Taiwan in Time: Nov. 2 to Nov. 8
Upon the mention of Shakespeare during an interview in 1987, an 84-year-old Liang Shih-chiu (梁實秋) exclaimed, “Shakespeare again! I’ve already declared that I’ve severed all relations with him.”
But the Chinese-born writer and longtime National Taiwan Normal University (國立師範大學) English professor seemed eager to discuss what he called the “most important task in his life” — translating into Chinese the entire works of the legendary playwright and poet.
Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
Liang died on Nov. 3 in Taipei, just a few months after that interview.
When the project was conceived in 1930, Liang was a young scholar who had recently returned to China after studying literature at Harvard and Columbia universities. It was 1967 when he singlehandedly completed the momentous task, and by that time he was a retired professor living in Taiwan.
The finished product contained 40 volumes (37 plays and three poem collections) and more than four million words. During the celebratory feast, Liang listed three key traits a person would need to accomplish what he did.
Photo: Wang Min-wei, Taipei Times
“Firstly, he can’t be too academically inclined, because if so, he would be doing research instead. Secondly, he can’t be a genius, because if so, he would be creating his own works instead. Thirdly, he must be long-living. I’m lucky that I possess all three traits,” he is reported to have said.
It wasn’t supposed to take this long. Philosopher and writer Hu Shih (胡適), then on the translation committee of the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education Culture (中華文化教育基金會), had planned for it to be a group project between five scholars, to be completed in five years.
Liang wrote that the other four dropped out for various reasons, and he carried on alone. However, war soon broke out in China with the Japanese invasion and later the Chinese Civil War. The majority of the translation was done in Taiwan, to where Liang had retreated with the Chinese Nationalist Party in 1949.
Photo: Hu Ching-hui, Taipei Times
Liang already had a few English-language book translations — Peter Pan and Silas Marner — under his belt when Hu recruited him.
Born in Beijing in 1903, Liang attended Tsinghua School (清華學校), which back then was a western-style prep school for students to study abroad in the US. In 1923, the entire class headed to the US, where Liang would spend time at Colorado College, Harvard and Columbia University. However, he was just as passionate about Chinese literature as he was Western.
He was very particular about his translation work, stating that his primary concern was to stay true to the original meaning of the text instead of translating directly. The main difference is that Liang’s translation is meant to be read, while Shakespeare’s works are meant to be acted out on a stage.
“Although I can’t translate word for word, at least I tried to do it sentence by sentence,” he said. “I will absolutely not delete anything, unlike some people today. I even tried to keep Shakespeare’s punctuation.”
It’s often mentioned how Liang also kept all obscene language or sexual references, which was not commonplace in those times.
“Sex is something that everyone is interested in, even in Chinese theater,” he said.
He also mentions the difficulty of translating puns.
“It’s just wordplay and doesn’t have much actual significance,” he says. “But the audience at that time enjoyed the puns. Occasionally, they can be translated into Chinese, but most of the time I can only explain them in the footnotes.”
Hu promised to personally throw a huge banquet for Liang, but he never got the chance because Wu died five years before the books were completed. After Liang finished translating all of Shakespeare’s plays, a banquet was held in Taipei on Aug. 6, 1967 with more than 300 people attending. But he wasn’t satisfied yet, and spent another year translating the playwright’s poetry.
Liang’s love affair with British literature didn’t stop there. In 1972, he embarked on another gargantuan project that kept him busy for the next seven years: History of British Literature (英國文學史) and Anthology of British Literature (英國文學選). Both works contain over one million words.
Taiwan in Time, a column about Taiwan’s history that is published every Sunday, spotlights important or interesting events around the nation that have anniversaries this week.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS