Poetic Alchemy: An Integrated Linguistic Model for Representing Romanticism in the Translation of Wordsworth’s Poetry

Abstract

The metaphor of ‘poetic alchemy’ frames a critical challenge in poetry translation: extracting the literary essence from simple utterances as an alchemist extracts the ‘philosopher’s stone’ from raw materials. Reconstructing the external syntax structures in ST does not automatically lead to the representation of their literary features and in-depth meaning in TT. Though scholars do notice the existence of something ‘under the surface’ of utterances in poetry, it is still difficult to specify what it is, because each literary school embodies distinctive characteristics that cannot be generalised. Therefore, this study takes Wordsworth’s romantic poems for experimental analysis, attempting to explore how to determine the literary uniqueness of certain poetic schools and reproduce it through appropriate strategies. An Integrated Linguistic Model (ILM) is designed for textual critical analysis: The Skopos Theory + Communicative and Semantic Translation. The former helps justify the criteria of ‘representing romanticism’ in translating Wordsworth’s poems, while the latter describes avenues to meet those criteria. This model operates as a ‘crucible’ that facilitates ‘transmutation’ in an alchemical process. Lessons drawn from the analytical experiment are aimed to provide references for scholars as well as translators who focus on digging out hidden essence in literary translation.