Two Sides of the Same Coin:How Creative Writings and Translations by a Poet-translator Affect Each Other
Will a poet-translator's creative writings and translations reciprocally affect each other,endowing both types of texts with some special attributes explainable only by her double identity?This is a question of obvious interest to studies of literary translation and yet remaining little explored so far.Making a fresh attempt to address the question,this paper looks closely into the works of a group of Chinese poet-translators who had all undertaken to render The Rubaiyat into Chinese,including Wen Yiduo,Sun Yutang and Kerson Huang.As a careful comparison,in terms of poetic narrative technique,form,theme and imagery,between their original poems and their translations of The Rubaiyat has demonstrated,an interactive and mutually enlightening relationship exists in most cases between the two genres of texts these poets-cum-translators produced.Their writings and translations tend to convey so strong a sense of unity and harmony as to suggest the two sides of the same coin.Since a poet-translator's authorship and translatorship are necessarily rooted in the same foundation of poetic or literary experiences,an act of writing or translating in this case would also produce some priming effects by activating the next output.
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