Retrieving the Lost Musicality: A Study of Rhythmic Sound Pattern in Poetry Translation

The research concerning poetry translation from English into Chinese has so far covered almost every aspect from content to form.There is one issue, however, that has not been touched upon yet and hence become a forbidden zone, or a blind spot, that is, the rhythmic sound pattern of poetry.It has been taken for granted that the phonetic systems are so different from English to Chinese that there is no possibility for any match between the two in terms of poetic tone.That might explain why there has been so little study in this aspect.This paper, however, raises this issue and holds that since the sound pattern in English and Chinese poetry both basically resorts to a disyllabic pattern, which basically in English poetry is an iambic foot, i.e.one accented plus one unaccented, while in Chinese, ping-ze, or flat-sharp, there is then a correspondence potential between the two sound patterns.Despite their difference in one way or another, the application of the sound resources is poetically of the same orientation.Therefore, there exists a motivation for a possible translational match in this aspect.