The Creative Treason In Watson's Translation Of Su Shi's Poetry From The Perspective Of Variation Studies

The year of 1965 witnessed the publication of Su Tung-P'o: Selections from a Sung Dynasty Poet by Burton Watson,the distinguished American translator,undertaking a selective interpretation of shi,ci,fu and letters in the whole life of Su Shi.Watson gives rise to much more focus on Song poems and this outstanding literati,ushering the research on Su Shi and his poems into the stratosphere.The study on the creative treason in Watson's translation of Su Shi's poetry from the perspective of Variation Studies focuses on the variations in language and culture.It is found that in syntax,Watson creatively transforms the omission of the pronoun into the subject-prominence,adopts mutation in interpreting the superposed adjective as the verb or adverb to restructure the images and artistic conceptions,employs the grammatical blending to render the parallel sentences in Su's poems into the antithesis and couplet,reviving the symmetrical beauty.In discourse,the variations of the omission of the lengthy one and catering to the first line as the title,the addition of the punctuation to reproduce ideo-realm and the enjambment of rearrangement of the lines for the consistency of the poetic connotation have displayed the creative treason.In rhyme,the distortion has been revealed in transplanting phonological beauty of the tone and rhyme in the original poems into the end-rhyme and alliteration to reconstruct the aesthetic flavor,giving the second life to the poem.The culture variations center on the allusions and culture-loaded words with the deliberate usage of the rhetorical device,footnotes,grammatical structure,thus transferring the implicitness and restraining artistic conception in the oriented culture to the direct and explicit beauty in the Western culture,achieving the wonder of applying different approaches to get satisfactory equivalence.The creative treason in language and culture by Watson,on the one hand,has intertwined connection with the aesthetic taste,value and culture cultivation of the translator.On the other hand,the ideology and poetics,the patronage and readers' acceptance all contribute a lot.The research on the creative treason from the perspective of Variation Studies has broken the deadlock of the previous study on the creative treason of the translator.It tries to shift the research emphasis from the general focus on the translator self to the ways,methods,reasons,effects and the meaning of the transformation of the text andculture,so as to expand the horizon of the study on creative treason and lead an effective combination of the study on the text and translator together.