翻譯：神思的機遇

A Chance Encounter of Imaginations

我在小傳裏說我透過跨文化的角度長期創作詩與批評詩。在中文詩裏，試圖溶合三四十年代的遺產，西方自象徵主義以來的表現策略和傳統中國詩獨有的呈現方式，在英文詩裏，創造一種可以兼容中西視野的靈活語法。在理論和批評，如比較文學理論和比較詩學，提出破解單一文化理論設限的方針，打開中西文化互照互省的開放性的對話。在中翻英的努力裏，譬如《藏天下於天下：王維詩選並論》（Hiding the Universe: Poems of Wang Wei, 1970），和《中國古典詩舉要》（Chinese Poetry: Major Modes and Genres, 1976），提供一種自由浮動的視覺，使西方詩人反思及重新調整他們的某些表現策略。在英翻中的作品裏，如《荒原》（1960），如歐洲、拉丁美洲詩選初版的《眾樹歌唱》（1979），提供新詩視野和技巧的開拓。這裏當然不是全部的故事，在這段濃縮的簡介裏，每句話裏都有一個小故事，未提到的故事重要的轉折還有不少，我的詩的創作和後來轉向理論的尋索（包括比較文學、比較詩學、翻譯理論、道家美學）可以說都和翻譯結了不解緣，我想在這裏作些回顧式的敘述，這樣也許比較能讓我翻譯與比較文學的生涯找出定位，起碼是我詩路／思路的歷程上的定位。 I offer 4 stories to illustrate my lifelong commitment to creating and critiquing poetry in a crosscultural context: to synthesize the heritage of the Chinese poets of the 1930's and 1940's, the modernist expressive strategies of the West since Symbolism, and those of classical Chinese poetry, to create a kind of syntactical flexibility that accommodates the perceptual priorities of both worlds, and, in the case of East-West comparative poetics, to provide new pedagogical guidelines for deframing monocultural theoretical hypotheses, leading to truly open dialogues between Chinese and Western cultures in an inter-illuminating and inter-reflective manner, and, through my translations of Wang Wei and Chinese Poetry: Major Modes and Genres, to offer a fluid perspective from which modern American poets can review and readjust many current poetic and cultural strategies m the West. The first story highlights how works of translation by Dai Wang-shu, Liang Zongdai, Bian Zhilin and others as well as my own translations of T.S. Eliot, modern European and Latin American poets, and later modern and classical Chinese poetry into English, have shaped my own poetic attempt to synthesize the 1930's and 1940's heritage, the modernist strategies since Symbolism, and those of classical Chinese poetry and how they have inspired my contemporaries. These strategies form a new counterdiscourse to the regimented and reductive humanity caused by the culture industry forced upon China through colonization and to the twisted humanity engendered by the high-handed 'witchhunt' suppressive acts of the Kuomintang rule under the no-exit atmosphere promoted by the cold war mentality. These strategies include the plurisignificative functions of words and creative ambiguity to provide for a free imaginative space without being persecuted. The second story points to my almost accidental discovery of the syntactical and aesthetic differences between classical Chinese and English languages as media for poetry in my sophomore year in National Taiwan University, long before my participation in the magazines of Modern Literature and Epoch Poetry. Before going to bed, I usually tried to write something in my diary, often in poetic form, experimenting with various subject matters, including the blatantly unpoetic, in order to extend my lyrical horizon. It was in one of these experiments that I wrote my first English poem, 'Have we overlooked certain facts ... ?' which was, to my delight, accepted and published by the Vak Review, a magazine out of India. Together with this experiment came my initial recognition of how grammatical and syntactical differences in two linguistic/ cultural systems lead to vastly differing perceptual-expressive procedures. The poem in question had several miscarriages in Chinese. The particularly strong narrative drive in the metamorphosis of that poem was looking for a medium that could accommodate a continuous run-on wave motion that my Chinese, still very much conditioned by the classical Chinese poems and rhymeproses I learned by rote in my grade school days, had a hard time to register, but when I switched to English, to my surprise, the lines flowed with an unexpected momentum. This realization soon led to my second discovery in the reverse, so to speak, of the unique strength of my native language through my careful examination of the gross distortions of classical Chinese poetry by translators who allowed the target language (in this case, English) to mask and master the indigenous Chinese aesthetic, creating treacherous modes of representation. Long before I formulated my challenge to these translations both in practice and in theory, first in my M.A. thesis, T. S. Eliot: A Study of His Poetic Method (1961, English Institute Taiwan Normal University), and then in Delos: A Journal on and of Translation, No. 3 (1969), in my Ezra Pound's Cathay (1969), in my Chinese Poetry: Major Modes and Genres (1976, 1997) and in my Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues between Chinese and Western Poetics (1993), I began to nourish this seed of discovery both as a poet and as an embryonic cnt1c as early as my sophomore year when I hardly even knew how to make a decent critical statement in English. Central to all these writings is this realization: underlying the classical poetic Chinese aesthetic is the primary idea of noninterference with Nature's flow. As reflected in language, this idea has engendered many a-syntactical or paratactical structures that opens up indeterminate space for readers to enter and reenter for multiple perceptions rather than locking them into some definite perspectival position or guiding them in a certain direction. The dispensation of articles, personal pronouns, the sparseness, if not absence, of connective elements (prepositions or conjunctions) aided by the indeterminancy of parts of speech and no tense declensions, afford the readers a unique freedom to consort with the objects and events of the real-life world. The third story is about my realization that to rectify the gross distortions of the Chinese horizon, the Western audience need to be educated to understand, theoretically, what did these important differences evolved and how. This led to my questioning of the differences in critical models, an important beginning to my East West methodology project. The fourth story is about the various dimensions of my teaching and writing about the theory of translation, including the debunking of Xin, Da, Ya, the battles and negotiations between two cultures, and cross-fertilization.