The Cultural Negotiation and Compromise: On the Chinese Translation of Jonathan Locke Hart’s Two English Poems

Abstract

Jonathan Locke Hart is not only a wellestablished scholar in the area of comparative literature, but also a poet who has been writing passionately since his teens. In 2021, an anthology of Jonathan Locke Hart in six volumes was published by Shanghai Jiao Tong UP, and the fourth book is a selection of 100 poems and their Chinese translations. Starting from Eugene Nida’s correspondence theory about translation, this article chooses two poems and their Chinese translations from the selection to explore the cultural negotiation and compromise in the process of their translation. As Jacques Derrida writes, translation, like the tower of Babel, is a task that can never be finished. The translation of poetry is particularly difficult because of the singularity of poems, and it is hard to conclude what is right and which is better. The analysis in this article is a personal view and needs further verification.