Recently my friend Lucas suggested that character-by-character translations of Chinese poetry, like the ones we offer, are generally misleading and confusing to lay readers. A couple nights ago at dinner I was asked about such translations and also found I had a much harder time than I would've thought explaining why we publish them. I'm not done with them necessarily, but I think it's very much worth a discussion.
Why do we do them? I generally take the following two reasons most seriously. For my part, before any consideration of the reader, I find it helpful in my process of close reading. It forces me to think actively about each character, not just rely on a higher-level understanding of the 'sense' of a line. Where character-by-character translations relate to close reading, I associate the practice with the book 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger (which I have enjoyed a lot, but find less and less useful the more translating I do; most of the translations in it just aren't very good).
The other argument is that such translations might help the lay reader better understand the 'relationship' between the original and the translation -- they highlight the process of translating and in particular the distance between these two languages. Readers can examine the translator's art-in-progress, and better understand the nature of the choices he or she makes. All elements of translation that may normally be ignored.
I think objections to this kind of 'intermediate translation' deserve to be taken seriously, though. For one, it may be completely wrong to see character-by-character translations as legitimately representative of an intermediate step in the translator's process. Translation requires not only an engagement with the meaning of each individual character, but a series of parallel engagements with phrases, and verses, and the poem as a whole. Grammar is not something one considers wholly separately from individual words. It cannot be that distinct. The meanings of words affect instantly their position vis-a-vis other words, and a word's place in a phrase or in the context of the poem as a whole affects its individual meaning. When readers examine a character-by-character translation, they may imagine, then, that it represents how the Chinese "works" at a deeper level; that simply is not the case. Character-by-character translations are more properly conceived as reducing the original Chinese, by stripping it of its grammar and context, to a form more conducive to certain kinds of analysis (though potentially less conducive to the best, most subtle and complete analysis).
Further, Lucas points out that such 'word-for-word translations as intermediate step' are not generally done when translating other languages. Honestly, I think the reason word-for-word isn't done when translating other languages into English might have more to do with the relative youth of sinology as a field. Plus it's just so easy to work character by character compared to word by word in other languages, because it happens that Chinese does not conjugate or decline. That is, of course, an explanation and not a justification.
I remember when I first read "19 Ways", I pored over the character-by-character translation. Years later I read it again and thought, "I can't believe I ever looked at it like that, what a fool I was." And as I kept looking at it I thought again, "No, no, that isn't even right" (I think they had 但 as "but" instead of "only"). So I was potentially mislead both by the format and by their execution of the format. Maybe the solution is relegating one or two example character-by-character bits to an appendix, with appropriate caveats about the particular nature of character-by-character translation, for the obsessive lay reader. Perhaps it can be safely done if the caveats are well written. What do you think?
