A Study Of Translation And Dissemination Of The Poems Ascribed To Tsangsyangs Gyatso

Tsangsyangs Tshomo Gyatso(1683-1706/1746), historically known as the sixth Dalai Lama of Tibetan Buddhism, is regarded as one of the most outstanding lyrists once appearing in the Tibetan history of literature, who authored many poems of high artistic value. These so-called love songs, famous and referred to as Tsangsyangs Gyatso Poems, which represent the highest achievement in composition of Tibetan "gzhas" songs, have enjoyed great popularity among the Tibetan people for three centuries. In1930, Yu Dao-quan, a famous Chinese Tibetologist, translated66pieces of Tsangsyangs Gyatso Poems from Tibetan into Chinese and English, marking the starting point of translation and dissemination of those lyric gems in China and abroad. It is like two branches diverging from the trunk of a river, giving rise to different alluvial plains each with a landscape of its own.By the end of2012, four score and two years have passed since Tsangsyangs Gyatso Poems began its intercultural travel. These poems, which have aroused increasing attention from translators, have been rendered into numerous translated versions, including those Chinese ones in21books and English ones in15(according to incomplete statistics), gaining some international reputation. The first decade of the21st century witnessed the surge of a Tsangsyangs Gyatso fever in the Han-language culture dominant regions, boosting the flourishing development of Tsangsyangs Gyatso-themed movie and play making, publishing, culture and arts undertakings, and tourist industry, etc., canonizing him as a classical lyrist of China.The present study, taking the Chinese and English translations of Tsangsyangs Gyatso Poems as object of study, analyzes systematically the corpus of these translations and their dissemination in China and abroad, with emphasis on research regarding their translation routes; the derivation and reference relations between different translated versions; external factors exerting influence on their translation production such as ideology, poetics, patronage, and the development of Tibetan Studies at home and abroad; the spread, influence, reception in the Han culture and English culture; the characteristics of major translations and some related literary translation questions, as well as the comparative study between translations into Chinese and renditions into English of Tibetan poems in some linguistic aspects and metric schemes, on the basis of which more efforts are made to probe into some theoretical questions with regard to the poem translation phenomena involving re-translation, academic research-oriented translation, creation-oriented translation, etc., where the set theory is applied to analyzing the complicated relationship between poem translation and poem creation.This research shows that the disseminations of Tsangsyangs Gyatso Poems inside and out of China present different routes with different characteristics. Their translation into Chinese reflects the features of different historical stages of China’s social development, while that into English is associated to a great extent with the ecological landscape of Tibetan Studies abroad. All their existing translations can be divided into two major categories in terms of the dominant translating strategy, that is, academic research-oriented translation and creation-oriented translation, the former of which is favored by Tibetologist translators, and the latter, by poet translators. Given the fact that it is almost impossible to reach faithfulness and elegance completely in the same translation in literary translation in general and in poem translation in particular, creative translation and academic translation as two strategies can co-exist in different translations, supporting and supplementing each other to constitute an increasing full and complete interpretation of the source poems.The comparative analysis of Chinese re-translations and English re-translations of Tsangsyangs Gyatso Poems reveals some problems currently troubling these translation fields. As far as the Chinese translations are concerned, many translations’ lack in characteristics compared with their previous versions, some translators’ inadequate consciousness of copyrights, incompetence due to weak preparations for translating, especially ignorance in the Tibetan language acquiring, and little critical efforts are shown. By contrast, translations into English are characterized by more expertise, more based on achievements in Tibetan Studies abroad. Most of them are translated directly from the Tibetan texts. Even those rendered indirectly display distinctive characteristics. By comparing Tibetan, Chinese, and English in such linguistic aspects as syllable and intonation and their respective features of such poetic aspects as rhyming scheme, rhythm, and form, it is found that there are more linguistic and poetic similarities between the Chinese poems and their Tibetan counterparts than those between the English ones and the Tibetan ones. Though the rhyming, rhythm, phonetics of the original poems are regarded as basically untranslatable, those more similarities between the Chinese and Tibetan texts bring about closer formal resemblance between the two sides, and meanwhile make it naturally easier to meet the requirement of poetic norms, much facilitating reception of readers on one side to texts on the other in new contexts.This study takes the lead in introducing the set theory into translation studies, giving it a broader application, and tries to set up a theoretical perspective into explaining the phenomena of the Chinese and English translations of Tsangsyangs Gyatso Poems and even the universal phenomena of translation. Synchronically, from strict academic research-oriented translations to extreme creation-oriented translations, the dividing line between translation and creation becomes less visible, with the target text as inter-textual text of the source text shifting to as far derived text. As a matter of fact, word-for-word translations, academic research-oriented translations, creation-oriented translations and critical-point translations constitute a continuum ranging from one end to the other, assuming the gradient relationship between them. In the large space between the two ends of the continuum ranging from the strict word-for-word translation at one end and the critical-point translation at the other exist translations, which are academic research-oriented translations and creation-oriented translations, blending the two in varying degrees, representing two kinds of poem translation strategies. This dissertation in its conclusion points out that the word-for-word translation and academic research-oriented translation are marked by monotonousness, the creation-oriented translation and the critical-point translation by richness, of which the last two are more compatible with the spiritual temperament and cultural inclination of the post-modern society aiming at activating infinite possibilities at the critical point of survival and languages.