Aesthetic Representation Of Zhang Peiji’s Selected Modern Chinese Prose Writings

“The modern Chinese essays” refer to the essays after the “MayFourth Movement” or after the introduction of the vernacular Chinese.During this period, a great number of outstanding essayists have emergedwith a variety of excellent essays. But the research of prose translationseems to be left far behind compared with prose composition. Thetheoretical works concerning prose translation which explore the innermechanism guiding the translating process are relatively scanty,especially those with unique perspective and systematic framework.Different linguistic structures, expression modes and distinct culturalbackgrounds all pose many obstacles in translation process. ProfessorZhangpeiji has long been devoting to the translation of modern Chineseessays, and thus has made a great contribution to the theoretical study aswell as the practice of modern Chinese essays.The emergence and development of aesthetics have provided a goodplatform and solid basis for the research of literature and of thetranslation of literary works. The author of the present thesis holds thatthe research on the translation of modern Chinese essays cannot be separated from aesthetics since the most typical characteristic of essays isloose in form but focused in soul, in other words, essay in the finalanalysis is the beauty of wholeness. Aesthetics is an important approachin assessing prose values for both theoretical probe and translationpractice. In view of the above, the author attempts to make a tentativestudy on the three volumes of Selected Modern Chinese Essays translatedby Zhang Peiji on the basis of the translation aesthetics theory proposedby Professor Liu Miqing. The author introduces some elements ofaesthetics including aesthetic subjects and aesthetic objects. Thetranslator is aesthetic subject of the original text, and he or she shouldreproduce the aesthetic value of the original in another language throughexploring the aesthetic features in the original text. From the perspectiveof translation aesthetic object, the beauty of prose mostly lies in theformal system and non-formal system. From the angles of aestheticsubject, aesthetic object, aesthetic representation and aesthetic criteria,the author tries to conduct a relatively in-depth analysis on how thetranslated essays reproduce the aesthetic: values of the original fromvarious levels like phonetic level, lexical level, syntactic level, andcultural level so as to provide a reference and guidance to the theoreticalresearch and translation practice of essays to some extent.