| American Poet Louise Glück is the laureate of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature,for the austerity of her poetic voice makes the existence of individuals more universal.Her works merit attention and cubic interpretation due to her exquisite description of universal daily life,subversion of classics and crystallization of life philosophy.Before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature,Glück herself was already in the spotlight in the western academic field for her poems and her own poetic views.As such,to date,the conversely obvious lack of popularity of Chinese translations of her themes positively deserves more concrete analysis.What’s more,the existing limited versions of Chinese translation still fail to cover the whole original themes,while some untranslated themes have been proved as crucial for the complete and cubic rendering of the original thematic meanings.Thus,through the thoughts of Polysystem theory,the paper aims to analyse the peripheral position of translations of Glück’s poems in the Chinese context.Specifically,by involving related sociocultural elements regarding target readers and publishers,the author seeks to illustrate how different existing Chinese translations selectively reflect the original themes.Firstly,the paper will demonstrate the sociocultural factors for the peripheral position of translated themes regarding the system of reader and the system of publisher.For the reader system,in the early stage of this initial translation phenomenon translated themes assume the peripheral position in the target literary system and in the late stage translated themes are moving towards the central position temporarily due to the announcement of the Nobel Prize for the poet and the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic.For the publisher system,understanding and positioning of original themes by the translators and the publishers greatly overlap due to the translators’ recommendation of the existing translations to the publishers.Secondly,analysis of the system of translator will be as follows:(1)with observation on the discourse and translations of different translators,it has been revealed that focus of the targeted translators(Liu Xiangyang,Fan Jinghua and Chen Yuhong)amid their selective translation differs respectively as the theme of coldness of death,the interpretation of feminism,and the theme of ambivalence of death;(2)a specific case study of The Wild Iris,the only volume hitherto enjoying two translations,will reexamine Liu’s and Chen’s selective translation of original themes;(3)with comparison it has been confirmed that three translators have adopted different translation strategies(familiarization and defamiliarization)while taking care of the images,structures,themes and other elements in the original.Thirdly,further discussion of the relations of the three different systems will reconfirm and better explain the interference traces of translators in different translated texts.Possible suggestions for future translation of Glück’s poems with the elaboration of theoretical concepts of text,model and repertoire will be shown as well.In short,with a descriptive analysis of the system of reader,the system of publisher and the system of translator for the present translation phenomenon of Glück’s poems,the paper aims to reveal and explain the voices of different translators and concludes that: Liu and Fan have interpreted part of the poetic style of original themes and adopted the translation strategy of familiarization.While Chen has rendered more of the poetic style of original themes with the translation strategy of defamiliarization,thus keeping more of the heterogeneity of the primary type.And then interference traces in the existing translated texts of Glück’s poetry are not only about the subjectivity of these translators but also attributed to sociocultural factors entailing target readers,related publishers and others. |
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