Some sixty authenticated poems written by Mao Zedong were the subject of studies that highlight the relationship between the statesman and his literary talent, through rather socio-political or ...psychological approaches. The present paper intends to focus on his poetic creation, by scrutinizing from the inside the textual and scriptural tension that animates the process of reappropriation and reinvention in relation to classical Chinese poetry, in particular to the “heroic and free” or fiery style (
豪放). Thematic and rhetorical analyses aim to show how the Promethean sublime nourishes a virile poetics in Mao Zedong’s work and an unusual verbal dynamic, which has the potential to transform conventions into speech, and poetry into a principle of action.
In recent years, with the rapid development of deep learning, natural language processing has achieved great progress in many aspects. In the field of text generation, classical Chinese poetry, as an ...important part of Chinese culture, also attached growing attention. However, the existing researches on neural-network-based classical Chinese poetry generation ignore the semantics contained in Chinese words. A sentence in Chinese is a sequence of characters without spaces, and thus it is of great significance to segment the sentence properly for understanding the original text correctly. Therefore, supposing that the model knows how to segment the sentence, the meaning of the sentence will be more accurately understood. In this paper, we propose a novel model, namely WE-Transformer (Word-Enhanced Transformer), to generate classical Chinese poetry from vernacular Chinese in a supervised approach, which incorporates external Chinese word segmentation knowledge. Our model learns word semantics based on character embeddings by bidirectional LSTM and enhances the quality of generated classical poems based on the Transformer with extra word encoders. Compared to the baselines and state-of-the-art models, our experiments on automatic and human evaluations have demonstrated that our method can bring better performance.
Metaphor and metonymy, which are treated as two basic cognitive and conceptual mechanisms in cognitive linguistics, are highly interactive to each other. Metaphor from metonymy, as a complicated ...linguistic device and cognitive mechanism, has long been ignored although it helps create abundant implications and aesthetic value in poetry. This paper explores functions of metaphor from metonymy in meaning construction in classical Chinese poetry in order to offer a new perspective for the research of classical Chinese poetry and provide implications for appreciation, translation and teaching of classical Chinese poetry.
For some Western translators before the twentieth century, domestication was their strategy to translate the classical Chinese poetry into English. But the consequence of this strategy was the ...sacrifice of the ideogrammatic nature of these poems. The translators in the twentieth century, especially the Imagist poets and translators in the 1930s, overcame the problems of their predecessors by developing their translation theory and practice in ways that are close to those of many contemporary semiotic translators. But both Imagist translators and contemporary semiotic translators have the problem of indifference to the feeling of the original in their translations.
This paper attempts to set up an aesthetic-semiotic approach to the translation of the iconicity of classical Chinese poetry on the basis of the examination of both Eastern and Western translation studies.
The computer generation of poetry has been studied for more than a decade. Generating poetry on a human level is still a great challenge for the computer-generation process. We present a novel ...Transformer-XL based on a classical Chinese poetry model that employs a multi-head self-attention mechanism to capture the deeper multiple relationships among Chinese characters. Furthermore, we utilized the segment-level recurrence mechanism to learn longer-term dependency and overcome the context fragmentation problem. To automatically assess the quality of the generated poems, we also built a novel automatic evaluation model that contains a BERT-based module for checking the fluency of sentences and a tone-checker module to evaluate the tone pattern of poems. The poems generated using our model obtained an average score of 9.7 for fluency and 10.0 for tone pattern. Moreover, we visualized the attention mechanism, and it showed that our model learned the tone-pattern rules. All experiment results demonstrate that our poetry generation model can generate high-quality poems.
Classical Chinese poetry and English poetry show huge differences, mainly with regard to literary imagery, sense, rhythm, sound, genre, and format. Hence, English translation of classical Chinese ...poetry based on equivalence is not an option. This article intends to explore translation as a creative, cross‐cultural practice. We shall suggest that “mirror‐shared reality” may play a critical role in this practice. This notion refers to an intermediate construction made by the translators with the aim of bridging different “realities” of classical Chinese poetry and English poetry with regard to knowledge, tradition, and reference. The construction of a “mirror‐shared reality” is a type of creative practice based on both realities, not just one of them. By selecting some of their relevant shared features, the two realities will mirror each other in certain essential aspects and produce an aesthetic experience among English readers theoretically akin to the experience among their Chinese counterparts. Our discussion is based on a number of English translations of classical Chinese poems, in particular translations by Xu Yuanchong (许渊冲 Xǔ Yuānchōng), building on his own theory, “Threefold‐Beauty” (三美论 sān měi lùn).
ShadowPlay2.5D Zhao, Zhenjie; Ma, Xiaojuan
Journal on computing and cultural heritage,
02/2020, Volume:
13, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
An immersive experience brought about by virtual reality can potentially enhance the appreciation of classical Chinese poetry, which is difficult to describe clearly in everyday language or ordinary ...media. However, making 3-dimensional illustrations for a 360-degree display in virtual reality is usually a labor-intensive and time-consuming procedure and hard to master for non-professional media creators, such as teachers. Motivated by the homology theory of classical Chinese poetry and painting, we propose an image-based approach of building 2.5-dimensional immersive stories to visualize classical Chinese poetry. Specifically, using Chinese shadow play as a metaphor, we have designed and implemented ShadowPlay2.5D, a sketch-based authoring tool to help novices create 360-degree videos of classical Chinese poetry easily. To ensure coverage of the diverse themes in Chinese poetry and preserve the sense of culture, we build a Chinese ink-painting style image repository of essential poetic elements identified via crowdsourcing. To facilitate construction of 2.5-dimensional scenes, we design features that support puppet-like animation, instancing, and camera organization in a 3-dimensional environment. Through two user studies, we show that ShadowPlay2.5D can help novices make a short 360-degree video in about 10--15 minutes, and the 2.5D stylized illustrations created can bring about a better immersive experience for poetry appreciation.
In the history of translating classical Chinese poetry, there are two kinds of translators. The first kind translate classical Chinese poetry “by way of intellectual, directional devices” (Yip, ...Wai-lim. 1969.
. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 16). What these translators are concerned with most is the coherence of their translations. They give little attention to the ideogrammic nature of Chinese characters. I call them traditional translators. These translators include those in the history of translating classical Chinese poetry from its beginning to the first decade of the twentieth century, although there are still some who translate classical Chinese poetry in this way later. The second kind of translator is highly interested in the images created by ideogrammic Chinese characters and tries to convey them in target language. We call them modernist translators. These translators are represented by some American modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Florence Ayscough, etc. From the point of view of iconicity, modernist translators’ contribution lies in their concern with the iconic characteristics of Chinese characters. But they did not give enough attention to syntactical iconicity and textual iconicity in classical Chinese poetry.
