Representing the poetic styles of Hamlet in equivalent Chinese: Perng Ching-Hsi’s literary translation of Shakespeare

ABSTRACT

As a professor emeritus of the Department of English, National Taiwan University, Perng Ching-Hsi (1945-) has dedicated his lifetime to literary translation and Shakespeare Studies for more than half a century. His Chinese translations of Shakespeare’s plays are adopted by local Taiwan drama companies for their outstanding lingual performability on the stage for the audience of our times. The paper seeks to explore how Perng manages to render the various Shakespearean poetic styles of Hamlet into equivalent, readable and performable Chinese language. First, the investigation will focus on the way Perng resorts to sophisticated domestication strategy in translating the proper names of the play into corresponding Chinese character names, names that are in most cases highly revealing of the characters’ essential roles as well as dramatic functions in the play. Second, the research will probe into Perng’s special literary expressions in the Chinese language, a language that hallmarks formal and semantic fidelity to Shakespeare’s original rhetorics and poetics. Altogether, I argue that Perng Ching-Hsi’s Chinese translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet features a dual contextualization, with which he attempts not merely to represent the original poetic styles of the play, but also to incarnate the poetics of Chinese literary convention.

KEYWORDS:

• Hamlet
• Shakespeare
• poetic style
• Perng Ching-Hsi
• literary translation
• domestication

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Science and Technology Council MOST [111-2410-H-004-177].

Notes on contributors

Min-Hua Wu

Min-Hua Wu is Associate Professor at the Department of English, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. He served as Associate Vice President for the Office of International Cooperation, NCCU from Aug. 1, 2020 to Jul. 31, 2022. He completed his doctoral dissertation in English literature at Paris-Sorbonne University fully funded by a Taiwan government scholarship. Besides a Chinese-French translation prize awarded by the Council for Cultural Affairs, Taiwan, he is a three-time awardee for the National Taiwan University Chinese-English Literary Translation Awards and three-time awardee in English-Chinese translation contest for the Liang Shih-ch’iu Literary Awards. As the Co-author of Chang Pao Chun Chiu: Li Ao’s Landscape of Lettres (Ink Publishing, Taipei), he has published in The Wenshan Review, Concentric, Brontë Studies, The Emily Dickinson Journal, Review of English and American Literature, Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, East Journal of Translation, Chengchi University Press, and Modern Chinese Literature, amongst others. He has co-edited a special issue on “Lyrical Translation and the Translator’s Subjectivity” with Paula VARSANO, Chair and Professor of Chinese literature at UC Berkeley for The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture (2021). Currently, he is working on a monograph, Tang Poetry in Xu Yuanchong’s English and French Translations: A Comparative Study. As of August 1, 2023, he was serving as the Editor-in-Chief of The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture (ESCI, Scopus, MLA, THCI).