Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

mean “grain,” for example. Waley’s translation of
the Book of Songs is still considered by scholars to
be a masterpiece of translation and some of his best
work.
In 1950, the great Swedish sinologist Bernard
Karlgren published his prose translation of the Book
of Songs. Karlgren set out to produce a scholarly
version with no literary pretensions. He provided the
Chinese text, a romanized text including his phonetic
reconstruction of the rhyme words. Karlgren’s text
is meant to be used as a crib by students and scholars.
His translation:
1. You shi-rats, you shi-rats(a), do not eat our
millet! Three years we served you, but you
have not been willing to (look at =) heed us;
it has gone so far that we will leave you; we
go to that happy land; oh, happy land, happy
land! Then we shall find our place.
2. You shi-rats, you shi-rats, do not eat our
wheat! Three years we have served you, but
you have not been willing to be good to us; it
has gone so far that we will leave you; we go
to that happy country, happy country! Then
we shall find our right.
3. You shi-rats, you shi-rats, do not eat our
sprouting grain; three years we have served
you, but you have not been willing to (recognize
our toil=) reward us; it has gone so far
that we will leave you; we go to those happy
outlands, happy outlands, happy outlands!
Who goes there to make long-drawn-out
lamentations?
(a) Some kind of rodent. 8
Karlgren’s translation, as we noted, makes no pretensions
of being an artistic rendition. The value of
his text lies in its ability to convey a sense of the
simplicity of the original. His version has become
the standard scholarly crib for all would-be sinologists.
Professor Karlgren’s reading of the character
shi, , is different from that of the other translators
considered here. In most early commentaries
and dictionaries, the character is normally glossed as
simply meaning “big,” which is the meaning it car-
ries today. However, Karlgren’s interpretation is
based on a gloss in the Examples of Refined Usage,
∫∏∂Æ (3rd century BC), China’s earliest lexicographical
work, where the character shi ∫” is identified
with the homophonous morpheme shi, Ò,
which contains the graphs for rat, π´ , and stone,
• , and which occurs in the Book of Changes,
©ˆ∏g, meaning “some kind of rodent.” 9 Yet, given
the logic of metaphor, a reading of the character as
“big” clearly makes sense.
Perhaps the most striking translation of the Book
of Songs—and I use the word translation in the
broadest sense of the word—is that of Ezra Pound.
Ezra Pound, of course, needs no introduction. One
can say there is never a dull moment in Pound’s
translation, but the reader would probably be more
interested in reading his translations for the Pound
they contain rather than as translations of a Chinese
classic. Pound clearly brings to his translations all
the concerns that one finds in Anglo-American
modernist poetry. What Pound gives us is a real
20th-century version of the poem:
RATS,
Stone-head rats lay off our grain,
Three years pain,
Enough, enough, plus enough again.
More than enough from you, deaf you,
We’re about thru and ready to go
Where something will grow
Untaxed.
Good earth, good sown
And come into our own.
RATS,
Big rats, lay off our wheat,
Three years deceit,
And now we’re about ready to go
To Lo Kuo, happy, happy land, Lo Kuo, good
earth
Where we can earn our worth.
RATS,
Stone-head rats, spare our new shoots,
Translation Review 39