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Wang Feibai

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Nekrassov’s poem Who is Happy in Russia? is translated by Fei Bai.

Wang Feibai (1929- ), known as Fei Bai, was born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, and is revered in China as a translator of poetry and a scholar. He is the author of Oceans of Poetry: An Outline of World Poetry and Travelling on the Oceans of Poetry. He has translated foreign poems from a dozen languages, including English, Russian, French, German, Italian, Latin and Spanish. His poetry translations include Who is Happy in Russia?, Selected Poems of Mayakovsky, Collections of Poems from the Victorian Era, Selected Poems of Ancient Rome and others, totaling 20 works.

People often call Fei Bai the “sailor on the oceans of poetry.” Not only has he written two volumes of Oceans of Poetry: An Outline of World Poetry, totaling 1.35 million Chinese characters, and compiled 10 volumes of the Library of World Poetry but he has also spent 60 years in the world of poetry and overcome language obstacles to translate the poetry of different countries.
 

To Fei Bai, this nickname represents a life spent wandering as well as the intrinsic freedom of human nature and the soul. Fei Bai is a “free spirit in the world of poetry” and an “envoy” for cross-cultural communication. He is reluctant to omit any field of world poetry, and it is his lifelong ambition to be immersed in the oceans of poetry.

As a translator of poetry, Fei Bai first became renowned in literary circles in 1957. At that time, Fei Bai, serving in the military, translated Soviet poet Aleksandr Tvardovsky’s poem about World War II titled Vasili Tyorkin. His widely read translation was published by China Youth Publishing Group and recommended by the Central Communist Youth League of China to young readers across the nation.

His later translations of Tvardovsky’s poems and other works by Soviet poets had a great influence on the world of foreign literature. For most Chinese readers, the works of Tvardovsky, Mayakovsky, Nekrasov and other famous Soviet poets are synonymous with Fei Bai’s translations.

In the mid-1980s, Fei Bai translated and published Collections of Poems from the Victorian Era, which allowed common Chinese readers the first chance to access many works of great British poets, such as Tennyson and Browning. On this basis, Fei Bai further broadened his research field and shifted the focus of work to comprehensive and systematic translations of foreign poems.
 

After years of work, he completed two volumes of Oceans of Poetry and 10 volumes of the Library of World Poetry. Oceans of Poetry was independently completed by Fei Bai, and he was the first Chinese scholar to achieve a history of world poetry that links the past and present and connects various countries.

Fei Bai’s Oceans of Poetry and Library of World Poetry celebrate poems from around the world, and some poems are directly translated from minor languages, such as Danish and Greek. In addition to four major languages—English, Russian, French and German—Fei Bai can translate Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Ukrainian and Czech poems as well as ancient Latin. In the Library of World Poetry alone, there are translations of poems written in a dozen languages. The extent of his language ability has earned him the respect and admiration of professors of foreign language studies in China and abroad.
 

There are many obstacles when writing multilingual translations of poetry, but Fei has overcome each one. He thinks that translators should focus on conveying the style of the source material because word-for-word translations often fall short in this regard. The “conventional” translation method often pays little heed to literary style, and only puts emphasis on words and phrases.

By contrast, he advocates “stylized translations” and advises translators to do their best to reflect original poets’ personalized features. In order to improve the transparency of reflecting poetic style, translators should listen to poets’ voices and get into the spirit of poets to let their own standardized translations make way for poets’ non-standardized styles.
 

He examined foreign literary works from the perspective of native language and culture, proposing the “theory of cultural reflection.” How should foreign literature be translated and integrated into national literature?
 

Fei’s “theory of cultural reflection” utilizes a fairytale narrative method to demonstrate that translated literature is actually a reflection of native language. Native language is like a house surrounded by the walls of language barriers and the colored glass window of literary styles. So once foreign literature is translated (reflected) into the “house” of the native language, there is no way to avoid transformation and misunderstanding. The resulting problem of whether translated literature should be regarded as foreign literature deserves of consideration.

Fu Shouxiang is from East China University of Political Science and Law.