Veteran translator's retrospect: Life and work

Gao further shared his opinions on translation. He said the difficult part is to accurately reflect the author's thoughts. He maintains that poems are "untranslatable", because in addition to plot, they usually provide readers with a good rhythm and a beautiful language. It is difficult to display the literary features of another nation in translation, so it's easier to translate novels than poems. Nevertheless, he has translated many poems of Anna Akhmatova, including her narrative work Requiem. In November 2013, this translation won the "Russia-New Century" Best Chinese Translation Award of Contemporary Russian Literature. Gao observed: "To do a good job of translation, you must first have a thorough grasp of the content before converting it into another beautiful language. However, European and Chinese languages are strikingly different, and both Chinese characters and European alphabetic writing have their distinctive features." [Photo by Chen Boyuan/China.org.cn]