A Different Scenery at the Historical Turning Point: Rethinking the Influence of Poetry Translation upon the Development of Chinese New Poetry

Abstract

Abstract: It is a consensus in the Chinese academia that Chinese New Poetry came into being under the influence from its Western counterpart, and Hu Shi is the first poet of Chinese New Poetry, i.e. vernacular free verse. A close reading of historical records, however, will lead us to an easy discovery that before Hu and other poets published their vernacular or baihua new poems, the Western poems they translated were almost all metrical ones, rather than free verses, and the translators used the method of domestication in translating the Western metrical poems into traditional Chinese poems. Therefore, neither the form of the original Western poems nor the form of their Chinese translations could have provided the right condition for the emergence of vernacular new poems, which are characterized by free verse. And it has been proven that vernacular new poetry had appeared way before the translation of free verses in vernacular. Moreover, after the emergence of the vernacular new poems, the translators adopted a “de-metricalized” approach in translating the Western poems. As a result, the metrical form of the Western poems was deformed systematically in translation and poems written in different forms were all translated in prose style. All this shows that it is not the Western poems that triggered the movement of the Chinese vernacular new poems, but, conversely, it is the double influence of Hu's “eight-don'ts” theory and the new poems he wrote that quickly changed the norms of poetic translation in China from traditional metrical form into free verse after the appearance of vernacular free verse.

Key words: poetry translation, Chinese New Poetry, influence

Wang Dongfeng. A Different Scenery at the Historical Turning Point: Rethinking the Influence of Poetry Translation upon the Development of Chinese New Poetry[J]. Foreign Literature Studies, 2019, 41(4): 151-167.

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