Must be the Translator of Poetry a Poet? Translating Taiwan Modern Poem into English – Take Xi Mu-rong’s Poem as Example

• Main Authors: Yin-Chia Wang, 王穎嘉
• Other Authors: Po-Ting Fang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/18693055560166841191

碩士 === 義守大學 === 應用英語學系碩士班 === 99 === In terms of literary translation, the criterion that a translator searched for - the accuracy of original composition or the signified equivalence - poses a dilemma. Particularly, in the poetry translation, each word holds certain numbers of implicit meanings and senses; therefore, the canon of accuracy cannot be of any help to reproduce and reconstruct the essence of the source text. This is not to imply that accuracy is insignificant but to propose the concept of creativity application to uncover the veil of poetic translation. For the purpose of re-establishing the intangible relationship between reader and writer, in this paper, the Taiwan modern poems from Xi Mu-rong are taken as source texts exemplifying that Chinese, which symbolizes meanings without the limitation of tenses, can be decoded and recoded into English, a temporal framework, through applying translator’s creativity to experiment with different kinds of translation theories and practices. To achieve this purpose, the poetic TT is provided with Chinese pinyin, word by word translation, and the multi-dimensional TT, is also presented with written text and multi-media version, so as to elaborate an innovative vision of literary translation. Poetry reading itself is a process of self-reflecting, self-relating and fun; therefore, we need to re-create, not another text, but another reading process, parallel to the original one. Governed by this thought, we designed various versions, including the hard copy 1 and 2, and e-version 1, to demonstrate the essence of poetry translation can be creative fertilizing, and personal interpretation to hammer on one’s ego, and can never be frozen into a specific form, or a set of correspondent words. Through the experimental methods, we create a multi-dimensional poetic situation for the source poems to live in. The result manifests that the poetic translation cannot be judged based on the concept of one-to-one correspondence. The discussion of juxtaposition of ST and TTs helps to re-define literary translation as a creative activity.