《草叶集》的访问的内容介绍

Walt Whitman Sings Anew, But Now With a Chinese Lilt

Copyright New York Times Company Feb 16, 1988

LEAD: Her desk is small, a table really, its grainy rosewood polished by her palms, the frayed bindings of dictionaries, the tissue-thin paper she fills with tiny ideograms.

Her desk is small, a table really, its grainy rosewood polished by her palms, the frayed bindings of dictionaries, the tissue-thin paper she fills with tiny ideograms.

For the last 10 years, Zhao Luorui has sat here, at this desk carved four centuries ago during the Ming dynasty, putting Walt Whitman's boisterous, individualist, prodigious ''Leaves of Grass'' into Chinese.

''Whitman,'' said this tiny woman, ''is the most American of the 19th-century poets.''

Last year, when she was 75, she retired as a professor of English at Beijing University, the only member of that department to hold a doctorate, which she earned at the University of Chicago. But the absence of formal teaching duties gave her that final burst of time to finish the major work of her life.

''Thirty-five years of my life were lost,'' Professor Zhao said, alluding to the political cataclysms that gripped China until 1978. ''I've poured everything into Whitman.''

Since the 1950's, China's Government, the Communist Party, has swerved violently in its approach to intellectuals, from periods of tolerance, to encouragement, to persecution and, later, even to imprisonment and murder. Thousands of intellectuals, many trained in the United States in the 1930's and 40's, were publicly reviled in the years after the Communists took power; some were sent to farms to shovel manure, or simply imprisoned for using their minds and trying to explain what they thought.

Professor Zhao suffered during those times as well, though now she prefers not to talk much about those years. She prefers to talk about Whitman, about poetry, about the life of the mind, life that has only recently begun to flourish again in this country.

''Actually, I didn't decide to do Whitman,'' she explained. ''Someone decided for me. There are two publishing companies in Shanghai and they have a committee which decides what should be translated and who should translate it. I got that assignment in 1962. Then suddenly there was a movement to criticize humanism. So I didn't start. When I was about to start again, the Cultural Revolution came in 1966, and I couldn't start. So I started 10 years ago.''

Her tiny three rooms, one side of a crumbling courtyard house in Beijing's center, are jammed with overflowing glass-fronted bookcases, crowded together so that passage from room to room demands nimbleness. Volumes of Faulkner, Melville, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, all in the embossed cloth bindings, now faded, common four and five decades ago, climb from floor to ceiling.

On other shelves, blue boxed sets of rare Chinese novels and histories rest under a patina of Beijing's ubiquitous dust. Blocky brocade boxes are piled about, each nestling a delicate 15th- or 16th-century lacquer box or, in one, a perfect, delicately struck bronze mirror from the Shang dynasty, nearly 4,000 years old. Tucked in corners, holding a fan here, a bag of oatmeal there, are piece after piece of Ming rosewood furniture, perhaps the greatest such collection in the capital. Furniture Is Returned

''During the Cultural Revolution all my furniture was taken away,'' she said. ''It was given back, bit by bit, after 1978.'' Professor Zhao turned the fragile pages of a yellowing copy of the 16th-century vernacular novel ''The Water Margin.'' The title page bore the six-character red seal of Jiang Qing, Mao's widow, who was imprisoned for her role in the Cultural Revolution.

''Yes,'' Professor Zhao said, ''our books were taken by Jiang Qing and others. They knew who had the best books. I've gotten many back now.''

''When I was assigned 'Leaves of Grass,' they expected me to do it in two or three years,'' said Professor Zhao, whose translation of T. S. Eliot's 'Waste Land' in the late 1930's caused a stir among Chinese intellectuals. ''I said I couldn't do it.''

''I began reading all the scholarly works on Whitman,'' she said. ''Then I read Whitman, both his prose and poetry. Then I began right from the beginning.''

Writers like James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon pose insurmountable problems for a Chinese translator, Professor Zhao said, and poetry is similarly difficult, its cadence and vernacular resisting the embrace of the foreign tongue.

''I try to imitate the style as well as the content,'' she said. ''My theory is that translators should be faithful to the original form as well as to its spirit.

But if you can't be faithful to both, you have to be faithful to the content. I'll sacrifice the form for the content.'' A Selfless Approach

But, she insisted, peering through her thick-lensed glasses intently, ''there are translators in China who are actually rewriting without the least stylistic faithfulness. I try to be as selfless as possible.''

''Whitman,'' she said, ''is American. He is not colloquial. Certainly he has the rhythm of the spoken language but it is not really colloquial. I try to follow that, the beauty of the spoken language. It's difficult to render idiomatic American style, but the thought is there.''

''There's always lines or phrases I don't get,'' she confessed. ''I write to my American friends. I tell them, I think it means this or that and they say yes or no. Very rarely I don't agree with them.'' And then, with a sigh, she continued: ''But you can't read any translation and say 'This is American.' You can't do that.'' Already, she has published an excerpt of her work, Whitman's ''Song of Myself,'' a long poem that is at the core of ''Leaves of Grass.'' Whitman began it so: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

In Chinese translation, and rendered in Pinyin rather than Professor Zhao's Chinese characters, those lines would sound like this: Wo zanmei wo ziji, gechang wo ziji, Wo chengdande ni ye jiang cheng dan, Yinwei shuyu wode meiyige yuanzi ye tongyang shuyu ni. Wo kunbu, hai yaoqingle wode ling hun, Wo fushen nin ran guanchazhe yibian xiaride caoji. 'I Try to Be Faithful'

''The individual means everything to Whitman,'' Professor Zhao said. ''The individual should have a chance for self-development. Whitman talks a lot about sex, you know. I'm not afraid, being an old woman. I try to be faithful. I don't underwrite.'' Beneath her desk, three boxes covered in navy blue fabric contain 1,000 flimsy sheets covered with tiny blue handwriting, the first complete Chinese translation of the Whitman opus. ''I've finished,'' she said. ''Now I'm revising. I'll hand it in this year, this spring. I've done the introduction. It's more popular than scholarly. For the first time, I'm trying to win an audience.''