Translation’s Pale, Life-Giving Fire: Observations on Navigating the Complexities of Literary Translation

Abstract

This reflective essay aims to explore the intricacies, pitfalls and limitations of literary translation, specifically concerning the rendering of great English works of literature into Mandarin Chinese. For this purpose, extracts from Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost and Hamlet, as well as Joyce’s Ulysses, will be compared alongside their respective published Mandarin translations, to demonstrate just what an unforgiving task fictional rendering can be.