China's NSFW Translation of Rabindranath Tagore

With lines like “The world unzipped his pants in front of his lover. Long as a French kiss, slim as a line of a poem,” China is in an uproar over novelist Feng Teng's new translation of Rabindranath Tagore. The New York Times's Amy Qin notes the popularity of the Bengali poet, the first non-Westerner to be award the Nobel Prize, runs deep in China. From the NYT:

More than 80 years after his death, Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate, still has a huge following in Asia. Outside India and Bangladesh, perhaps nowhere is his legacy more alive than in China, where his works have been part of the middle-school curriculum for decades.

This month, to commemorate the 155th anniversary of his birth, the People’s Publishing House will release “The Complete Works of Tagore,” the first direct translation of his entire output from Bengali into Chinese. The project took a team of translators nearly six years.

But Tagore has also been at the center of a controversy here, after another, more racy new translation of some of his poems by the writer Feng Teng, called “Stray Birds,” set off a storm of criticism. The furor was so intense that the Zhejiang Wenyi Publishing House pulled the volume from stores.

“Most Chinese grew up thinking Tagore was mild and romantic, all stars, gardens and flowers,” Mr. Feng said in a recent interview in his Beijing studio. “So with my translation, many people felt like their Tagore, the Tagore from their childhood textbooks, had been challenged.”

Feng's translation appeared last summer with criticism soon following. More:

The cultural critic Raymond Zhou, writing in the state-owned China Daily, called Mr. Feng’s translation “a vulgar selfie of hormone saturated innuendo.” Even the Indian news media chimed in, with one commentator writing that Mr. Feng had made a “mockery of Tagore.”

The anger mostly focused on three of the 326 poems, all of which Mr. Feng, like most earlier translators, based on English versions. In one, which was translated into English by Tagore himself, the poet wrote: “The world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover. It becomes small as one song, as one kiss of the eternal.”

By contrast, Mr. Feng’s translation in Chinese reads: “The world unzipped his pants in front of his lover. Long as a French kiss, slim as a line of a poem.”

We're blushing over here! Head to the New York Times to read the article in full.