【英语学习】
纪伯伦诗歌《孩子》（之二）：什么是“他们借助你来这世界，却非因你而来”？
最近发在《Medium》杂志medium.com/@yong321/103b36ef09f0?sk=f321e423ef8177b30680fef60c250329 原文中链接在此从略

Kahlil Gibran’s Poem “On Children” (II)
What is “They (the children) come through you but not from you”?

In the last article (http://t.cn/AXMO7MOy ), I commented on the phrase “Life’s longing for itself” in Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran’s famous poem “On Children”, citing translations of the poem into other languages as a way to help interpretation. In this article, I’d like to elaborate the third line of the most quoted stanza of the poem, which reads

| Your children are not your children.
| They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
| They come through you but not from you,
| And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

What does “They come through you but not from you” mean? Your children can come through you, metaphorically speaking? Who do they belong to, if not to you? Will translation of this poem into other languages help us, like it did when we interpreted “Life’s longing for itself”? Let’s check.

(1) Spanish:
Vienen a través vuestro, pero no de vosotros.
(Literally: They come through you, but not from you.)

(2) French:
Ils viennent à travers vous mais non de vous.
(Literally: They come through you, but not from you.)

(3) German:
Sie kommen durch dich, aber nicht von dir.
(Literally: They come through you, but not from you.)

(4) Italian:
Tu li metti al mondo, ma non li crei.
(Literally: You put them into the world, but do not create them.)

(5) Chinese:
他们借助你来这世界，却非因你而来.
(Literally: They come to this world with the help of you, but do not come because of you.)

The Italian and the Chinese translations do not literally translate the prepositions “through” and “from” in the original poem. The Italian translator chooses to paraphrase in a rather dull style. That’s quite un-poetic! In my opinion, he has gone too far from the author’s possibly deliberate wording that borders on mischievous play of words. Similarly, the Chinese translation, which changes the author’s “through” to “with the help of” and “from” to “because of”, would probably be frowned upon by the author as well.

We know that unlike in academic translation of works in science including social sciences, which should be literal, some or even a great deal of flexibility is allowed in translation of literary especially poetic works. But the Spanish, French and German translations of this line I found all stubbornly stick to the literal mapping of the two prepositions. My take on this is that if the original poem can be understood in its original language and also in the translated language with literal translation, no word change should be made, and I believe that is exactly the case here.

So, what is this deceivingly simple line really saying? We can make sense of “They come through you but not from you” if we use a good analogy. Imagine a scene in which bright sunlight shines through the window and comes into the room. This sunlight (the children in Gibran’s poem) comes through the window glass (you) and yet it is not truly from the window or glass, but from the sun. In this interpretation, the light travels literally through the glass, without the help of the glass (contrary to the Chinese interpretation), without the glass somehow putting the light down into the room (contrary to the Italian interpretation), and having no cause-and-effect relation with the glass (contrary to the Chinese translation). The light belongs to the sun (Mother Nature, or God if you are religious) because the sun created it. The light can come into the room simply because only the window out of the whole external wall is transparent. Gibran’s “through you but not from you”, when likened to “through the window glass but not from the glass”, is a clever play of the prepositions and yet makes perfect sense. There is no need to replace them unless it’s prone to misunderstanding. If absolutely needed, a translator’s note can be provided to help the reader. Anything else will likely tarnish the beauty of this line.

Poetry reading of course requires a bigger picture than critical exegesis of the text. Gibran’s “On Children” essentially advocates for more freedom for the children, because they are independent beings rather than parental possessions. Just like the window glass initially shapes and may color the sunlight going through it but the sunlight leaves the glass and travels further along, the parents give the children initial push but the children go along to live their own lives.

( I’m a language lover. For more about my work on languages and linguistics, visit http://t.cn/AXMO7MOU )