China Review International

With "Neunzehn Alte Gedichte aus der Han-Zeit," Manfred W. Frühauf presents a richly commented new translation of the famous collection of nineteen five-syllable line poems Gushi Shijiu Shou 古詩十九首, into German. The anonymous texts themselves most likely date back to the Later Han dynasty, but are in this arrangement familiar to today's readers through Xiao Tong's 蕭統 Liang-dynasty anthology Zhaoming Wen xuan 昭明文選. Frühauf combines his broad knowledge of the poems and their multilayered meanings and interpretations with helpful insights into the challenges of translating ancient Chinese poetry, which bear witness to years of intensive engagement with the Chinese language.

The book is divided into three parts. Two introductory chapters raise important questions concerning the possibility and challenges of translating ancient Chinese poetry into a modern Indo-European language and situate the work with regard to previous translations and studies. They are followed by a translation of the nineteen poems, each supplemented with an extensive commentary. Ten short essays on central aspects of the texts and its translation conclude the study.

The introduction right away addresses the various challenges a transfer of premodern Chinese poetry into German poses to the translator. It is modestly aimed at "a possibly not sinologically educated reader" ("einen möglicherweise nicht sinologisch ausgebildeten Leser," p. 1), but will in fact probably be helpful to all its readers, as it increases awareness of the daunting task every translation represents. The subject is revisited in three essays on translation and theory ("Übersetzung und Theorie," pp. 311-316), text and translator ("Text und Übersetzer," pp. 317-326), and text and reader ("Text und Leser," pp. 327-332) at the end of the book. Frühauf formulates the translator's conundrum as follows: "Literary translations, and especially translations of poetry in a foreign language, ideally require not only a rendering of the content, but also the conveying of an impression of the poetic form of the original text. This means that the penta-syllabic Nineteen Old Poems discussed here must or should all be rendered in a uniform meter in order to create also in the translation a formally homogeneous and concise aesthetic impression as in the originals" ("Literarische Übersetzungen und insbesondere Übersetzungen fremdsprachiger Lyrik verlangen idealerweise nicht nur eine Wiedergabe des Inhalts, sondern auch die Vermittlung eines Eindrucks der poetischen Form des Originaltextes. Das heißt: die hier behandelten pentasyllabischen Neunzehn Alten Gedichte müssen oder sollten alle in einem einheitlichen Vers- und Silbenmaß wiedergegeben werden, um auch in der Übersetzung einen gleichermaßen formal homogenen [End Page 64] und konzisen ästhetischen Eindruck zu bewirken wie die Originale," p. 313, emphasis in the original). As "the transfer of a Chinese penta-syllabic verse into five German syllables is almost never feasible without loss of content" ("die Übertragung eines chinesischen pentasyllabischen Verses in fünf deutsche Silben—ohne Inhaltsverlust—[ist] so gut wie nie machbar," p. 10), Frühauf, like any translator, cannot avoid making compromises. Unlike Erwin Ritter von Zach's translation, for example, which transforms the poems into prose,¹ Frühauf's rendering of the Nineteen Old Poems aims at maintaining their poetic form. This being said, the translator refrains from both attempting to preserve the original five-syllable line and giving in to the urge to imitate the rhyme scheme in a continuous fashion. He makes these concessions in order to remain as close as possible to the original text in terms of content while at the same time striking a poetic tone by re-creating the rhythm of the original poems. It comes as no surprise that those verses of his translations that diverge most from the first objective masterfully succeed in the second. The first two lines of the third poem ("Qingqing ling shang bo" 青青陵上柏, p. 53) may serve as an example:

Zypressen auf den Hügeln stehen, immergrün und dicht an dicht; (青青陵上柏) Steine sich im...