Initial or Final: The Placement of Prepositional Phrases in English-Chinese Translation
The three poems engage with a plurality of physical/mental phases of fever. Norman Dubie’s “Fever” presents a spatio-temporally nonlinear conversation that meanders between conscious and unconscious realms, during which the husband, also the speaker of the poem, is taking care of his wife, who is experiencing a fever and its concomitant delirious ravings. Sandy Longhorn’s two persona poems, “Left a Refugee in a Sterile Country” and “I Have Gone Shimmering into Ungentle Sleep,” center on the sickly speaker, who is a fictional character rather than an autobiographical voice of the poet herself. Fever serves as a common motif for the three pieces, and yet the intersubjective hallucinations are intertwined with the imagined realities, exerting emotional undercurrents in varied directions. The fever in Dubie’s poem acts as a catalyst elevating the telepathic warmth and affinity between husband and wife while in Longhorn’s poems, it deepens the spiritual coldness and unrest that keep haunting the helpless daughter left alone in a hospital by her mother.
The syntactical rearrangement of the verb and its accompanying prepositional phrase (PP) frequently recurred in my translation process. In modern English, it is a ubiquitous word order in which the verb of a sentence appears before the modifying or complementing PP. Take Norman Dubie’s “Fever” for example. In the second stanza, the fifth line and the sixth line read, “Their rough teats caked/ With the white mud.” The verb “caked” precedes the PP “with the white mud.” In Mandarin Chinese, the verb almost always comes after the PP. I rendered the above-mentioned two lines as “它们粗糙的奶头与白泥凝固在一起,” in which the PP “与白泥 (with the white mud)” is placed prior to the verb “凝固 (caked).” Another way to translate these two lines could be a complete inversion in which the PP becomes the fifth line while the subject and the verb constitute the sixth line: 与白泥一起 (With the white mud)/ 它们粗糙的奶头凝固了 (Their rough teats caked). Semantically, the two translations correspond with each other; syntactically, the first one re-settles the PP between the subject and the verb while the second one, without changing the position of any specific part, moves the PP directly to the front of the subject and the verb. I prefer the first treatment because it preserves mostly what is highlighted in the original visual dynamics– the noun “teats” and the verb “caked.” The second treatment, very much like the movement from “We trust in God.” to “In God we trust.,” is undesired because emphasizing the “white mud” in the first place dilutes the direct impact of the “caking teats” imagery, which is supposed to be the primary focus of the original sentence.
In the same vein, the phrase in Stanza 4 Line 5, “falling from sky,” is translated into a Chinese collocation–“从天而降,” in which the verb “降 (fall)” is moved to the end while the PP is moved to the front of the idiom. The Chinese conjunction “而” links together the head verb “降 (fall)” and the adverbial phrase “从天 (from sky)” to show the action and the form of the action. The phrase in Stanza 6 Line 2, “climbing out of the mud,” is translated as “从泥潭中往外爬,” in which the verb “爬 (climb)” likewise succeeds its modifying PP “从泥潭中往外 (out of the mud).” The sentence in Stanza 3 Line 1, “I bathed you with a sponge,” is translated as “我用海绵给你沐浴.” It is worth noting that not only the PP “用海绵 (with a sponge),” but also the object “你 (you),” is placed before the verb “沐浴 (bathed)” in the translated line. The original Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) construction in English hence shifts into a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) construction in Mandarin Chinese. This movement is made grammatically correct by adding an extra preposition “给” immediately before the object “你 (you).” This preposition does not exist in the original line; it belongs to a widely used Mandarin Chinese sentence structure “Subject + 给 + Object + Verb,” in which it indicates the target of the verb.
This is not to suggest that this type of reverse placement is the only appropriate solution to translating a “V+PP” structure from modern English into Mandarin Chinese. “Falling from sky” could otherwise be translated as “降自云端,” and “climbing out of the mud” could be rendered as “爬出泥潭,” in which the syntax of the translated phrases remains the same as that of the originals. The two alternatives retain the word order but redirect the focus from the verbs (降; 爬) to the nouns (云端; 泥潭). They also sound too formal in a way that compromises the conversational and outspoken tone of the original stanzas. Comparatively, in most cases, the reverse approach does alter the word order and sometimes the line breaks, but it evokes more idiomatic cognitive sensibilities in the target text. In a Mandarin Chinese sentence that starts with the subject, placing a PP before the head verb exhibits a natural flow and fluency. In modern English, it usually would take an emphatic structure (e.g. It is…that…) or a parenthetical structure (e.g. I, with a sponge, bathed you.) to achieve the same outcome. The syntactic alterations of the reverse approach are therefore aimed to preserve the original emphases and poetic effects/affects according to the cognitive inclination that modern English readers are used to anticipating the core messages of a sentence in the beginning few words while Mandarin Chinese readers would habitually look for them near the end.
This reverse approach also applies to translating “N+PP” structure. Such examples abound in Sandy Longhorn’s poem, “I Have Gone Shimmering into Ungentle Sleep.” I translate the noun phrase (NP) in Stanza 1 Line 2, “scarlet + on my cheeks,” as “我脸颊上 + 猩红 (on my cheeks + scarlet),” in which the noun “scarlet (猩红)” switches positions with the PP “on my cheeks (我脸颊上).” The reverse placement alone would not be sufficient to create a grammatically correct “N+PP” structure in Mandarin Chinese. A structural particle “的” is thus inserted to connect the modifier “on my cheeks (我脸颊上)” and the modified “scarlet (猩红)” so that the complete phrase becomes “我脸颊上的猩红.”
The same is true for the “N+Restrictive Clause” structure in the second stanza. In my translation, the attributive clause, “that gallops beneath the cold sting of stethoscopes unleashed (在被解开的听诊器的冰刺下狂奔的),” is moved to the left of the NP “a heart (心).” And inside the clause, another NP is made up of the NP “the cold sting (冰刺)” and its complement “stethoscopes unleashed (被解开的听诊器).” I flip-flop the positions of the two parts, add a structural particle “的” between them, and convert the periphrastic form “X of Y” to the inflected form “Y’s X” in Chinese as “被解开的听诊器的冰刺 (the unleashed stethoscopes’ cold sting).” The last line of Stanza 4 in Longhorn’s poem “Left a Refugee in a Sterile Country,” “her arms sturdy as the thick limb that held me,” is translated as “她的双臂像托起我的枝干一样坚实.” It proves that the reverse approach works out well in translating “Adjective+PP” structures. The adjective “sturdy (坚实)” appears sequentially as the third word in the original line, whereas in the translated line, it is positioned as the ending word, and the PP “as the thick limb that held me (像托起我的枝干一样)” is moved to the front.
“Fish & Chips” and “Chips & Fish” are equally understandable when referring to the dish made of fried fish fillets and potato sticks. The former, however, stems from cultural conventions and norms while the latter sounds a bit strange. The primary purpose of implementing the reverse placement in my translation is to make the translated lines look and sound more coherent and cogent, more like “Fish & Chips,” in the target text. The fact that I found the reverse approach somewhat inevitable and have used it on a regular basis leads me to a tentative conclusion that modern English tends to place the central message of a sentence, for example, the head word, in the beginning half while Mandarin Chinese usually put that in the ending half. Linguistically speaking, though both languages contain SVO constructions and encompass a wide array of head-initial and head-final structures, modern English substantively favors head-initial sentences while Mandarin Chinese appears chiefly head-final. The word order differences also reflect the logic order distinction of habitual expressions in English and Chinese. In modern English, the head word, which often indicates the effect or the result, comes first, and the PP, which often reveals the cause or the details, follows later; in Mandarin Chinese, it is largely the other way around. Being aware of this syntactic and logic distinction between English and Chinese help translators properly reposition the PP in relation to its head phrase. Nevertheless, the reverse approach should not be viewed as an elixir that cures all syntactic divergences in translation; it is only valid when applied in careful consideration of presenting and representing as much as possible the poetic values and vitality of the original text.
About the Translator
Zhongxing Zeng is a Ph.D. (Literature) student in the English Department at Arizona State University. His research interests include William Blake, English Romanticism, and English-Chinese Literary Translation. He is also a singer-songwriter with publications of original music on NetEase Music, Apple Music, and Spotify under the artist name 曾寅. (updated 2023)
Translations
“I Have Gone Shimmering into Ungentle Sleep” by Sandy Longhorn
“Left a Refugee Here in Sterile Country” by Sandy Longhorn
With grateful acknowledgment to Chinese language reviewers Fay Zhen & Xiaoqiao Ling
"Monty Python" by Brian Heston (Chinese)
"When You Are Old and I Am Gray" by Eric Schlich (Chinese)
With grateful acknowledgment to Chinese language reviewers: Xiaoqiao Ling, Huaiyu Chen & Yenan Lyu
"French Postales" by Alberto Ríos (Chinese)
"Oriental" by Jenny Yang Cropp (Chinese)
"Self-Portrait as Minotaur" by Jacqueline Balderrama (Chinese)
With grateful acknowledgment to Chinese language reviewers: Xiaoqiao Ling & Huaiyu Chen