On March 13, 2018, School of Foreign Languages invited Professor Matsuoka Eiji , a renowned sinologist at Tokyo Gakugei University, to give a lecture entitled "The gap between exegesis and translation-the beauty and difficulty in the translation of the Book of Songs" and "Song Ci", which was chaired by Dr. Xiong Linhong, a teacher from Japanese Department of SFL.
The lecture mainly focused on difficulties in the translation of poetry and Song Ci. Professor Matsuoka Eiji held the opinion that in the translation of ancient Chinese poetry, there were many subtle points where real efforts were required. Some nouns such as "Si Buxiang", "Xin Yi", "lit", "worry" and many other words, which were very difficult to translate. We should not only understand their meaning, but also express them in appropriate language.
Moreover, problems of rhyme, social context and reader issues are also difficulties during translation. When it comes to these problems, he combined his own translation experience and put forward his own translation insights. For example, the word "Guan Guan" in "Crying Ospreys". Although it was generally considered to be the cry of ospreys, but very few people really heard the sound of ospreys. Due to this fact, he played his own recordings of ospreys’ sound to the audience. Another example given by the professor was the common word "Bluegrass" in Song Ci. In order to appreciate the real fragrance of bluegrass, Professor Matsuoka Eiji had been planting bluegrass for four years to experience the real aroma of bluegrass.
Finally, Professor Matsuoka suggested that the translation work should be combined with interpretation and translation, which needs to read lots of books, and also needs to appeal to both refined and popular tastes according to the differences of the positioning and readers in the process of translating. Professor Matsuoka Eiji’s academic spirit and exploratory spirit deeply influenced everyone present.
Professor Matsuoka Eiji was formerly the vice-dean of Faculty of Humanities of Japan’s National Tokyo Gakugei University, and is currently the chairman of the Culture and Education Association of Japan-China Translation, and also a Japanese counselor of Foreign Languages Press. He has high attainments in exegesis, translatology and foreign languages. In 2000, the "三省堂 Unicode Chinese Characters Information Dictionary" in which he was the editor-in-chief won the American Unicode Bulldog Awards.
