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Translatability of Tagore’s Stray Birds into Chinese with Insights from Constrained Language |
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| รหัสดีโอไอ | |
| Creator | Ruby Ka Yee Hui |
| Title | Translatability of Tagore’s Stray Birds into Chinese with Insights from Constrained Language |
| Publisher | IATIS and Chalermprakiat Center of Translation and Interpretation at Chulalongkorn University |
| Publication Year | 2568 |
| Journal Title | New Voices in Translation Studies |
| Journal Vol. | 30 |
| Journal No. | 2 |
| Page no. | 30-61 |
| Keyword | constrained language, essentially translatable poetry, poetry translation, Stray Birds, Tagore, translatability, world literature |
| URL Website | https://newvoices.arts.chula.ac.th/ |
| Website title | New Voices in Translation Studies |
| ISSN | 1819-5644 |
| Abstract | Poetry has long been considered untranslatable. However, Walsh (2018) proposes a theory of “essentially translatable poetry”. To test the feasibility of Walsh’s framework, this paper applies it to Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861-1941) poem Stray Birds. Based on an examination of all 325 poems of Stray Birds and their Chinese translations, there are four features greatly relevant to the translatability of poetry: dominance of imagery, absence of culture-specific items, free verse, and simple lexical and syntactic structures, in line with Walsh’s (2018) proposal. As Stray Birds comprises Tagore’s self-translations from Bengali into English and poems originally written in English, this study discusses the reasons for translatability from the perspective of constrained language, which refers to the language produced under prominent constraints. Readers’ reception is also examined to investigate the effects of Tagore’s strategies, which are found to contribute to ease of cross-cultural understanding and the circulation of Stray Birds as world literature. |
