China and the West

Emily Dickinson and China : general
Wang Baihua : Modern Chinese literary figures who studied in Europe and in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s paid much attention to the Western New Poetry Movement and with their newly gained insights attempted to prvoke a similar and simultaneous movement in China. These Chinese scholars had the chance to read or hear about the controversial criciticsm associated with Dickinson's poetry.

Xu Cuihua : The Chinese reception of Dickinson's poetry has been passionate since the 1980s.
Twelve major translators published their translations in book form and four other major translators published their translations in monographs or anthologies : Jiang Feng, Zhang Yun, Guan Tianxi, Mu Yu, Wu Juntao, Wu Qiren, Sun Liang, Wang Jinhua, Ma Yongbo, Dong hengxiu, Pu Long, Li Huina, Zhou Jianxi, Liu Shoulan, Huang Gaoxin, Yu Guangzhong, Fei Bai.
Translating Dickinson into Mandarin Chinese involves a two-fold dilemma : on the one hand is the difficulty in obtaining a satisfactory understanding of her poetry ; on the other, finding in Chinese appropriate expressions to represent the original. Basic characteristics of Chinese characters are of great significance to the composition of classical Chinese poetry but are inconvenient for poetry translations. The translators of Dickinson may have felt the impossibility of displaying the musical effects Dickinson intended in her frequent use of alliteration. The limitations of the phonetic dimension of Chinese characters, translators also have to handle problems that arise from the differences between the English language and the forms of Chinese characters. The semantic dimension of the characters is the translators' last resort. They need to translate the ideas or thoughts Dickinson expresses in her poetry, to disclose the essence of her poetry. In this respect, the major challenge remains the task of understanding what ideas Dickinson means to convey through her poetic language.
A general survey of the Chinese translations of Dickinson's poetry suggests that translators show a general concern for the poet's subject. This may be rooted in Chinese culture, which has been deeply immersed in the thoughts of different schools of teaching, especially those of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. It is therefore natural for a Chinese translator to explore ideas when reading Dickinson's poetry. The fact that Chinese is ideographic may also encourage a reader of Chinese to form such a reading habit. When approaching Dickinson's poetry, scholars and translators may try to explore the ideas she expresses, just as they would with a Chinese poem.
Perhaps driven by Dickinson's conversationally vernacular style, Chinese translators have adopted a similar style. They translate into modern Chinese vernacular instead of the more elegant classical written language. Translations of her poetry into Chinese provide a telescope through which readers of Chinese can recognize her as a serious thinker, who used her intellectual power to interrogate the world and to build an alternative world of her own. Impressive translations show her courage to doubt the existence of God, the seriousness of her reflections on life, her wisdom of renunciation, her conception of poetry and understanding as distilled essence and her prioritizing of goals for life.

Jiang introduced Dickinson as an introverted, unorthodox, and modern poet with broad perspectives. His selections covered typical subjects (mostly nature poems) as well as unusual
ones that showed, for instance, Dickinson's concern for politics, such as "My country need not change her gown". Zhang characterized Dickinson in her preface as a profound poet with a brave heart and subsequently represented these features in her choices for translation. Guan obviously favored Dickinson's nature poems; over fifty out of seventy-eight are about nature. The Wus placed emphasis on Dickinson's definitions of nature, success, exultation, weeping, speech, presentiment, crisis, the past, experiment, love, self, brain, loneliness, civilization, memory, and madness. Sun included Dickinson's favorite subjects: love, life, death, and eternity. Wang saw Dickinson's poetry as a philosophical reflection on daily events.
Significantly, he pointed out in his preface that reading Dickinson's poetry was like reading the words of the Chinese Taoist master Zhuangzi, claiming that reading the works of either could reduce our fear of death. He tended to reconstruct the poems with plain expressions in order to provide readers with easier comprehension. Li seemed to favor the beauty of nature and the wisdoms of life: over one-fifth are about nature and two-thirds about life. Liu integrated her translations into her six-chapter monograph Emily Dickinson Studies. Her discussion regarding the poems' subjects covered more than one-fourth of her book. Only Mu and Zhou did not tend to favor particular subjects in their selections.