Poetry Translation: A Grammatical Metaphorical Perspective

As an important medium for cultural communication, the translation of poetry bears great significance in promoting the great cultural heritage to the whole world. Despite the consistent disputes about the translatabili ty of poems, both the practices and studies on Chinese poetry translation have been under way from various perspectives, and, without the least doubt, have witnessed striking achievements. With the previous successful applications and theoretical implications that grammatical metaphors are abundant and universal in languages, this paper employs grammatical metaphor theory as the theoretical model to analyze the translation of two Chinese poems so as to investigate how this theory can work in poetry translation.The first Chapter introduces the contents of this paper and explains the reason for choosing grammatical metaphorical perspective as being that the modern development of metaphor theory shows metaphor is not just a rhetoric frill or ornament to poetic language but an indispensable part. Chapter 2 surveys two difficulties in the translation of Chinese poetry, that is, the correct understanding of the ambiguous content and the realization of the poetic form. Then introduces the methods and principles that can be effectively employed in poetry translation. After tracing the development of metaphor theory, Chapter 3 focuses on the description of Halliday's grammatical metaphor theory and mentions the application of this theory in other fields, both leading to the conclusion that this paper is a new tentative. The main part of this paper, with detailed analysis of two case:;, one from the perspective of the comparisons of three versions, and the other focusing on the difficult points in the process of translation, Chapter 4 implies that grammatical metaphor theory is applicable in poetry translation in correctly understanding original poems, fairly judging different translation versions and making reasonable choices in the process of translation. Chapter 5 offers a brief summary of the whole thesis.