2017年第三届“LSCAT杯”江苏省笔译大赛 竞赛汉译英译文

“What I expected most was a person covered with white cloth, who was holding a rodlike snake spirit overhead, next was someone putting on yellow cotton garment and playing the tiger jump”. This is a lifelike description on the traditional opera by the novel of LuXun——Village Opera. Watching the Village Opera is traditionally a cultural activity suitable for all ages. Not only does it offer an opera performance to the spectator, but also serves the functions of social communication, commercial trade and cultural transmission for residents.

At present, there are two extreme developing orientations for traditional opera. On one hand, precious few main operas such as BeiJing Opera and KunQu Opera are generally acknowledged as elegant arts. The professional performing agencies supported by the government maintain their higher artistic levels. In addition,the attention focused by the intelligentsia increases their property of refined culture. T hey are highly valued as a visiting card of Chinese traditional culture. On the other hand, large amounts of folk operas survive in the folklore. They enjoy neither abundant financial backing, nor any professional performing teams.Although some locations attempt to preserve these kinds of operas, more measures are acting a way like museum style, which makes them lose their vitality as fossils.

If traditional operas prefer to target at new spectators especially the young, they are supposed to keep up with the time on the basis of holding their essence. Since culture is always keeping in a dynamic process, keeping the incomplete will isolate the culture from the world. Styles of salvage and specimen, of course, are essential under particular situation. However, both the two ways might be arduous but fruitless; at least they can’t achieve the initial expectation of culture transmission. For the sake of preserving and propagating the traditional opera arts, we are obliged to transform the coming force to focus on the opera by attracting the active intellectuals in the folklore, performing lovers and the spectators to get involved, especially providing opportunities to attract the young. A photo, a video, a cartoon or even a WeChat post would possibly become a turning point for the developing of the traditional operas. Actually, young people are not indifferent with the traditional art, they just live in a “cosmos”differ from the traditional operas.In order to heave the traditional opera into young people’s vision, we’d better to change the mode of discourse initiatively and let it sing loudly in the cosmos of the young.