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Women, Consumption and Popular Culture (Vol. 4 No. 1); Life, Community, and Ethics (Vol. 4. No. 2)

The Making of Barbarians in Western Literature (Vol. 5 No. 1); Chaos and Fear in Contemporary British Literature (Vol. 5 No. 2)

Taiwan Cinema before Taiwan New Wave Cinema (Vol. 6 No. 1); Catastrophe and Cultural Imaginaries (Vol. 6 No. 2)

Affective Perspectives from East Asia (Vol. 9 No. 2); Longing and Belonging (Vol. 10 No. 2, produced in collaboration with the European Network for Comparative Literary Studies)

Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations, 1776 to the Present (Vol. 11 No. 2). 

ABSTRACT

The present paper intends to explore the ways translation recreates corresponding terms for literary, cultural and psychological needs. At the same time, the present paper questions that under translingual practice, the translated text is revised, edited, appropriated and invented, eventually becoming “the other” without its alterity. Two cases in point are Ezra Pound’s Cathay/ Pound-Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, and modern Taiwan graphic poetry.

In Cathay, one finds Pound’s translation of the classical Chinese poems does syntactically resemble the Chinese poems. But it does not come as a result of Pound’s translating Chinese poetry. It is rather an application of the Imagist principles to the classical Chinese poems. What lies behind the personae of the Cathay poems is the poet Pound, who was striving to find foreign materials for a Second American Renaissance.

The paper then discusses that in Pound-Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, the “method of Chinese writing” intending to return to the culmination of a Western poetics is actually a fallacy. But, curiously enough, with Poundian creative misprision, there has been a revival of graphic poetry since the eighties in Taiwan. Just as Pound translates classical Chinese poetry and the method of Chinese writing into his American Renaissance, the modern Taiwan graphic poets translate their (mis)recognition of Chinese hieroglyphic characters into the construction of new cultural imagination.

Keywords: ideogrammic method, alterity, the absolutely other, translation ethics, Chinese prejudice, nostalgia for origins

 

摘 要

本文探討翻譯如何重新創造心理、文學與文化的對應詞,使譯文文本在另一個語文環境中獲得差異,形成新的意義。另一方面,本文質疑:被翻譯的原文在「跨語際實踐」之中,被刪除、修改、編輯、挪用、發明,而成為沒有「他異性」的「他者」。

本文以兩個跨文化翻譯的例子做為討論。在龐德《國泰集》翻譯中國古典詩、龐德-費諾羅沙《漢字做為詩的表現媒介》挪用中文表意方法中,我們看到西方的「中國偏見」、「本源的鄉愁」、「發現自我」與「挪用他者」。在臺灣當代所發展的臺灣現代圖象詩中,我們也看到了類似的現象。龐德-費諾羅沙翻譯中國詩/文字,企圖建立美國文藝復興;臺灣現代圖象詩則受龐德意象派圖象詩學影響,確認漢字的圖象特質,企圖建立臺灣的新文化想像。龐德-費諾羅沙企圖「整全同一」中國詩/文字,臺灣現代圖象詩則採取「取我所需、為我所用」的挪用策略,形成單向同一的翻譯現象。

關鍵詞:表意方法,他異性,絕對他者,翻譯倫理,中國偏見,本源的鄉愁