(Download) "Full Chairs and Empty Spaces: A Kind of Entertainment (A Record of the Translation of Leung Ping-Kwan's "Fourteen Chairs") (Essay)" by Fu Jen Studies: literature & linguistics * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Full Chairs and Empty Spaces: A Kind of Entertainment (A Record of the Translation of Leung Ping-Kwan's "Fourteen Chairs") (Essay)
- Author : Fu Jen Studies: literature & linguistics
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 219 KB
Description
Fullness and emptiness suggest the process of translation, and so it was that on March 17, 2006, at Simmons College in Boston, Leung Ping-kwan and Michelle Yeh answered my invitation to spend an entire day working on a single poem by Ping-kwan, a poem modeled on the Western sonnet and inspired by a proposed public art project in Hong Kong. We recorded our conversations on audio, and I kept records of all our drafts. The idea for spending time this way came to me after a few unconnected conversations with Chinese poets and scholars and translators working in the field. Translation of any language has its own challenges, but Chinese has the added challenge of several major dialects and two writing systems, not to mention the competition it must face from European languages in the US. The majority of funding for translation projects and publication of translations goes to European languages. Moreover, with most Americans still receiving instruction in French, Spanish, or German as preparation for college (although Chinese is gaining ground), there is a very small field of candidates of native English speakers who go on to work as translators and scholars in Chinese and other Asian languages. Originally, I had hoped to have a translation seminar at the University of Hawaii lasting several days and focusing on Chinese with teams consisting of the poet, a native speaker of English who is a poet and may or may not know Chinese, and a translator or scholar in the field of Chinese literary studies. That idea proved too ambitious, so I scaled it down to this afternoon with Leung Ping-kwan (Lingnan University, Hong Kong) and Michelle Yeh (University of California, Davis). My intention was to provide records for perhaps an open discussion of the process of translation wherein the poet, a scholar proficient in the language and literary tradition, and an American poet with--in my case--some proficiency in the language, bring together the translation process by adding more poetic, intuitive energy in the receiving language. What follows here is a documentation of what transpired that afternoon, with the original poem and an explanation of our process, our drafts of the translation, an excerpt from the conversation, and a summary commentary.