ESTRUCTURAS PARA LA GESTIÓN DEL VII PLAN

This is the first poem in Cathay. The original Chinese title is 采薇 (pick ferns). It is a poem in the earliest Chinese poetic collection 诗经 (literally, poetry classic, also known as ‘Book of Songs’). The Book of Songs has more than 300 poems and was used by Confucius as a textbook to teach his disciples (Gao 2004, 13). Though it originated 2,500 years ago, the art of language in the book has reached a significantly high level (19). The poem that Pound selected has a unique artistic glamor in the category of 边塞诗 (frontier poetry). It reflects the hardships and homesickness of frontier soldiers who are away from home for a long time due to warfare and for whom the returning date is still unknown. They have both the joy of victories over the enemy and the pains of expedition. There are six stanzas in the poem, and each stanza has eight lines. I will choose the first and last stanzas of the poem for study, as these have depicted the most touching scenes.

The first stanza of the original poem runs as follows, with a gloss translation that I made on the right:

采薇采薇， Pick ferns, pick ferns, 薇亦作止。 Ferns are growing. 曰归曰归， Say return, say return, 岁亦莫止。 Near year-end.

靡室靡家， No family, no home, 猃狁之故。 Because of Xian Yun. 不遑启居， No leisure to squat, 猃狁之故。 Because of Xian Yun.

And Pound’s translation is:

Here we are, picking the first fern-shoots

And saying: When shall we get back to our country? Here we are because we have the Ken-nin for our foemen, We have no comfort because of these Mongols.

The original poem is a metrical poem in six stanzas with fixed line-length and the sing- song rhyme and rhythm. Pound translated it into non-metrical free verse in one single stanza with irregular lines. This shift falls into Lefevere’s (1975) strategy of ‘version’, because by using ‘version’ technique the translator ‘keeps the substance of the source text but changes its form’ (76). Meanwhile, as seen from above, Pound repeatedly combined two lines into one to translate this poem. This falls into Chesterman’s (1997) category of ‘sentence structure change’, which

occurs ‘between main-clause and sub-clause status’ (97). Since Pound used free verse to translate metrical verse, which ignores set rules of writing poetry and is compared by Robert Frost to ‘playing tennis with the net down’ (Campbell 2013, 89), more shifts can be expected.

The original poem, like others in the Book of Songs (诗经), was composed to be used as lyrics with music (Gao 2004, 13), and thus it has traditional chanting techniques of repetition of a word or a sentence, showing the characteristics of folk songs – for example, ‘采薇采薇’ (pick ferns, pick ferns) in line one and ‘曰归曰归’ (say return, say return) in line three. In Pound’s translation, this feature is changed. Instead of repeating the words as ‘pick ferns, pick ferns’ and ‘say return, say return’, Pound repeats ‘Here we are’ at the beginning of lines one and three. The ST poetic device is reproduced in the TT, but it involves shifts which fall into Chesterman’s (1997) ‘information change’ and ‘clause structure change’.

Meanwhile, the repetition of the sentence ‘猃狁之故’ (because of Xian Yun) in line six and eight is partially retained in Pound’s translation. The content is the same but in different wording, while new information is added: ‘because we have the Ken-nin for our foemen’ in line three pragmatically equals to ‘because of these Mongols’ in line four. The cleverness lying in this rendering is that line four is a natural explanation of line three in which readers get to know that ‘Ken-nin’ is the Mongols and enemy. This shift falls into Chesterman’s (1997) category: a pragmatic strategy ‘explicitness change’, since Pound added ‘components explicitly in the TT which are only implicit in the ST’ (108) such as ‘our foemen’ and ‘these Mongols’. As for the shifts of poetic devices from repetition in the ST to non-repetition and half repetition in the TT, these fall into Chesterman’s (1997) ‘scheme change’ (99).

Lefevere’s (1975) ‘phonemic strategy’ is seen in Pound’s rendering of ‘Ken-nin’ for ‘猃 狁’ (Xian Yun), which refers to the Mongols before the Han Dynasty. Since Pound translated the poem through a mediating language – Japanese – there are inevitably traces of it such as this ‘Ken-nin’, a Japanese pronunciation for ‘金人’ (Jin Ren), another title for ancient Mongolian tribes in China.

In addition, there are other shifts from Chesterman’s (1997) categories in Pound’s rendering. For instance, the whole fourth line ‘岁亦莫止’ (near year-end) and fifth line of ‘靡室 靡家’ (no family, no home) are missing in Pound’s translation, which falls into ‘information change’; it is different from the strategy of implicitation because the ‘omitted information … cannot be subsequently inferred’ (109). As for ‘不遑启居’ (no leisure to squat) in line seven, Pound translated it into ‘We have no comfort’, a ‘paraphrase’ (104), under-translating the original. For the single character word ‘归’ (return) in line three, Pound used a whole sentence ‘When shall we get back to our country?’ to make the implicit meaning explicit, so an

‘explicitness change’ occurs. At the same time another shift occurs: ‘illocutionary change’ (110), because the speech act has changed from the original statement ‘曰归曰归 (say return, say return)’ into a question in the TT.

In comparison, ‘Cai-wei – We Pick Ferns, We Pick Ferns’, translated by Watson (2000), is much closer to the original in terms of poetic schemes, sentence structure, and semantic and pragmatic strategies. Burton Watson is a sophisticated translator of Chinese literature whose works include: Early Chinese Literature (1962), Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century (1971), The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the

Thirteenth Century (1984), Selected Poems of Du Fu (2002), and Chinese Rhyme-Prose (2015). Watson’s translation of the poem is as follows:

We pick ferns, we pick ferns, For the ferns are sprouting now: Oh to go home, to go home Before the year is over! No rooms, no houses for us, All because of the Xianyun, No time to kneel or sit down, All because of the Xianyun. (140)

Unlike Pound, Watson followed the original form and made it six stanzas of eight lines and uses repetition as in line one, three, six, and eight. For ‘猃狁’ (Xian Yun), unlike Pound’s use of the following line to explain the term in previous line, Watson adds a note instead before his translation – between the title and the poem – to give background knowledge while

introducing what ‘Xianyun’ is, namely ‘men on duty guarding the country from the Xianyun tribes of the north’ (140).

The last stanza of the original poem is as follows, with a gloss translation on right: 昔我往矣， In the past I went,

杨柳依依。 Willows gently swaying. 今我来思， Now I come,

行道迟迟， Slowly we march, 载渴载饥。 Thirsty and hungry. 我心伤悲， My heart feels sad,

莫知我哀！ No one knows my sorrow!

This stanza – especially the first four lines – of the poem is regarded as among the most noteworthy essence of the whole Book of Songs (Tao 2004, 13). There is the juxtaposition of the past and the present, of the spring and the winter, and of lightheartedness and sadness. The lingering profound sentiment flows out naturally from the skillful depiction of nature. Like the first stanza, it employs the poetic device of repetition such as ‘依依’ (gently swaying), ‘霏霏’ (falling and swirling), and ‘迟迟’ (slowly). This kind of repetition is called 叠字 (duplicating character), in which a word is made up of two same characters. In the above case, no single character in these three words can be used separately; the two characters together contribute to one single meaning of the word.

Pound’s translation (Eliot 1928) is as follows:

When we set out, the willows were drooping with spring, We come back in the snow,

We go slowly, we are hungry and thirsty,

Our mind is full of sorrow, who will know of our grief? (105)

As seen, though Pound did not conform to the original form of line length and stanza size and there are ‘scheme changes’, he retained the whole artistic mood of the original perfectly.

Especially in his rendering of the first two lines ‘When we set out, the willows were drooping with spring’, the verb ‘droop’ is precise and elegant, which echoes the original, depicting a picture in which willow branches are hanging downwards softly and moving gently in spring breeze. The scenes at two different times of the year when the soldiers set out to the frontier and when they are trapped in arduousness of marching are presented smoothly and naturally. Here we can see that Pound used a strategy that falls into Chesterman’s ‘synonymy’ in rendering ‘the willows were drooping with spring’ for ‘杨柳依依’ (willows gently swaying); at the same time the shift falls into another of Chesterman’s categories, namely ‘explicitness change’, since Pound added ‘with spring’ in the TT which is only implicit in the original.

In contrast, in the next line, Pound omitted some information by putting ‘雨雪霏霏’ (snow falling and swirling) into ‘in the snow’, which may fall into Chesterman’s (1997) ‘paraphrase’. In the last line, Pound made two shifts: ‘interpersonal change’ and ‘illocutionary change’. In ‘我心伤悲’ (my heart feels sad), as in the whole poem, the speaker is ‘我’ (I), the first person singular, while in Pound’s translation it becomes ‘we’, first person plural, as in ‘Our mind is full of sorrow’. This changes the ‘degree of emotiveness and involvement’ and thus belongs to ‘interpersonal change’ (110). Meanwhile, the original exclamatory sentence ‘莫知我 哀!’ (no one knows my sorrow!) is translated into a question ‘who will know of our grief?’ – the speech act has been changed, thus it belongs to ‘illocutionary change’.

Comparatively, Watson’s translation partially keeps the chanting characteristics of the original and uses repetition as in ‘Slow slow our march’ in rendering ‘迟迟’ (slowly), one of the three above mentioned words for an effect that is pleasant to ears. Here is Watson’s translation of the last stanza (141):

Long ago we set out

When willows were rich and green. Now we come back

Through thickly falling snow. Slow slow our march,

We are thirsty, we are hungry, Our hearts worn with sorrow, No one knows our woe.

As in the first stanza, Watson retained the poetic schemes, sentence structure, semantic and pragmatic strategies of the original much more than Pound did. Meanwhile, Watson put more emphasis on the chanting features of the original. Though both Watson and Pound exhibited ‘interpersonal change’ by turning the speaker of the poem from ‘I’ to ‘we’, Watson’s last line is much closer to the original than that of Pound in terms of ‘illocutionary change’: the original exclamatory sentence ‘莫知我哀!’ (no one knows my sorrow!) is translated into a statement ‘No one knows our woe’.