Проблемы литератур Дальнего Востока. Часть 1

Новые вопросы изучения классической китайской литературы... Issues of Far Eastern Literatures. Vol. 1. 2018 259 either with background in sinology or at least with solid Chinese general education. I realized that things seemingly trivial for generally educated Chinese audience are not suitable for same wide audience in Russia due to difference in cultural background. Strictly speaking, common reader fromRussia would hardly ever read my translation. Does it mean that seven lectures about ci do not have their readership anywhere outside Chinese cultural domain? Since these lectures in the book are just records of Ye Jiaying`s words, she talks about poetry and its cultural background in a very plain way with use of everyday language, and this point suddenly turns out to be of big help to a translator. Everyone who ever read academic books by Chinese scholars knows about a tendency to just quote in classical Chinese without explaining or expanding on this quote. In her lectures Ye Jiying spends much time to explain meaning of poems word by word by translating them into modern putonghua . These explanations, even though verbose and repetitive at times, also help foreign reader better understand poetical lines from ci and shi poems. Finally, some observations on translation from modern Chinese into Russian. As was mentioned before, I clearly realized that a book I`m translating aims to popularize classical literature to wide masses in China. It is clearly not an academic study with strict structure, footnotes and quotes. Actually, each lecture did have footnote-like insertions, they were either explanations of some names and notions mentioned byYe Jiaying in her lecture, or larger portions of poems that she used, all of themwere turned into footnotes in the translated version and put at the end of each chapter. Certainly, translating numerous poems was the main challenge for me, I chose to make their subscript translation keeping most possible proximity to the original and sacrificing meter and melody. I would translate lines from classical Chinese into modern Russian. In her lectures Ye Jiaying conducts word by word explanation of lines in wenyan by using modern Chinese. Such explanations maintain the central part of her lectures. One can imagine that this procedure would seem superfluous for the translated text, nevertheless, this explanation of modern Russian words by means of other modern Russianwords was included into the book. Luckily, certain part of the poems mentioned byYe Jiaying have been previously translated into Russian and published, my job was to find and quote these translations. Needless to say, that authoritative translations (e.g. Qu Yuan`s poetry translated by Anna Akhmatova) in many cases are not strictly following the Chinese original, many details are omitted, while Ye Jiaying`s lecture does explain the original word by word. In such cases I had to give my own word by word Russian translation together with the older published one. Many notions, names and facts unknown to Russian readers required footnotes, which brought Ye Jiaying`s popularizing lectures closer to the form of academic book. It would still seem too trivial to experts on Chinese poetry, but may serve as helpful introductory material for university students. Translation of Wang Guowei`s work from classical Chinese was another challenge. When having difficulties to understand classical Chinese, I would consult its English translation by A. A.Ricket and translation into modern Chinese