楚辞: Elegies of the South

Paperback, 303 pages

Classical Chinese, Modern Chinese, English language

Published Jan. 1, 2009 by 中国出版集团, 中国对外翻译出版公司, China Publishing Group, China International Translation Publishing Company.

ISBN:: 978-7-5001-2022-3

(1 review)

"On the other hand, Elegies of the South may be said to be the earliest collection of romantic poems written by poets of the largest State of Chu along the Blue River or the Yangzi Valley, permeated with time-hallowed tradition, fantastic imagination and violent emotions of a mythical world."

This snippet, taken from the Preface, covers well the nature of this work: a staggering collection of almost reckless romantic poetry that shaped and influenced Chinese stories and culture to modern times.

1 edition

🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦 reviewed 楚辞: Elegies of the South by 许渊冲(翻译)

A "must read" collection for sinophiles and scholars of Chinese culture

4 stars

"It is impossible to translate poetry, but worth the effort."

A trilingual translation work with side-by-side Classical Chinese, Modern Vernacular Chinese, and English makes this a valuable study guide. The translator, by his own confession in the preface, was less interested in having literal meaning translated than in keeping a hint of the beauty of the original language. This is a tension that all translations of poetry must resolve, and in this translator's view other English translations fall on the literal side of the equation so he thought to counter with a translation that keeps as close as possible to the core meaning while highlighting the beauty of the language as it is used in the original work, choosing the latter when the goals conflicted.

The translation is solid, from my own paltry efforts to read the Chinese, but it features an error that is bothersome to me, hence the …

"It is impossible to translate poetry, but worth the effort."

A trilingual translation work with side-by-side Classical Chinese, Modern Vernacular Chinese, and English makes this a valuable study guide. The translator, by his own confession in the preface, was less interested in having literal meaning translated than in keeping a hint of the beauty of the original language. This is a tension that all translations of poetry must resolve, and in this translator's view other English translations fall on the literal side of the equation so he thought to counter with a translation that keeps as close as possible to the core meaning while highlighting the beauty of the language as it is used in the original work, choosing the latter when the goals conflicted.

The translation is solid, from my own paltry efforts to read the Chinese, but it features an error that is bothersome to me, hence the loss of a star. The original work makes use of the character 兮 (xī), which is a meaningless symbol pronounced that was used in ancient texts in much the way that 啊 (ā) is used in modern texts or "uh" or "oh" or the like is used in English.

There's a problem with this.

This symbol was pronounced "xī" in Classical Chinese ... but it wasn't meant to be read aloud like that in poetry. Classical Chinese lacked punctuation, so pauses in text had to be indicated in some way when writing it, and 兮 was the character chosen since it had no meaning. When reading the original work, upon seeing 兮 the reader is expected to briefly pause: 兮 is, for all practical purposes, a comma in this work!

But the translation inserts "oh" wherever 兮 appears in the original text which is, well, literally every line or every second line (it varies) depending on the poem. And I just found it a bit distracting.