Apostrophizing Byron: The Rhetoric of Troping and the Making of Chinese Modernity through Lyric Translation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v48.i3.09Keywords:
English poetry, Byron, translation into Chinese, literary influences, apostrophe, mimetic reconfiguration, allusionAbstract
Given Herder’s insight that one way to effectively establish national identity is to look into poets who are capable of telling ancient stories and bringing them back to present readers, this article focuses on the unlikely technique of apostrophe in lyric translation as the means by which English Romantic poet Byron was assimilated into the Chinese socio-historical context. Drawing on Kenneth Burke’s tripartite theory of portraiture, which tends to lock the text into a “drama of human relations” with a “socioanagogic mode of analysis,” the article argues that translation reconciles two uses of apostrophe in lyric traditions: a poetic convention that is “a relic of archaic beliefs” and an optative signifier of “the power of poetry to make something happen.” The analysis shows that by wittingly adopting archaism, namely, by seeking a dynamic equivalence between the refrain word xi in sao poetry that originated in the Chuci tradition and the poetic device of apostrophe in Western Romantic poetry, Hu Shi (1891–1962) interpolated the exclamation tradition of Chinese poetics into Byron’s poem “The Isles of Greece,” thus rhetorically eluding the risk of making every apostrophe “an invocation of invocation.” It was in this way that Chinese modernity was made, and a more problematized version of the poem was passed along to the intended Chinese readership through the target language text.
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