A Comparison Between Stephen Owen And Xu Yuanchong’s Translation On Du Fu’s Poems

Du Fu plays an important role in the history of Tang poetry and even in the history of Chinese poetry.As a treasure of Chinese culture,Du Fu’s poems have a profound impact on East Asia.With the close communication between China and foreign countries,Du Fu’s poems have been translated into English and received special attention in the English world.This paper aims to explore the similarities and differences between Stephen Owen’s The Poetry of Du Fu and Xu Yuanchong’s Selected Poems of Du Fu from the aspects of translation theory,translation strategy,language choice and poetic prosody.It also explores the misreading of Du Fu’s poems in the process of English translation by combining with the research of many commentaries and modern scholars.This paper consists of three parts: introduction,main body and conclusion.The introduction shows the reason of the topic selection,and puts forward the innovation of the paper by combing the literature review.The main body is divided into four chapters.The first chapter focus on the development of the translation on Du Fu’s poems and the main works in the English world,also combines with the background of the times and the humanistic value of Du Fu’s poems to expound the reasons why Du Fu’s poems have expanded their influence in the English world.The second chapter compares the two translators,Stephen Owen and Xu Yuanchong,to find out the reasons for their translation differences.One is the difference of their translation thoughts caused by the difference of cultural background,that is,Xu Yuanchong followed the pursuit of “Preserving Beauty” in poetry,while Stephen Owen adhered to his concept of “World Poetry”.Two is that the number of Du’s poems translated by them is different.Stephen Owen translated all the existing Du’s poems,so his overall style is mainly authentic and literal translation is often used.Xu Yuanchong translated 100 classic Du’s poems,so he paid more attention to free translation in order to show the characteristics of selected poems.The third chapter makes a comparative study of the two English versions of Du Fu’s poems from the aspects of language choice,syntactic structure and poetic rhythm,and analyzes Xu Yuanchong’s free translation by restoring the inherent beauty,formal beauty and phonological beauty of poems,so as to construct his idea of “Preserving Beauty”.By following the literal meaning of the original poem,Stephen Owen tries to find similar words in English words to replace the images in Chinese classical poetry.He tries to keep the original image and the style of the original poem,and follows the original sentence structure for literal translation as much as possible,so as to construct his concept of “World Poetry”.The fourth chapter enumerates and analyzes the text misreading in their translations,pointing out that the polysemy of the explanation on Du Fu’s poetry,the limitation of the translator’s subject and the unique culture of Tang poetry may lead to the misreading of the text,and cause poetic deviation and lack of cultural information.The conclusion part summarizes the gains,losses and experience of the translations of Du Fu’s poetry by these two famous translators,and further explores how to achieve an effective translation in the differences and contradictions between eastern and western civilizations.