Critical and translational reception of Vasily Zhukovsky’s poetry in China: the 1980s
Authors:   National Research Tomsk State University, Wanying Wu , Poplavskaya Irina A. ,   National Research Tomsk State University
Published: December 2024

The relevance of the article is seen in the study of the particularity of Russian-Chinese intercultural and transcultural communication of the second half of the 20th century, in the comprehension of the most important trends in modern comparative literature related to the issues of translated literature, in the understanding of the national specifics of Russian literature, which receives its interpretation in Chinese literature. The aim of the article is to identify the features of the creative reception of Vasily Zhukovsky’s poetry by Chinese translators and researchers of the second half of the 20th century. The objectives of the article are: to study Chinese translations of Russian poetry of the first third of the 19th century in the formation and development of Russian-Chinese literary ties; to understand the distinctive features of the translation strategies of Chinese authors when translating Zhukovsky’s poems into Chinese; to compare Zhukovsky’s poems and their Chinese translations; to clarify the role of individual publications (readers, anthologies, collections of poems by Russian authors) in the formation of Russian-Chinese literary and cultural dialogue. The material for this publication was scientific articles by Chinese philologists Zhang Weimin, Lu Kun, Qin Dezhu about the features of the work of the “first Russian romantic” and the typology of Russian romanticism, published in the 1980s, and the collection Selected Poems of V.A. Zhukovsky (1985), translated by well-known Chinese translators Huang Chenglai and Jin Liuchun. The article employs cultural-historical, historical-literary, comparative and hermeneutical methods of analysis. Works on the
history and theory of translation by Yu.D. Levin, R.R. Tchaikovsky, E.L. Lysenkova, and others were used. The article consistently conducts a comparative analysis of individual fragments from Zhukovsky’s poems “Rural Cemetery”, “Evening”, “The Proximity of Spring”, “Sea”, the ballad “Svetlana” with their translations into Chinese. As a result of the analysis, it is concluded that, in the collection Selected Poems of V.A. Zhukovsky, Huang Chenglai and Jin Liuchun created an adequate translation of the poetic texts of the Russian romantic poet. The reasons why Chinese translators turned to the works of the “first Russian romantic” are connected with the desire to present a complete picture of the development of Russian romanticism in the person of Pushkin, Lermontov, Zhukovsky; the evolution of their figurative, motif, genre and style systems; the features of the transfer of psychologism in lyrics. When translating Zhukovsky’s poems into Chinese with its isolating pictographic type of writing, the use of the principle of mounting images and elements of Russian verse into a single whole through implicit connections, context, associations is observed. Chinese translators turn to individual emotional and psychological details when depicting the internal state of the characters and landscapes in Zhukovsky’s lyrics, achieving their greater concretization. When translating poems, key mythologems are used, which are significant for both Russian and Chinese cultures. These include dawn (morning and evening), moon (month), stars, water, seasons. In translation, there are often imagessymbols such as the sea, the road, the echo, detailed allegorical descriptions, emotional dialogues. All this allows us to say that the works of Zhukovsky as a representative of the psychological trend in Russian romanticism with its genre (elegy, ballad, meditative poem, patriotic song) and figurative system met the internal needs of the development of literature and literary criticism in China in the second half of the 20th century.