vernacular translation is concerned, he tried to make sure that the word order, punctuation, syllables, and rhyme are consistent with the original text. The syllables are slightly looser, with five steps per line corresponding to the pentatonic steps of the original text, but sometimes eleven words, sometimes twelve. It is commendable that he is very strict in rhyme, following the tradition of old-style poetry, flat, up, and go without rhyme, which not only reflects the translator's pursuit of classical poetry aesthetics, but also shows the translator's highly sensitive sense of hearing in rhyme. This is reminiscent of the frequent criticism of the old style of poetry by the writers of the new poems, who believe that the flat sound belongs to the old phonetic system and should be abandoned and a new rhyme should be adopted, or that rhyme should be abandoned at all. From Zhong Jin's treatment of rhyme, we can see his grand vision—he stands on the bridge between the old style of poetry and the new poetry, looking at the two ends of the difficult world of this century, trying to bridge the huge poetic gap. I hope that his good intentions can be noticed by today's new poets and readers, and I hope that his efforts will be successful in the end.
There is a sentence in "Butterfly Loves Flowers: The Translation of the Red Mansion is Written by Hawkes": "The rain is scarred by the wind, and the paper and ink are colorful." It can be used to describe the achievements of Zhong Jin's translation of the "Rubai Collection", so it is cited as the title of the text to show admiration.
Huang Fuhai
Editor-in-charge: Liu Xiaolei