Translation of visual poetic spatiality

Abstract

Abstract Spatiality in literature has been explored in depth in recent years, but there are still few applications in literary translation studies. With space cognitively defined and the trichotomy of iconic signs adopted, we argue that the written text of a poem has its visual poetic spaces – the scene properties of linguistic signs (letters, character parts, words, lineation etc.) and relational reference of linguistic signs (distance, sequence etc.) – and that these poetic spaces are imagically and diagrammatically iconic. Our analysis of the English-Chinese and Chinese-English translation of poems’ iconic letters, lineation, distance, and sequence reveals that some translators have successfully reproduced the source text’s visual spatiality in the target text, but some have simply ignored or neglected the rendering; visual poetic spaces are semantically important and translatable, and the translation techniques involve direct reproduction and complementary renderings. We argue that, in addition to portraying the linguistic and cultural information found in poems, translators should pay more attention to visual poetic spatiality in their work in order to ensure an accurate portrayal of the original author’s work.