In literary translation, the reproduction of the "other" of language and culture in the source language text and the resulting challenge to the purpose and expression constitute the realization that translation has the creative nature of literature and art. Due to the existence of the "Western" culture A lot of differences, so the use of unfamiliar translation is more extensive.In my opinion, the defamiliar translation not only preserves the cultural contents and features of the source language as much as possible, but also can not be too obscure and difficult to comprehend. In combination with the characteristics of the language, the translator can make the translation inspire readers' reading interest. Not only enjoy the exotic culture, but …show more content…
Watson used a great deal of translation skills in translating ancient poems and gradually formed his own characteristics in terms of the reproduction of the ideal mood and the transmission and reconstruction of the foregrounding elements. This thesis mainly studies the defamiliar translation in Watson Chinese ancient poem, and takes the unfamiliar translation in Lu You 'poetry as an example. Lu You as a Southern Song writer, historian, and patriotic poet, his life quite good. Watson used the method of defamiliarization in the translation of Chinese ancient poems to make some re-creation of his poems. However, based on the content of its research is less, so there is a certain amount of research …show more content…
Shklovsky, the representative of this school of translation literature, holds the view that the purpose of poetry is to change the dynamic and customary state of everyday language and make people "unfamiliar" with familiar things. In other words, poetry is "creatively damaging what is commonplace and standard in order to inculcate us with a new, childlike, vibrant outlook." (特伦 斯•霍克斯，1987:61)However, as a creative method, it has long been the focus of Chinese and foreign literary theory circles. Ancient Greek literary theorist Aristotle said in "Rhetoric": "To give the usual language an unusual atmosphere, which is Very good; people like to be impressed by unusual things. In poetry, this method is common and applies to this approach, because the characters and events in poetry are separated from daily life. " However, both Shklovsky's theory and Aristotle's viewpoints set forth in the poetry of the Song Dynasty in our country are all based on the opposition between everyday language and poetic language Highlighting the "unfamiliar" characteristics of the poetic language. Poetry language is one of the most important traits attracting readers. It often makes people feel strange, amazing, unfamiliar and give a fresh artistic experience, all because of the poet's unconscious use of "defamiliarization" in his poems
Literature shows us the changes of our society from time to time. It also gives us an idea about people, culture, politics, gender traditions, as well as an overall view of previous civilizations. As a part of literature, poetry introduces us to different cultures with different perspectives. Ancient Egypt and ancient China may differ in terms of culture, politics, economic stability, tradition, or even in religious belief. However, in poetry, especially in love lyrics both Egyptian and Chinese poems portray common area of describing women, social attitudes toward love, sexuality and the existence of romance or selfishness in relationships. . If we look at the Egyptian poem “My god, my Lotus” and the Chinese poem “Fishhawk”, we will see both poems have similarities in describing relationships. Also, they have the similarity of imagining the lovers and their expression of love toward each other. However, both poems have some significant differences in terms of representing female sexuality, gender disparity and the display of love.
Gao Shi and Cen Shen have been connected together since the Southern Song, because they wrote a large number of poems to describe their experiences on the frontier. Gao Shi’s preference was those “bleak and barren expanses.” He usually focused on the armies, and depicted their suffering and courage. The description of the landscapes was a tool to show the troops were suffering from the wars.
Aesthetic form in modern poetry, then, is based on a space-logic that demands a complete reorientation in the reader's attitude toward language. Since the primary reference of any word-group is to something inside the poem itself, language in modern poetry is really reflexive. The meaning-relationship is completed only by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relation to each other when read consecutively in time. Instead of the instinctive and immediate reference of words and word-groups to the objects or events they symbolize and the construction of meaning from the sequence of these references, modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity.
Meyer compares poems to songs. He says that we have to listen several times a song before we hear it all and before we understand it. The title of a poem provides a sense of what the poem is about. It can tell you about the poem’s subject, tone, and genre. While reading poetry we need to pay attention to elements such as speaker, image, metaphor, symbol, rhyme, and rhythm. Also, Meyer defines doggerel as a “derogatory term used to describe poetry whose subject is trite and whose rhythm and sounds are monotonously heavy-handed”. It is characteristic of children’s game rhymes. In addition, by characterizing poetry as “undefinable” and “unmistakable”, Robinson says that it can have different purposes, subjects, emotions, styles, and forms.
Srinivasa Iyengar, you don’t. Iyengar says, “poetry, by nature, is untranslatable. [A] competent translator can, however, play the good broker between the poet and the reader... and give the intimations of the poet’s sovereign utterance.” But even this seems to suggest that at best, the translator is only a middleman, able to convey the subtleties of the poet’s original work, but not without noted differences. Famous poet Bysse Shelley calls translation of poetry “vain”, saying “it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principal of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language to another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no
Translation is a linguistic science, but it occurs within a theological and moral framework. The issue is a sensitive one, as theology involves an obligation to the text and morality involves an obligation to the
When I first read “The Gift” by Li-Young Lee, my first thought was, “What?” The way the poem was written was so confusing at first glance, but after reading the poem over and over, I feel I have a good understanding of what Lee was trying to get across. In the first and second paragraph, the narrator talks about the memory of his father taking a splinter out of his hand. The narrator talks about his father telling him a story while he pulled the silver from his hand. When the poem said, “The flames of discipline, he raised above my head.” I thought that the father slapped the narrator after he removed the splinter, but after the class discussion I realized that the flames were above his head, meaning the father didn’t yell at him; he soothed
"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal [but] which the reader recognizes as his own." (Salvatore Quasimodo). There is something about the human spirit that causes us to rejoice in shared experience. We can connect on a deep level with our fellow man when we believe that somehow someone else understands us as they relate their own joys and hardships; and perhaps nowhere better is this relationship expressed than in that of the poet and his reader. For the current assignment I had the privilege (and challenge) of writing an imitation of William Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 87". This poem touched a place in my heart because I have actually given this sonnet to someone before as it then communicated my thoughts and feelings far better than I could. For this reason, Sonnet 87 was an easy choice for this project, although not quite so easy an undertaking as I endeavored to match Shakespeare’s structure and bring out his themes through similar word choice.
The lyric poems in the ancient times are presented in the first person point of view. Since lyric poetry expresses the personal and emotional feelings of a speaker, Sappho’s poems, Abu Nawar’s verses, Egyptian poems, and Neo-Christian Aztec poems explore the emotions of the speakers as they describe their culture, lifestyle, and tradition. These verses depict the passion, love, and perspectives of the ancient civilizations
One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish, this is the basic tales written by Dr. Seuss. Not only are these enjoyable children’s novels, but it is often times people’s first known exposure to the literary style of poetry. Poetry can be written in many different styles, with changing messages, tone, stanzas, rhyme, and length. Whether or not the difficulty level is low for a beginning reader, or written as an epic poem for a top level scholar, there is always a specific style and message that is being interpreted in the writing. These styles are studied and the most mysterious and inspirational poets are studied in literature classes; two academic individuals who have had a large impact on the poetic community are Aristotle and Alexander Pope.
In human society, translation plays a significant role, which helps realize effective communication among people. Benjamin (as cited in Venuti, 2000) indicates translation is the mode, which plays a function of transmitting information; hence translatability determines whether the information could be effectively and appropriately delivered and is regarded as the “essential quality of certain works”. Throughout history, many scholars have developed translation theories, which provide various effective translation strategies and methods, to explore the translatability. Equivalence theory points out that all languages always share some similarities; hence the languages could be exchanged (Nida, as cited in Venuti, 2000). The skopos theory emphasizes
Translations are essential to us and our culture, because through ancient documents, inscriptions and books, historians and archeologists reconstruct the ancient societies and civilizations, as well as the story of our forefathers and the history of the entire human race. They allow communication between us and different countries and nations, whose language might be different from ours and this may create difficulties in being able to understand each other. However, translators make this possible as they are the mediators between two different cultures. The need for translations is massive, from both a social and political outlook. According to David Katan’s Translating Cultures, “The translator is a bilingual mediating agent between monolingual communication participants in two different language communities” (16). Therefore, for a translation to succeed translators have to be not only bilingual, but also bicultural. A translator is furthermore put in an exclusive but at the same time, difficult position because it is his responsibility to clarify certain ideas within cultural and natural boundaries. This can be done by keeping the same exact (literal) meaning. Interpreting and translating a text is not a simple and easy task; it takes time and is also challenging, because “the translator cannot merely search for equivalent words in the target language to render the meaning of the source” (Dingwaney and Maier, 3). Up until today there are many translations of ancient works and books, such as the Odyssey; and so, there is a wide range for people to choose from. This choice must be taken with the most care because some may be exceptionally good at communicating the essence of the original text while others ...
The work of the translator stars with the reading of the ST: he has to study the lexicon, the grammatical structure, the communicative intention of the writer, and of course the cultural context in which is developed the ST, in order to identify the best translation strategy able to express the original intention.
The essential problem with translation is an obvious one. A word has more qualities than just its denotation. For one, a word has a sound, an attribute which has great importance in poetry (though we should not underestimate its significance in prose, as well). Also, a word consists of various connotations, meanings which only rarely cross over from language to language. Complicating matters is the nature of literature itself. Writers and poets put pressure on the language; they often choose words because of their rich variety of meanings, complicating rather than clarifying their subjects. Unfortunately, then, for the translator of literature, the currency of words is not as easy to exchange as the other kind of currency.
translation which are all close or very close to the ST (source text) (Schjoldager, 2008, p. 93-99). Therefore, they are not considered as creative skills and strategies, and texts translated using merely these cannot be considered creative translations. On the contrary, eight strategies in some way add to the level of creativity when applied in translations (which are Explication, Condensation, Deletion, Addition, Paraphrase, Adaptation, permutation and Substitution). Within these eight creative strategies and skills, the degree of creativity varies as well. The model of creativity classifies the strategies explicitation, condensation and deletion as slightly creative since they merely involve elaborating on existing meaning, shortening text and taking out meaning. The other five creative strategies, however, are rewriting semantics of the ST or adding meaning which cannot be directly inferred from the ST. Therefore, they are regard as more creative.