Translated Weirdness

Sometimes, when you’re translating a text, you come across something that just doesn’t make sense. If your text is prosaic then you can usually assume the author meant something sensible, and you can hunt around for a rational way to interpret what you’re seeing.

That approach doesn’t work as well when you’re translating poetry, because things happen in poetry that don’t happen in prose. When you find something that doesn’t make normal sense in a poem, you need to figure out whether the poet intended it that way, or whether you’ve simply misunderstood the text. The work becomes even more difficult when you’re translating a translation of a poem by a clever writer like Jakdan, who sometimes inserts his own twists into the product.

Take, for example, Jakdan’s translation of the following line from Spending the Night at the Yamen of the Left Gate in Spring [春宿左省] by Dù Fǔ:

花隱掖垣暮，    gurung-ni fu-i ilha buruhun-i yamjiha,

It’s easy to see which words in Jakdan’s translation equate to which words in the original, but less easy to see how he intends his translation to be understood.

The simplest way to parse the line is as follows:

gurung-ni fu-i ilha, noun-phrase, subject of the sentence, “the flowers on the outside walls of the palace”

buruhun-i, noun marked with the genitive/instrumental case,  adverbial phrase, “dimly, in a shadowy way”

yamjiha, perfect tense, finite verb, “it [the sun] set”

Unfortunately, this simplest way of parsing the sentence gives us a weird line that is difficult to square with the original:

“The flowers on the outside walls of the palace dimly set.”

There’s a certain beauty to the nonsensical idea of flowers setting, but Dù Fǔ can’t possible have meant “the flowers on the outside walls” in the original because the character 隱 (buruhun, dim) is interposed between the flowers 花 (ilha) and the outside wall 掖垣 (gurung-ni fu).

Another way to parse Jakdan’s line is to take ilha buruhun as a coordinate noun-phrase, “flowers and shadows.” This works better with the original because Dù Fǔ put the two corresponding characters together. If we set aside the palace walls for a moment, and let the genitive/instrumental -i at the end of ilha buruhun-i create an adverbial phrase, then the remainder of the line can be read as:

“Dusk fell in a flowery, shadowy way.”

Again, that’s pretty, but then what do we do about the palace walls, which also carry the genitive/instrumental case marker? It seems awkward and clumsy to suggest that the sun sets in a manner like the palace walls, or by means of the palace walls.

It would be better if we could read the case-marker -i on gurung-ni fu-i as marking an object behind which the sun sets. Semantically that isn’t as big of a stretch as it may seem, because we’re essentially saying that the sun makes evening by means of the thing it sets behind. That gives us:

“It [the sun] set behind the outside walls of the palace, bringing dusk in a flowery, shadowy way”

Or, to put it more concisely:

“Dusk fell flowery and shadowy within the palace walls”