Thinking out loud -- well, on screen -- about a slow realization about Chinese translations.
One translation principle I hold to is that translations should, where possible, reproduce formal structures of the original text using analogous means in the target language. So if the text is a poem that has a meter, the translation should too. (Thus my irk over not rhyming these Chinese translations.) And when the text has the same meter throughout, the translation should too.
Classical Chinese poetry has meter: it's syllabic, a certain number of characters/words* per line -- and in the genres/forms I've focused on, with lines the same length throughout. I've been aiming in translation for loose iambic meter, taking that as a default metered line in English, with same number of beats throughout.
With 120-odd quatrains under my belt, I've found that most five-character lines can be tautly rendered in four-beat iambics, unless the language is especially compacted <glances at Du Fu and Li Shangyin>, when five beats may be needed to include all the basic surface sense. For the seven-character lines, typical is six-beat iambics, sometimes seven beats, and in one especially relaxed case, five beats.
This experience does not hold for the five-character regulated verse. What I'm finding, now that I'm focusing on this form, is that while four beats is usually good for the first and last couplet, I seriously struggle with the two middle couplets -- the antithetical couplets.
I haven't talked much about those yet. Between the two lines, each corresponding word has to match in syntactic role and semantic domain, with some of them directly opposed in meaning -- thus the "antithetical". To take an example from the
last draft I posted, a character-by-character pony should show how it works:
灭烛怜光满，
披衣觉露滋。
| go-out | candle | pity/sympathize with | light | expire |
| drape-over-shoulders | clothing | aware | dew | increase |
What I'm finding is that, in handling these antithetical couplets, poets often lean
hard on the caesura (pause) after the second character. Which is to say, a "regular" line is typically a single-clause sentence, with the initial two-character stich often a subject or an adverbial phrase. Antitheticals often have two clauses, with the initial stich either dependent or (as here) independent.
And fitting two complete sentences in a four-beat line is … challenging.
What I need to figure out is whether it's better to relax all the lines to five beats (potentially padding the other lines in ways that don't match the original) or commit to compacting down the middle lines (potentially over-compacting the syntax in ways that don't match the original). Or even mix and match solutions, depending on the poem.
Or, yanno, keep plugging along and get more experience.
* Not synonymous even at the time, but most words were a single character -- unlike modern Mandarin. Subject quote from Gimme Five!, Sesame Street. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
