Proposal for the Chinese translation of natural symbols in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

The natural symbols play a fundamental role in the poetry Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair and contribute to transmit aesthetic values and philosophical ideas of Pablo Neruda. In this article, the symbols we analyse are “wind”, “fire”, “sea”, “twilight” and “night”. The article focuses on the main difficulties posed by the Chinese translation of those important natural symbols in Neruda’s poetic thinkings, and problems that preexisting Chinese versions contain, whose translators adopted a variety of strategies to express the natural symbols in Spanish. Nevertheless, due to the linguistic and cultural distance between Chinese and Spanish, they may make mistakes and fail to convey intense emotions to Chinese readers. The article presents the Chinese translation of the natural symbols based on the translatological approaches of Xu Yuanchong, one of whose translation theory “Three Beauties” points out the importance of recovering aesthetic values and the essential spirit of poetry. By taking Xu’s methodology as the guide, this work offers a justification for each necessary strategy that has been adopted to resolve the difficulties throughout the translation process.