China and the West

[Shakespeare, William]. Shashibiya xi ju quan ji. Zhu Shenghao yi [ID D23377].
Zhu Shenghao ist der erste chinesische Übersetzer, der die Gesamtwerke von William Shakespeare übersetzen will.
Er schreibt im Vorwort : "I have always loved Shakespeare's plays and in some cases I went over whole plays a dozen times, studying the text closely and reciting it to myself. I feel that I have quite a good understanding of the spritit in the original plays. In the spring of 1935, encouraged by my colleagues and my predecessors, I began my attempt to translate the complete works of Shakespeare. The next year war broke out and all my books, more than one hundred items including different Shakespeare editions, annotations, research papers and reviews, were completely destroyed by fire in a bombing raid. In great haste, I was abel to rescue the complete edition published by the Oxford University Press and a few pieces of translation. After that I was compelled to move from place to place and hunt around for a living so that I did not have the leisure to carry on with what I wanted to do. Not until the spring of 1942, when I found the times really bad, did I sever myself from all other work and, confining myself to home, concentrate on my translation work. Though I was pressed on both sides by poverty and illness, I never stopped translating. Over a period of ten years, I finished all the manuscripts. Ten years is not a long time for a task as arduous as translating Shakespeare. However, I have put my whole life's effort into it."
"I do my best for conserving the flavor and features of the style of the original. In case I failed to reach this goal, I would try to communicate the ideas... clearly and faithfully in an elegant and comprehensive Chinese. I considered it indecent to translate word for word without expressing the ingenuity and vigor of the original. Whenever I felt unable to render an English sentence into Chinese adequately, I would work a long time on it, and strive to reveal the English poet's ideas clearly, risking a completely different rearrangement of the words of the original sentence. Every time I finished translating a paragraph, I used to read it carefully as the first reader... if there were any ambiguities, and at the same time I would consider myself an actor for examining if the tone of the version was harmonical and the rhythm was agreeable. If, for example, a word or a sentence were not used with good taste, I would mediate even for some days trying hard to find the right word."