Fidelity to the deep structure of literature: Yu Kwang-chung’s translation of Emily Dickinson

ABSTRACT

Yu Kwang-chung embarked on a translational project, Anthology of American Poetry, around 1960. Edited by Stephen Soong, the anthology was published by World Today Press, Hong Kong, in 1961. This research commences with Yu’s plight in selecting what poems of Dickinson’s to translate, a plight associated with Poundian translatology. It follows with textual analyses of Yu’s translations of and introduction to Dickinson’s poetry. I aruge that Yu is far from being an absolutist inasmuch as translational fidelity is concerned. In contrast, what he pursues in poetry translation is an optimal fidelity, one that intends to bring about as profuse poetics as possible in the target language. The translator exerts optimal faithfulness to a variety of traditional literary elements, all of which amount to what I call “fidelity to the deep structure of literature.” It is with such a flexible fidelity that Yu transplants Dickinson’s metaphysical universe onto the Chinese soil.

KEYWORDS:

• Yu Kwang-chung
• Emily Dickinson
• Poetry Translation
• Anthology of American Poetry
• Ezra Pound

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The interview by Te-Hsing Shan was originally executed in Chinese and the quotation was also originally written in the Chinese language. For the sake of easy reading, the author of the study has taken the liberty to translate the entire passage into English. Henceforth, if the author of the essay quotes a Chinese passage, it is he who has done the Chinese-English translation to serve the need of the English readers.

2. Yahoo Dictionary. Accessed July 20, 2020. https://tw.dictionary.search.yahoo.com/;_ylt=AwrtXWtEKI5bRm4Awz19rolQ?_guc_consent_skip=1595227041.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science and Technology Council [MOST 111-2410-H-004-177].

Notes on contributors

Min-Hua Wu

Min-Hua Wu is Associate Professor at the Department of English, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. He served as Associate Vice President for the Office of International Cooperation, NCCU from Aug. 1, 2020 to Jul. 31, 2022. He completed his doctoral dissertation in English literature at Paris-Sorbonne University fully funded by a Taiwan government scholarship. Besides a Chinese-French translation prize awarded by the Council for Cultural Affairs, Taiwan, he is a three-time awardee for the National Taiwan University Chinese-English Literary Translation Awards and three-time awardee in English-Chinese translation contest for the Liang Shih-ch’iu Literary Awards. As the Co-author of Chang Pao Chun Chiu: Li Ao’s Landscape of Lettres (Ink Publishing, Taipei), he has published in The Wenshan Review, The Translator, Concentric, Brontë Studies, The Emily Dickinson Journal, Review of English and American Literature, Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, East Journal of Translation, Chengchi University Press, and Modern Chinese Literature, amongst others. He has co-edited a special issue on “Lyrical Translation and the Translator’s Subjectivity” with Paula VARSANO, Chair and Professor of Chinese literature at UC Berkeley for The Wenshan Review (2021). Currently, he is working on a monograph, Tang Poetry in Xu Yuanchong’s English and French Translations: A Comparative Study. He serves as the Editor-in-Chief of The Wenshan Review (ESCI, SCOPUS, EBSCO, MLA, THCI core) as of Aug. 1, 2023.