Chinese Familiarity vs Otherness : The Self Gendered Voice in the Translation of Female Poetry

The traditional Chinese literati realm rested predominantly with male poets, which resulted in negligence of those poems written by women poets. Some famous surviving female poems were ‘impersonated’ by the males, with prevalent feminine gendered voice, thoughts and psychology embedded. If poetry literally written by women poets has to be sorted out for analysis, researchers always witness a familiar disdainful sentiment against traditional Chinese conventions in the poems. These might hardly be comprehended or interpreted by English readers should they be subsequently translated into English. The otherness revealed in the poetic lines is, no matter handled by either the celebrated methods of domestication or foreignization in translation, substantially conducive to retrospective yearning or resistance to traditional norms. Such resistance is often due to the conventional suppression of women in every aspect upon an invincible faith towards the superior male and inferior female statuses in the imperial society. With such an understanding, classical poetry written by Chinese poetesses has to be emphasized on a level of displaying the persona’s voice when translation is in progress, as there is a specific gendered voice in relation to the inferior bearings of women. The typical Chinese feminine poetic voice is usually melancholic, vividly deprived, and grief-stricken. The elements causing such sentiment in the poems are to be strengthened in the translation by explicit magnification of the original implicit behaviour. And, there is always a question of whether the implicitness should be transformed into explicit components in translation. This controversy will also be discussed in this article.