A new Chinese-language translation of Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry collection Stray Birds has been pulled from bookshops in China, the publisher said, after controversy erupted over its unusually sexual content.
The work, originally in Bengali, was first published in 1916, three years after Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature for “his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse.”
The new translation, by Chinese novelist Feng Tang (馮唐), known for his racy depictions of Beijing youth in the 1990s, was released earlier this year, but its content raised eyebrows.
According to Xinhua news agency, in Feng’s version, the original line: “The world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover” became: “The world unzipped his pants in front of his lover.”
In recent days online posters have been scornfully comparing Feng’s translation to English and previous Chinese versions.
“He can write however he likes in his own books, but when he’s dealing with other people’s work, he must have basic respect,” one netizen wrote on a Chinese microblogging site.
The publisher on Monday announced that it would pull the book from bookshops and erase it from the Internet.
“Due to the great controversy surrounding Feng Tang’s translation of Stray Birds, we have decided to recall this volume from all bookstores and online platforms,” the Zhejiang Literature and Arts Press said in a statement on its verified microblog.
Feng is not known to speak or read Bengali, the state-run China Daily reported, but according to Xinhua he worked from English versions of Tagore’s poems.
He translated “hospitable” as “horny,” the China Daily reported, citing “translation buffs” and Tagore fans as saying that Feng’s version “infused the original poems with hormonal flavor” and “mixed words of disparate styles.”
However, despite the critical response to the translation itself, the recall was condemned online.
“Are you crazy? If the translation’s bad readers can just choose not to buy it — why recall it, what law has been broken?” one expletive-prone netizen wrote. “This is no longer a discussion of the translation’s merits — this is now about freedom of speech and freedom of the press.”
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