China and the West

Discussion of David Kuebrich with Zhao Luorui.
Zhao rejects the idea of a free translation in favor of being as faithful as possible to the original. Striving for a meticulous fidelity to both Walt Whitman's content and style, she revises repeatedly in search of a judicious blend of accuracy, fluency, and what she speaks of as 'idiomatic grasp'. Commenting on the relative difficulty of translating Whitman, Zhao says that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was 'easy'. T.S. Eliot lent himself to a rather literal translation ; Henry James was 'very difficult', but Whitman is 'impossible'.