An Investigation Of The General Features Of The Four English Versions Of Hong Lou Meng Poetry

Hong Lou Meng(or Dream of the Red Chamber)is an encyclopedia of Chinese culture.In addition to the excellent text which blends the beauty of different literary works,the novel includes amazing quantities of verses,such as poems,songs,couplets,proverbs and etc.According to some statistics,the number of poetic proses the author composed in the novel adds up to 379,making great influence on the description of the plots and characters.Aliteraure review of the large quantity of previous studies on the poetic verses of Hong Lou Meng indicates that an overwhelming majority of the studies focused on the role the poetic verses played in the development of story and the portrayal of the characters in the novel.As far as the studies on the English translations of the Hong Lou Meng poems concerned,they mostly fell on the success or failure and the pros and cons of the translators in the reproduction of forms,culture and image of the Chinese poems.While some research paid attention to the translators’ styles with reference to their poetry translation,these studies ended up with merely a qualitative look at a couple of poems.As a consequence,not only most of the Hong Lou Meng poems and their translations are left untouched;even their “findings” and conclusions fell short of repetitiveness and explicability.It is not difficult to find out that poetry research on Hong Lou Meng is inadequate,lacking not only a comprehensive conclusion of the style of original text but also the all-sided inspections of these four famous English versions.In order to examine the extent to which the English versions of Hong Lou Meng separately reproduce the original text and to inspect the translators’ styles on poetry interpretation,this thesis studies 300 verses in the novel,compares and analyzes the translations of all four English versions’ genres according to their features by statistical analysis and comparison.Through all these studies,it is hopeful to lay a foundation for further researches on the translation of poetry in Hong Lou Meng and provide some experiences for the study of translations with different styles.This thesis tries to answer three questions: first,what metrical features does the poetry of Hong Lou Meng have? Second,what individual features does each of the four English versions have? The last one,what experiences do the translations provide for subsequent poetry translation?Major findings of this paper are as follows: first,in all the 108 poems of this novel,98 of them are rhymed with different rhyme schemes.There are 4 kinds of rhyme schemes for quatrains and 5 different schemes for regulated verses.And 15 of the 108 poems follow the rule of intonation of ancient Chinese poetry.The number of Ci / Qu is 28,14 of them rhyme,and 6 of the 28 verses are arranged well with intonation.All 45 pairs of couplets in the novel are structured well with antithesis.119 chapter titles lay emphasis on narration,which is of great difference for couplets,and 106 of these titles are made of two well paralleled sentences.Second,in the translations of poems,both Yangs’ and Hawkes’ versions reproduce the original poetic lines completely and pay more attention to rhyme.And Hawkes’ version is much better because he translates all the poems with rhyme and he tries best to apply English iambic and spondee to reproduce the original rhythmical features.The poetic lines of four translations of Ci / Qu are based on pauses in the source,and Hawkes takes advantages of poetic forms to translate this genre,while Joly and Bonsall pay less attention to rhyme of this kind;and Yangs’ translation follows Hawkes’.Hawkes also adopts English iambic or spondee to reproduce the rhythmical pattern in the source text.In the translation of couplets,the four versions tend to use simple sentences.In addition,Hawkes takes antithesis into consideration in his translation of couplets and chapter titles and 50% of his couplet translation parallel well.The analysis shows that Hawkes’ translation reproduces most formal features of the source text.This thesis puts forward that though the form of Chinese poetry can hardly be completely reproduced,translators can try the way that Hawkes adopts,using the poetic form to translate poetry to show foreign readers the beauty in form of ancient Chinese classical poetry.