«Juana of America»: the translation of the poetry of Juana de Ibarbourou in China

Abstract

After the beginning of the program known as Reform and Opening Up in 1978, and together with the need to rebuild literature for a new era, a great interest in Latin American poetry awoke in China. With the help of translated versions, numerous poets and their works were introduced to this country. Juana de Ibarbourou, a character of worldwide reputation known as «Juana of America» and one of the figures of undoubted importance in the Latin American literary field, entered the field of vision of Chinese readers through the translation of her compositions, compiled in various anthologies. The present work, focused on the translation of Ibarbourou’s poetry in China, analyzes a series of issues related to this topic: the author’s poems included in the anthologies, the period of publication of these, as well as the translators and strategies adopted in the translation process. We found that the introduction of translated works of this poet in China has achieved a certain level of development and the versions are of good quality. However, due to the low number of translated poems, it is concluded that there is still a lot of space to cover.