Du Fu: A Master Of The Tang Chinese

By setting literal translations as the upmost goal of faithful translation, Newman makes faithful translation difficult. ‘Literal’, originating from the Latin littera, meaning letter, indicates letter-by-letter, and thus literal translation stands on an unreachable point, though in Newton’s use, the phrase is a metaphor for a close translation focused on the formal aspects. Sacrificing coherence, Newman emphasizes form and structure, but, ironically, in the attempt for accuracy, accuracy falls away seriously for reader comprehension, as in the example above.

Written in 759, the poem serves as Du Fu’s account of his short stay in Shi Hao, or Stone Moat, a village in Henan, during the An Lushan Rebellion against the established Tang Dynasty. The rebellion, which ended in failure, and subsequent disorder resulted in a huge loss of life and large-scale destruction, significantly weakening the Tang Dynasty though loss of land. This period of unhappiness was the making of Du Fu as a poet: he began writing poetry to communicate political comments, especially towards the government’s failures and successes, out of sheer emotion. A master of the Tang Chinese poetic forms, Du Fu mainly wrote in lǜshi, requiring five characters per line

The euphony of the original also disappears, due to syllabic loss and the incoherent jumble of words, such as in line 21, or a perceived enjambment in lines 9 and 10 that is not in the original. And although grief and suffering emerges from the literal translation, the strangeness nearly mutes it. The ‘looser’ translation by Ayscough, preserves the tragedy and anguish of the narrative by preserving the narration. Sentence case, punctuation, and longer lines deviate from the Chinese, yet the unity of each line and content