Between the Lines: Visualizing an “Original” Shijing

• In Event: Experiments in Translating Classical Chinese Poetry

Abstract

A translation makes some kind of reference to an original text, and most theories of translation are concerned with the quality of that reference. But what is the “original,” really? It is not, in fact, a given; in the case of classical texts in particular, the original must be defined before any reference to it can be made. Classical poems involve a history that is essential to the translator. From which point in that history will the translator select a text? Which of its textual variants does it include? Which parts of its traditional accretion—commentaries, glossaries, intertexts—are necessary to interpret it? I propose an approach to translation that incorporates the polymorphic nature of classical “originals” in the version produced. This presentation will discuss the history of the Shijing 詩經 poem “Jiong” 駉 to demonstrate the mutable textuality of the original. I will show how translators as different as James Legge and Ezra Pound have invisibly defined their original texts in translation with approaches that fall along a hermeneutic-aesthetic spectrum. I will argue in turn for a different approach that is derived from an investigation of the original’s historicity: interlinear translation, a method as classical as the Shijing itself. But the interlinear version need not be traditionally didactic. It can be innovative and foreignizing; its artful display of polysemia can transcend the hermeneutic-aesthetic polarity. Interlinear translation is a method both deeply rooted in the particular history of Chinese classical poems and uniquely suited to a postmodern global readership.

Author

• Monica Zikpi, University of Oregon