从朗德《一位老哲人的临终遗言》诗的汉译看诗歌翻译中的变通

Adaptation in Poetry Translation:A Case Study of the Chinese Translations of Landor’s Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher

《一位老哲人的临终遗言》是英国古典主义诗人朗德最著名的一首箴言诗,现有14个中文译本无一不对原诗的形式或内容做了一些改变。我们认为,译者对原作的改变,有道理的是变通,无道理的是误译。本文简要介绍朗德这首诗的背景,考证其原标题,从文法视角剖析诗人的创作动机和所要表达的核心意思,发现最受中国读者推崇的杨绛译本不仅将一首英雄四行诗变通为自由诗,而且实际上还借朗德之口,抒发了译者自己的处世哲学,而原诗中诗人的自我评估和对朋友的深切感激却在翻译中遗失了。出于相信英文格律诗只有译成中文格律诗,才能既传达诗人的意思,又体现原诗的形式,本文重点分析朗德诗6个格律体译本,探讨如何在不违背诗人的创作意图并且不改变原诗基本意思和关键意象的前提下,通过对原诗中一些次要意思的变通,在译本中重建诗的格律,再现原诗的意境。

Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher is one of the best-known epigrams by the English classical poet Walter Savage Landor.Each of the 14 Chinese versions has made some alterations to either the poem’s form or content.We posit that justifiable alteration is adaptation whereas unjustifiable alteration is mistranslation.This article gives a brief account of the background of this poem,untangles the confusion surrounding its title and,from the perspective of grammatical analysis,looks into the poet’s motive in composing it and the core meaning he wished to convey.We find that Yang Jiang’s version,the most popular in China,has not only rendered this heroic quatrain into free verse,but also,through Landor’s mouth,expresses the translator’s own philosophy behind her dealings with other people,while Landor’s selfassessment and his heart-felt gratitude to his friends overflowing in the poem is lost in the translation.With the belief that only by rendering an English metrical poem into its Chinese counterpart can both the poet’s meaning and the poem’s prosodic features be conveyed,this article focuses on analyzing the six metrical translations of Landor’s poem and explores how,under the precondition that the poet’s motives be not contradicted and the poem’s essential meaning and key imageries be not altered,adaptations can be made to some less important meanings of the poem so as to reconstruct its metrics in the translation and recreate its images and sentiments.