After reading both articles, I still have doubts about the idea that poetry can be effectively translated into another language. Unlike the articles, I believe it is only feasible between closely related languages, such as Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, or between English and other European languages. As I do find reading chinese poem in japanese a very possible thing. However, I think it's a different story when translating between languages like Japanese to English or Chinese to English.
The arguments made by Pulver, suggesting that the form can be changed while maintaining the content, seem applicable to some poems but not all. This reminds me of a course I took last semester, where we read classic novels from different cultures. One of the works we studied was the Daodejing by the ancient Chinese philosopher Laozi, which we read in English. The Daodejing is very similar to poetry, with many passages that are poetic in nature and carry deep meanings.
As a native Chinese speaker, I read both the Chinese and English versions, and in most cases, the English translation did what Pulver described—it altered the content while trying to preserve the core idea. However, the problem was that the cultural beauty of ancient Chinese was completely lost in translation. The mysterious and profound nature of the Daodejing was reduced to a very simplified list of theories that differed greatly from the original text, and I mentioned this issue during the class and checked a various numbers of different editions, and none of them are able to fix the problem.
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