Xu Yuanchong’s Imagery Reproduction Of Su Shi’s Ci-poetry

Gary Palmer, an American linguistic anthropologist, proposes a synthesis of traditionally anthropological linguistics with the newly emergent field of cognitive linguistics, called cultural linguistics. Such a new discipline integrates the studies of language and culture with the framework of cognitive linguistics, hoping to look into the inner world and cognitive models of language users in different cultures through all kinds of imagery. Imagery, as the nucleus of cultural linguistics, varies from specific to abstract, from image to schema, and it includes not only visual images, but also images of touch, sound, taste, and smell, even kinesthetic, temperature and emotional experiences. Imagery study on language or discourse analysis is the main subject of cultural linguistics.Poetry is the pith of language, and imagery is the soul of poetry. Ci-poetry, as the climax of Chinese Civilization in a sense, has incomparable influence on Chinese classical poetry. Su Shi has been regarded as the greatest poet of the Northern Song Dynasty, who created the Ci-poetry in the mode of Tang poetry and in so doing broadened its horizon and elevated its status. Xu Yuanchong is one of the greatest translators of classical Chinese poetry. He is not only a translator, but a translation theorist. He has made great contributions to both the formation of literary translation theories of the Chinese school and the rise in status of the Chinese translation in the world. Xu Yuanchong’s imagery reproduction of Su’s Ci-poetry is a window not only to Su’s style and life philosophy, but also to the beauty of Xu’s translation, thereby to give some inspirations to spread Chinese culture.This paper firstly focuses on the corpus of19pieces of Su’s Ci-poetry in Xu’s Bilingual Edition300Song Lyrics to categorize imagery and research imagery transmission, and then makes a comparative case study on four versions of Tune:Charm of a Maiden Singer to analyze the effectiveness of imagery reproduction. Under the theoretical framework of Palmer’s cultural linguistics, it is hoped that, according to the discourse analysis on imagery, the thesis can be of some help to appreciate and evaluate Xu Yuanchong’s translation and his theory from a different angle, and also to throw light on the imagery reproduction and cross-cultural understanding and communication of native languages.