Poetry establishes a truth through the sometimes allegorical, sometimes symbolic description of concrete details: the experience described and preserved in the poem always points to something else—whether moral truth, or aesthetic beauty, or romantic sentiment. This is why the most salient comments in Chinese literary criticism are often gnomic statements about flavor that elude paraphrase.It can be therefore concluded that the essence of translating Chinese poetry into English is to translate the"flavor", where imagery and ideorealm interact to create the unique literary effect according to Chinese poetics. It is due to the fact that the elusive and coy nature of flavor that the translator's creativity is required.
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