Translating across Cultures: Yi Jing and Understanding Chinese Poetry

Translating across cultures stands for a complicated and demanding process. In his well-known article “Chinese Poetry and the English Reader,” David Hawkes discussed the challenges of translating classical Chinese poetry into English, but he failed to examine a most distinctive feature of Chinese poetry, yi jing 意境. Commonly translated as “poetic world,” yi jing is as much a cultural and philosophical phenomenon as a poetic argument. It is most central to Chinese poetry and the failure to make a substitute for it in English translations hinders its proper understanding by learners of other cultural backgrounds. Using concrete examples, this article examines such failure on the part of the existing English translations and makes suggestions as to its remedy. A visual approach making use of paintings is advocated as a supplementary tool in the teaching of yi jing in the American classrooms.