Die dialogische Natur des Duizhang

Abstract

The Chinese poetic parallelism (Duizhang) as a central aesthetic instrument of classical Chinese poetry is extraordinarily difficult to translate. The meaning and association triggered by its structure must be lost in translation. The aim of the present work is to show, with the helpaw of Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic theory, what is actually lost by translating a Duizhang couplet. That depends on how the mechanism of the Duizhang fulfills its aesthetic function. The answer to this question could advance the discussion how to understand Chinese poetics, how to promote poetic translation, and how to enrich the thesaurus of world literature.