Commemorating the Bard’s sonnets
Print Edition
THE commemorative edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets with only 400 copies release this April is the latest salute from China to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death.
Published by Shanghai People’s Publishing House, this edition features thread binding and vertical text, with Shakespeare’s profile pictures and roses woven into the book’s silk cover.
The book uses the translations from poet and translator Tu An, who is also the first to translate all of Shakespeare’s sonnets into Chinese in 1950.
Shakespeare might be in popular demand now, but when Tu started the translations in the 1950s, he struggled to get access to the original works.
Through a phone interview, the now 93-year-old translator told Shanghai Daily how he got a hold of his first Shakespeare sonnets when he was still an undergraduate of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1943.
The book was an edition annotated by Charlotte Carmichael Stopes from a London publishing house.
“But it was so expensive that I couldn’t afford it. So I went to that store almost every day to read a few pages,” Tu said.
It took the young student all his courage to ask the bookstore owner if he could borrow the book for a week.
To Tu’s surprise, the bookstore owner gave him the book as a gift.
“He told me that it’s a book’s fortune to be in the hands of a book lover,” Tu said. The two became friends.
The bookstore owner, Wang Maigan, later became a printmaking artist. When the two met years later, Tu gave Wang the latest publication of the Shakespeare sonnets he had translated into Mandarin as a gift.
It was all thanks to this first book that he was able to further study the sonnets, which helped him with the translation.
Over the past six decades, Tu never stopped translating the sonnets. So far Tu’s translation of Shakespear’s Sonnets has been published by several publishing houses with more than 600,000 copies printed. For each edition, he would carefully edit the previous translation after studying the latest translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets from China and overseas.
In addition to a special preface for the anniversary edition released this month, Tu told Shanghai Daily he also made several changes compared to translation of the previous editions.
Sonnet 18, one of his favorite, is just one example: For the line “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” he used “夏日” to translate the “a summer’s day”. In the new version, however, Tu uses “夏季的一天.”
“The difference is subtle in Chinese, but the new translation emphasizes the idea of the day,” he said.
Tu has devoted all his translation manuscripts to Shanghai Library, which has helped with the commemorative edition.
After decades of translating the sonnets, Tu said that his two favorites are 18 and 29.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
