Artistic features of poetic translations of I. A. Krylov's fables in China (on the example of the fable "Dragonfly and Ant")

Pei Tszyan ORCID: 0000-0002-6100-2718 Postgraduate student, Department of History of Russian Literature, Faculty of Philology, Lomonosov Moscow State University 119991, Russia, Moskovskaya oblast, g. Moscow, ul. Gsp-1, leninskie gory, 1, str. 51 pj725913.zyh@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

The fables of I.A. Krylov are well known to the Chinese. According to current data, there are more than 30 complete collections of his fables in China alone, not to mention individual translations of Krylov's fables. The first translations of Krylov's fables in China were made in 1899-1900 thanks to the preacher of the American Methodist Church Lin Lezhi (Young John Allen, 1836-1907) and his Chinese assistant Ren Tingxu, published in the Shanghai newspaper "International Review". So in China they were the first to translate Krylov's fables, namely "Dog Friendship", "Pike" and "Fox and Marmot", which is still considered the beginning of the translation of Russian literature in China ^{[13, p. 90]}.

Then after them, from 1900 to 1983. According to our calculations, few translators devoted their efforts to translating Krylov's fables. There were only four of them: Li Bingzhi, Meng Hai, Wu Yan and Chen Chifong. The first verse translation belongs to Li Bingzhi. In 1925, he published the first poetic translation of Krylov's fable "Oak and Cane" in China in the publishing house of the Shanghai Library "Yadong". The 1950s were a small peak in the history of the translation of Krylov's fables. In 1951 and 1953, Meng Hai (1916-1980) twice published a collection of prose translations of Krylov's fables by the Epoch publishing house, including 20 fables published in 1951, and 84 fables in 1953. Then the first translator of the complete collection of Krylov's fables, Wu Yan (1918-2010), who reprinted his translations the most (20 reprints in total), in 1954, the publishing house "New Literature and Art" published prose translations of nine books of Krylov's fables, and three more separate fables ("Guests at the Wrong Time", "The Lion and the Man", "Feast"). A year later, in 1955, Chen Qifeng released a collection of Krylov's poetic fables, which included only 8 Krylov's fables ("Casket", "Pike", "Mirror and Monkey", "Pig under an Oak Tree", "Monkey and Glasses", "Donkey", "Frog and Ox" and "Wolf and the Cat") ^{[13, pp. 91-92]}.

Later, the translation of Krylov's fables subsided for more than ten years, and only in the 1980s began to recover. The first thing that catches your eye is the translation work of Xin Jun, who in 1981 published a book of bilingualism, which contains 45 poetic translations of the fable with the Russian original. In 1983, with the appearance of two remarkable translations: "The Donkey and the Nightingale" (166 fables), translated by Gu Yu and "Collection of Poetic Fables by I.A. Krylov" (203 fables), translated by He Shiin, Chinese translators of Krylov's fables began to divide into two camps, namely those engaged in translations in prose or in verse ^{[13, pp. 92-93]}. In addition, thanks to the research of scientists and translators, people realized that, unlike ancient Chinese fables, fables exist not only prose, but also poetic, which also have high artistic value. Therefore, now most Chinese translators prefer to translate Krylov's fables in verse, as in the original.

I must say that "The Dragonfly and the Ant" is one of the most popular Krylov fables in China, and one of the earliest Krylov fables (Meng Hai, 1951) translated into Chinese. In addition, most of Krylov's fables were written by iambic, she is one of the few fables written in four-stop chorus.

In Russia, interpretations of this fable are ambiguous. A. S. Pushkin assessed Krylov as "a representative of the spirit of the Russian people", whose fables have such features as cheerful cunning of mind, mockery and a picturesque way of expressing themselves [12. p. 1962]. But the Russian poet of the Silver Age, novelist, journalist Sasha Cherny (real name Alexander Mikhailovich Glikberg) hated the ant Krylov: "... The ant, in my opinion, is a ruthless brute" [14. p. 363]. Soviet and Russian philologist, culturologist Sergey Sergeyevich Averintsev in the article "The Lafontaine paradigm and the Russian dispute about the fable: Vyazemsky versus Krylov" proved that when recreating the fable "The Dragonfly and the Ant" Krylov overcomes not only La Fontaine's rationalism, but also the rational logic of universal cultural development, adding detailed descriptions ^{[1, pp. 208-213]}. Modern literary critic Elena Ivanovna Annenkova believed that in the fable "The Dragonfly and the Ant" the heroine, despite her laziness, is very charming, but the hardworking Ant is too pedantic ^{[2, p. 9]}.

And how the Chinese translators understood the fable "The Dragonfly and the Ant", you can probably find out from their translations. Of course, the translator is not a poet, and there are not so many places for personal creativity in translation, but we can still find hints from a few words and sentences. As an example, I can cite translations of the first verses of this fable "The Dragonfly Hopping / The red Summer sang" ^{[6, p. 32]}: Mei Hai translated as "On clear summer days, the dragonfly only sings and plays all the time" ^{[7, p. 32]}, Wu Yan added the adverbial "wandering" based on the translation of Meng Hai before the "dragonfly" ^{[8, p. 61]}. It is clear that under the influence of the motto "Glory to the Heroes of Labor" in the 1950s in China, translators accepted the lazy dragonfly as a negative character. And in the subsequent translations of Gu Yu and He Shiin, a more accurate and objective assessment of the dragonfly is felt. In Gu Yu's translation, "The Flying Dragonfly sang a beautiful summer" ^{[9, p. 53]}, the dragonfly acquired a neutral character trait. And in the translation of He Shiin – "A dragonfly capable of singing and dancing, sang and danced all summer", the translator to some extent recognized the artistic talent of the dragonfly ^{[11, p. 75]}. This is also a modern trend of Chinese translation literature, that is, the accuracy of translations has come to the fore.

In fact, since the 1980s, after the implementation of the policy of reforms and openness, more and more foreign works of art and specialists engaged in the translation and study of foreign literature have appeared in China. And our translators not only worked hard on the accuracy and objectivity of their translations, but also tried to restore the form of the original, including the poetic form of Krylov's fables.

It is worth mentioning 3 good translations, two of which are taken from the above-mentioned two poetic translations of Krylov's fables "The Ass and the Nightingale" (Gu Yu, 1983) and "Collection of poetic Fables by I.A. Krylov" (He Shiin, 1983). They belong to the translations of the rhythmic school, that is, they contain the baihua letter (modern colloquial literary Chinese), but there are pauses, rhythm, rhyme, stanza; and the third book is "The Complete Collection of I.A. Krylov's Fables" (Zhu Xiansheng, Qiu Jingjuan, 2015), which is a more free translation. It lacks strict requirements for versification; it is structurally close to the Russian verlieb, or more precisely, white verse. But all these translators adhere to the same principle of translation, that is, poems need to be translated into verses.

To achieve this goal, the translator needs to master the system of Chinese versification, which is very different from the Russian version. From the point of view of the genre, ancient Chinese poems can be divided into two groups: "Gutishi" and "Jintishi". Gutishi mainly refers to poems before the Tang Dynasty (618-907), including "Gushi", "Chuqi", "Yuefu", etc., in which the Wenyan script (the system of which only educated people used in China before, unlike baihua), rhymes are relatively free. "Jintishi" refers to Chinese poems after the Tang Dynasty before 1919, that is, the statutory verses of "Liushi" and the quatrains of "Jueju" with the regulation of the sequence of tones, in which there are strict requirements for rhyme, tones of hieroglyphs, sentence structure, etc. ^{[3, pp. 3-17]}. Then the Movement for a new culture "May 4" in 1919 brought us two new types of poems, in the first "Ziyushi" letter – Baihua, namely Chinese free verse, similar to the Western verlieb, emphasizing the natural expression of emotions, and the second type – "Sanwenshi" – prose poems that combine elements of poetry and prose.

Well, that's where the question arises: what form of Chinese poems should a translator use when translating Krylov's fables? He Shiying and Gu Yu took the form of "Liushi", while the third translator Zhu Xiansheng took the form of "Ziyushi". Both He Shiying and Gu Yu paid more attention to the Sinification of Krylov's fables, while Zhu Xiansheng paid more attention to the principle of modernity of the translated language.

The next question is how translators do with stress, stop, rhyme in the original Russian, etc. In general, according to their translations, at least three approaches were found: to show unstressed and stressed syllables with the help of Chinese even ("Pin") and broken tones ("Tse"), to show stops with the help of "small pauses" and to show rhymes in each line of verses with the Chinese syllabic vowel "Yunmu".

Firstly, the display of unstressed and stressed syllables using even and broken tones. In Russian there are stressed and unstressed syllables, but in Chinese one hieroglyph corresponds to one syllable, in most cases — and one word, i.e. each hieroglyph (syllable) carries meaning and has stress. However, Chinese differs from Russian in tonality: previously it had four tones (even, incoming, ascending, descending), and now the tones have changed, the first two tones are considered as even tones ("Pin"), and the third and fourth tones as broken tones ("Tse"), for example, a. According to the translators, the principle of alternating even and broken tones, as well as the Russian principle of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables that form the foot, are based on the specifics of languages ^{[15, p. 145]}. Therefore, translators used this similarity to solve the stress problem, that is, smooth tones represent unstressed syllables, and broken tones represent stressed syllables.

Gu Yu and He Shiying paid special attention to this aspect. The most typical examples are: in the third sentence of He Shiin's translation "zhi zi guo de liu shui ban su" (I didn't have time to look back) ^{[9, p. 53]}, according to the principle of even (P) and broken (L) tones, this means: LRRRRRL. And in Gu Yu's translation "dou yu fan zhuo ke and ju tsan, dou yu chuan pu ke gong shui mian" (Both the table and the house were ready) ^{[11, p. 75]}, according to the same principle, the poems rhyme like this: RLLRLLLLR, RLLRLLLLR. In particular, in the second example, there is only one sentence in the original text, and the translator used the "cross-line" technique when translating to meet the requirements of Chinese verses, which usually have clear lines. Unfortunately, neither He Shiying's translation nor Gu Yu's translation fully corresponds to the original fable in terms of emphasis. It is quite possible that, faced with the problems of deprivation of meaning and deprivation of form, translators sacrificed form.

Secondly, the display of stops using a "small pause". Unlike the Russian language, pronunciation and writing of the Chinese language are separate systems. Since there is no concept of "stop" in Chinese, the translators put forward a concept, namely, "replace the stop with a pause" to show the stop of the original text with a pause in the flow of speech. According to this principle, the pause after the syntagma in a Chinese poem should correspond to the foot created by a certain number of syllables of the Russian original. The pause here is done in order to distinguish semantics, not to emphasize semantics. Despite the incomplete transmission of the beauty of the syllabic-tonic poem, however, this is already a compromise method that the translators could find.

GU Yu did it strictly in his translation: “yizhi faili of pacyga Tintin , / cengage of Doguola of mahada сятянь, / Bogota huivi of sonunda шигуан/ janjagran of Duncan of Ilayda мяньцянь” (Grasshopper Dragonfly / Summer red sang; / no time to Look back, As winter rolls eyes) ^{[9, p. 53]}. The same sentence in Hae Shiin 's translation sounds like this: “Tintin guangyangcheng of Nanga sanju , / danguole of the UIS of tomanila саньфу / jizz of Goode luchaban су/ juanan of chanllenge of Duncan ичжи” ^{[11, p. 75]}. When reading these poems, perhaps pauses are made most often between lines or sentences, but here small pauses in Chinese poems can compensate for the lack of an equivalent of a foot in translation.

Thirdly, the display of rhymes with the Chinese syllabic vowel sound "Yunmu". We know that in Russian poems there are cross, adjacent, ring rhymes, etc. Chinese poems also rhyme. Only we are familiar with idle rhyming, in which the first and third lines do not rhyme, each line does not necessarily rhyme at all. The ancient statutory Chinese poems "Geluishi" required one rhyme for all poems, however, in long poems, two rhymes can exist (usually they alternated); in modern Chinese poems, one or several rhymes can be used ^{[4, p. 257]}. Chinese syllabic vowel sounds "Yunmu" are similar to the vowels of the Russian language, only Chinese "Yunmu" can consist of 1, 2 or 3 letters.

Thus, when translating Krylov's fables, the translators also noticed this. Rhymes of the original text: AAAA bbcc deee daad dddf fdfg gfha fh. Gu Yu's translation rhymes as follows: ting (ing), tian (an), guang (ang), qian (an), xiang (ang), jian (an), mian (an), can (an), mian (an), shi (i), han (an), ge(e), yan (an), kan (an), bian (an), guan (an), lian (an), qian (an), chi (i), nuan (an), tao (ao), xian (an), gan (an), fu (u), ruan (an), jian (an), xuan (an), ju (u), tian (an), a (a), an (an), rhymes are: abcb cbbb bdbe bbbb bbdb fbbg bbbg bhb ^{[9, pp. 53-54]}. The translation is just one line longer than the original text. Here we can easily notice that the translator worked hard on the rhyme so that the translation corresponded to the characteristics of metrical verses. At the same time, it is also felt that the rhyme of the translation seems to differ greatly from the original text. This is due to the Chinese tradition of versification – that is, one rhyme to the end. The translation of another translator, He Shiying, also follows this tradition. Its variant rhymes as follows: wu (u), su (u), zhi (i), bi (i), qu (u), lu (u), ge (e), le (e), shuo (o), wo (o), guo (o), he(o), huo (o), shuo (o), zuo (o), ta (o), le (e), which are: aabb aacc dddd dddd e ^{[11, pp. 75-76]}. There are only 17 lines in this translation, which is very far from the 30 lines in the original.

However, it should be noted that all of the above two options relate to the translation of the rhythmic school. The third translation mentioned earlier does not apply to him. Translators Zhu Xiansheng and his assistant Qiu Jingjuan made great efforts to restore the meaning and morality of the fable, so there is no strict rhyme in this translation. In it, the animals are a dragonfly and an ant, as modern people say, it seems to be specially done for modern Chinese readers. For example, translators used such phraseological units as "" (bright days), "" (everything has passed), "" (evil longing), which are often used in modern Chinese free verse or prose poems. However, this translation is very popular among Chinese readers, especially among young readers. It is clear that ordinary readers appreciate modernity and ease of translation.

The famous Chinese Russian scholar, writer and translator Liu Wenfei noted that the most popular translation, most often, is the one that is farthest from the original text. However, Mr. Wen Yiduo, the great Chinese revolutionary, poet and writer, also believed that writing poetry means "dancing in shackles", "poems without rhyme are not poems" ^{[4, p. 263]}. Probably the translation is the same. Perhaps Krylov's fables are untranslatable. But Vyazemsky correctly said, "Krylov is a completely separate phenomenon. He did not continue anything and did not conceive anything. He is no one's successor and no one's ancestor" ^{[5, p. 164]}. That's why Krylov's poems and fables have always retained their vitality. We have every reason to believe that in the future more and more translators will devote themselves to work on the translation of Krylov's immortal poetic fables.