November 5th, 2014
On the afternoon of November 5th, 2014, at the invitation of Institute of German Studies (IGS), Prof. GU Zhengxiang delivered a lecture titled “Chinese Scholar’s Researches on Friedrich Hölderlin”, which was presided over by Prof. FAN Jieping, the Director of IGS. Teachers and students of IGS attended the lecture.
Prof. GU is a famous Chinese-German scholar, a recipient of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, and also an alumnus of Zhejiang University. He used to teach in Hangzhou University and is now a professor in University of Tübingen. Prof. GU has made huge contribution to the translation of German poems into Chinese and to the cultural exchange between Germany and China. His compilation work includes An Annotated Bibliography of Chinese Poems in German Translation and An Annotated Bibliography of Goethe in Chinese Translation and Research, and his translations work includes Selected Poems of Hölderlin.
Prof. GU regards Hölderlin as a poet among philosophers and a philosopher among poets, who had some of the characteristics of classicism and romanticism but was mainly of a unique style. Hölderlin is not as famous as Goethe in China, but, in fact, his attainment in lyric poetry is greater than Goethe. With the wit and wisdom and the poet’s understanding of Grecian philosophy in it, Hölderlin’s poem can always leave readers endless aftertaste, lead them to read it time and time again and always give them new inspiration. Hölderlin’s poetry mainly has a content of five themes, that is, love, homesickness, mood, philosophy and his sense of responsibility.
When Prof. GU was still a student, research on Hölderlin was not a hot academic issue. In the belief that he should do something that nobody has ever done, Prof. GU made a great amount of groundwork for this. When it refers to China’s history of researching on Hölderlin and translating his works, Prof. GU regards WANG Guowei who is one of the masters of Chinese culture as the earliest founder and JI Xianlin as the hero during the period of Republic of China. But he thinks that the one who researched for the longest time and contributed most should be FENG Zhi, the eminent translator of German literature. When talking about translating Hölderlin’s works, Prof. GU said he not only values the scientific writing methods, e.g. citation and annotation, but also lays stress on the acquisition of the original text and the primary source. He thinks that many literature books on the market are of low quality and he has the responsibility of assessing the works for readers as a reference.
Prof. GU believed that a translator should choose a text that is most close to his temperament to translate. Only can a translator translate a poem poetically when he is fond of poetry. In that case, he can feel the poet when translating, instead of merely seeing a poem as a combination of words and trying hard to build a one-to-one correspondence between the source text and the target text. Prof. GU thinks that translating and researching should be at the same time, as translating is also a sort of making a research into the original text to some extent. He also recommends a translator to have a wider range of knowledge and have a solid foundation of both source language and target language. In the end, Prof. GU read two poems by Hölderlin, one was the well-known The Middle of Life, and the other one was The Wanderer , one of his contented ones.
(Translated by CAO Yifan)
