Poetry in translation: Chinese to Finnish

[extrapenguin]

I recently got Pertti Nieminen's compilation of translations Veden hohde, vuorten värit, with a bunch of translations from the Book of Poetry (詩經 Shi Jing) onwards, and have been slowly making my way through it. (Out of print, so I got it via antikvaari.fi and ended up paying more for postage than the actual book lol. Joys of living abroad.) This was for the most part an exercise in seeing whether Chinese poetry works better translated into Finnish than into English, given that all three poetic traditions have different defaults of what is considered poetic. Anyway, the short answer is "yes". I picked a few poems I liked from the Shi Jing to illustrate the differences. The text itself is available on ctext, along with out of copyright 1800s translations by James Legge, to which I shall compare.

(My largest annoyance with the book so far: the transliteration chosen is, uh, not pinyin, so I'm here like "who tf is Su T'ung-po" whenever a name comes up. My copy already has a random inscription on the front so I might add a pinyin gloss to the authors' names with pencil at some point.)


49 鶉之奔奔
鶉之奔奔、鵲之彊彊。
人之無良、我以為兄。

鵲之彊彊、鶉之奔奔。
人之無良、我以為君。

Nieminen:

Viiriäiset torailevat,
harakat ovat kiukuissaan;
kelvottomia miehiä
minun täytyy sanoa veljikseni.

Harakat ovat kiukuissaan,
viiriäiset torailevat;
kelvotonta miestä
minun täytyy sanoa herrakseni.

Rendered into English:

Quails quarrel,
magpies are angry;
worthless men
I must call my brothers.

Magpies are angry,
quails quarrel;
a worthless man
I must call my lord.

Legge, meanwhile:

Boldly faithful in their pairings are quails ;
Vigorously so are magpies.
This man is all vicious,
And I consider him my brother !

Vigorously faithful in their pairings are magpies ;
Boldly so are quails.
This woman is all vicious,
And I regard her as marchioness.

On an accuracy front, I think both are wrong: the quails are rushing/eloping (nothing about faithfulness or quarreling), and the magpies are vigorous/stubborn, no mentions of pairings anywhere, and also Legge has hallucinated a woman to be mad about when 君 is, uh, more along the lines of "ruler of a state" or "my husband".

On a language front, the Finnish is a nice poem where even the birds are angry about the speaker's brothers/lord being useless, while the English is like ... that's not even a poem lol. (I think the original contrast might be that even these random birds have virtues, unlike the brothers/lord.)

61 河廣

誰謂河廣、一葦杭之。
誰謂宋遠、跂予望之。

誰謂河廣、曾不容刀。
誰謂宋遠、曾不崇朝。

Nieminen:

Kuka sanoo, että joki on leveä?
Yhden ruo'on korren varassa voi sen ylittää.
Kuka sanoo, että Sung on kaukana?
Kun nousen varpailleni, voin nähdä sen.

Kuka sanoo, että joki on leveä?
Eihän siihen mahdu edes venettä!
Kka sanoo, että Sung on kaukana?
Eihän matka sinne kestä aamun vertaa!

Legge:

Who says that the He is wide?
With [a bundle of] reeds I can cross it.
Who says that Song is distant?
On tiptoe I can see it.

Who says that the He is wide?
It will not admit a little boat.
Who says that Song is distant?
It would not take a whole morning to reach it.

Again, the Finnish just works better, I think because Finnish poetic standards have more room for things like repetition (cf. Hyvä on hiihtäjän hiihdellä by Eino Leino, where every stanza starts with the same line), and for leaving out information/clipped sentences, and also isn't so heavily tied to rhyme as the English poetic tradition is. As a result, there is no need to unpack the original Chinese sentences into something much longer, and the repetition can be preserved easily without it feeling exotic/odd.

For further evidence, see the first stanza of 99 東方之日:
Nieminen:

Aurinko idän kulmalla;
sorea nuorukainen
on huoneessani,
on huoneessani,
hän astelee minua kohti!

Legge:

The sun is in the east,
And that lovely girl,
Is in my chamber.
She is in my chamber;
She treads in my footsteps, and comes to me.

Of course, Legge is fundamentally unimpressive in his poetry, but even if I try to make my own translation...

The Sun is in the East,
And that beautiful woman
is in my room,
is in my room,
and draws near me.

...it doesn't quite hit the same way, because English poetry does not have the same bedrock of "repetition is poetic" so the repetition ends up feeling very modernist/experimental/"this is a literal, non-poetic translation".

The volume of course does not translate all the Shi Jing, but of the ones translated, in addition to the above three, I liked:
93 出其東門 "Itäisen portin tuolla puolen"
114 蟋蟀 "Sirkka"
132 晨風 "Haukka, aamutuuli"
182 庭燎 "Pihalla palaa soihtu"
224 菀柳 "Tuuhea paju"


I might do some similar comparisons of the Tang poets and then, later on, other sections – I think there must be enough famous Ming poets that one of them has also been translated into English, and at the very least I can talk about Mao Zedong's stuff for the Republic/People's Republic section.

Comments

[kat_lair]

Fascinating! I don't speak/read any Chinese but the comparison was still super interesting. I use a lot of repetition (of form and phrase) in my poetry in both English and Finnish and it does read somewhat differently. Also, I wanted to ask in #99 does the original Chinese denote a gender of the person in the room? Because 'nuorukainen' to me reads masculine, I've never seen it used for a young woman, only young man...

[shipperslist]

Lol, we asked the exact same thing. 😁

[kat_lair]

Lol both like 'my subtext senses are tingling' *side-eyes the translator*

[extrapenguin]

Yep, it's 姝 "pretty woman" and I too am ?? at the choice of "nuorukainen", even accompanied by "sorea". And yeah, since the Chinese poems at this point are basically built around the repetition of form and phrase, how repetition is valued essentially makes or breaks the ability to translate faithfully.

[shipperslist]

Ohh interesting!

On stanza 99: the Finnish says "nuorukainen" and in English it's a female? Was the original word female? If yes, why wasn't it translated as "neitonen"? 🤔

[extrapenguin]

Yeah it's 姝 which has the female radical and is "pretty woman". No idea why Nieminen chose "nuorukainen". Mayyyybe it's a 50s/60s thing (the volume is an omnibus where the originals were published in 1960, 1963, 1966, and 1970), maybe he thought "sorea" would be enough to gender the person, idk.

[pikkugen]

In some commentary I think he said the poem's "me" was supposed to be a woman, and so translated it that way? I don't have the book(s) here right now, but I seem to remember something like that. (Glad you achieved the book, even with exorbitant postages, lol.)

[extrapenguin]

Based on some remarks at the end he seems to think most of the ancient stuff is women's songs? But here it's definitely about a woman, so either the speaker is a man or it's lesbians. :D

[shipperslist]

Ohhhhh.

Wow. I wish I was fluent in Chinese.

[maggie33]

I love reading about people's thoughts and feelings on translation. This subject is always fascinating to me. So this was a very interesting read for me, even though I don't know Finnish. :)

[extrapenguin]

Glad you enjoyed it! It really is fascinating how different languages can be even expressing the same thing.

[trobadora]

Thank you for sharing this! Even without knowing any Finnish this was interesting to read. Translation is always such a fascinating subject!

[extrapenguin]

You're welcome! It really is fascinating to see how language affects things.

[nnozomi]

This is so neat, thank you for posting! Fascinating to read the various versions and see, as you point out, what works and what doesn't. Oh dear, one day I will sit down and study Finnish. I wonder if part of the reason the Finnish works better is that you can encode more information in a single word, thanks to all those cases etc.? Please feel free to post more any time, I'll eat it up.
(Also "the He is wide" is driving me nuts. How is that not just "the river is wide"?)

[extrapenguin]

Yw! I think you would enjoy Finnish. Now you mention it, the fact that each word contains more information (talossa vs in the house) means it at least looks more compact, which is in keeping with the Chinese tradition of elegance, and also I think Finnish poetry has a longer tradition of sentence fragments, in addition to the repetition, than English poetry, plus Finnish as a language is much more tolerant of dropping pronouns and other stuff (vs having to have dummy pronouns), so there is less barrier to using the same structure as in the original and having it still sound poetic.

I'll definitely make a post on the Tang poets section, and probably also the Han through Sui section once I'm done with them. (I've been reading slowly, and decided to pencil in the pinyin, since like ... "Tso Ssu"? when all information on the person will be findable only with "Zuo Si".) I've been making notes on what poems have been easily available in English translation as I go, so uh that will also be a thing.

Also "the He is wide" is driving me nuts. How is that not just "the river is wide"?
I thiiiiink sometimes you can take 黄河 (Yellow River) and just use the 河 in compounds, but I just checked a map from the Western Zhou period and Song is nowhere near the Yellow River so idk. I guess Legge got confused?

[superborb]

This was really interesting!

[china_shop]

This is so cool! Thanks for the comparisons. :D