Visitors at the Dickinson Homestead, Emily Dickinson's erstwhile residence and now a museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, will scarcely notice an inconspicuous Chinese book that is popping up in the showcases of its exhibition room. But the book is making big waves among Taiwan's literati. Ostensibly a Chinese translation of selected poems by Dickinson, the book is now hailed as the first serious exploration of her poetry to ever come out in the Chinese language.
Translation of poetry is generally seen as a hopeless endeavor because no single rendering can fully convey the nuances, images and symbolism of poetic language. That was why Robert Frost never approved any translation of his works. Nor can we be certain what Emily Dickinson would say -- were she alive today -- of having her poetry translated. But what makes this book stand out are the sumptuous interpretations that follows each work.
The book contains a selection of 50 poems in English and Chinese, including some of her best-known pieces like "Because I could not stop for Death" and "A narrow Fellow in the Grass." Each translation is followed by a one-page interpretation, which unravels for the Chinese reader Dickinson's hidden themes and often enigmatic language that perplex even fairly sophisticated native English readers.
Beyond the usual researched presentations of the social and historical backdrop of Dickinson's life, the interpretations exude a warm intimacy with the poems, in which the interpreters say they have long steeped themselves. At a recent press conference, George Lytle (
Dorothea Tung (
The book is illustrated with photos taken by Tung during a trip to the poet's hometown in 1998. The pictures cover the Dickinson Homestead (where she lived from 1855, when she was 25, until her death in 1886), the landscape around Amherst and, perhaps the most stunning of all, the tombstone that tells us Emily has been "called back."
Some translations of Dickinson's poems have been published in China. Literary heavyweights like Yu Kuang-chung (
The renderings in this new book are bound to generate the usual, endless debates in academia. But the pleasure for most readers lies in the explanations that unveil -- for the first time in Chinese -- the vast and complex landscape of the poet-hermit's inner world. Apart from Chinese students of American literature, the book will be of interest to foreigners studying Chinese and aiming to probe into the field of translation.
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