If there were a translation-difficulty barometer, translating pre-modern Chinese poetry into contemporary English would surely be a high-pressure system. Lü shi (律詩) or regulated, lyric poetry was developed during the late Six Dynasties period (220-589) and the early Tang dynasty (618-907). Its formal qualities are complex, but in basic terms, poems are eight lines long and have five or seven characters per line (thus five or seven syllables per line). There are rules in regard to end rhyme patterns—even-numbered lines must end with the same rhyme—as well as rules about internal tonal patterns and parallelism. Despite these difficulties, I’ve chosen to translate Zhu’s lü shi and jue ju (（絕句), or quatrains, rather than her ci, (詞), or song lyrics, although the latter are more commonly associated with the Song Dynasty and female poets and do not have the same structural imperatives. I made this choice based on the composition of her collection—it includes more than 300 shi and jue ju and only 33 ci—and because many of her ci have been translated, while her shi have not.
Although I’ve focused on sound and parallelism in my translations, I cannot reproduce tonal patterns (as English is not a tonal language), and I’ve also not focused on end rhyme. This is a controversial choice and not something I dismissed out of hand. Although I tried, I was not willing to sacrifice her images to rhyme. This is not to say that sound is not of central importance to my translations, only that end rhyme was not a sound I chose to stress. Instead I used slant rhymes, internal rhymes and alliteration.
In addition to formal constraints, two other major difficulties presented themselves in translating Zhu’s poems into English: syntactical difference and trope imagery. In my translations, in order to avoid pidgin English, I am forced to add pronouns and prepositions where the Chinese syntax allows for ambiguity. Additionally, pre-modern Chinese poets used trope imagery without fear of cliché or redundancy. (Hence all the blossoms and parasol trees in these poems.) This imagery was multi-purposed. It often referred to seasons and the emotions associated with them, or made intertextual reference to lines of earlier poets, an act that was considered an art in itself. Unfortunately, repeated imagery can sound hackneyed in contemporary English, in part because of different aesthetics, but also because we don’t have the cultural knowledge to interpret the objects as representations of various states of mind, times of year or as poetic references.
Despite—or perhaps because of—all this, I enjoy translating Zhu Shuzhen’s poems. I hope you enjoy reading them.