To Pursue Beauty And To Respect Difference—criticism On Xu Yuanchong's English Translation Of Ancient Chinese Poems

The linguistic paradigm, which combines translation and aesthetics through language to explore the aesthetic or beauty of the original text and the target text, occupies an important chapter in the history of translation in China. And Xu Yuanchong is the first translator and translation theory researcher who advocates the pursuit of"three beauties"in literary translation. Xu applied his principle of"three beauties"to the translation practice of ancient Chinese and generalized his principle on the translation of ancient Chinese poetry. The principle can be put like this: on the issues of poetic translation, Xu thinks poetry should be translated as poetry. Poetry demands beauty while translation should be faithful. So we can't call such poetic translations to be faithful that are not as beautiful as the original. We should pursue the beauty of the original on the premise of being truthful, which constitutes the principle of poetic translation. In Xu's eyes, the ancient Chinese poetry is poetry with"best words in best order". So it is quite necessary to represent the beauty of the ancient Chinese poetry in creative and artistic ways.During the 1990s, translation studies experienced"a cultural turn"which reversed the prevailing linguistic translation. Culture studies researchers mainly focus their attention on the"heterogeneity"or differences between the source language (SL) and the target language (TL).They take efforts to explore the relationships involved in translation, such as relationship between the author and the translator, relationship between the readers and the author, relationship between the source text (ST) and the target text (TT), and relationship between the respective cultural contexts of the ST and TT. These researches render translation a more ambitious vision.In translation, difference and identity are two essential concepts and translators unavoidably encounter these two concepts from time to time. The commonness between languages and cultures constitutes the translatability of translation while the counterpart difference accounts for the necessity of translation. It is the commonness and difference that make translation possible but challenging as well. Furthermore, the fundamental issue, whether it is in translation practice or translation studies, may arise like this: how should we treat the difference between languages and cultures. Considering the heterogeneity of the languages and cultures, translators may adopt varied strategies in translation. So their translation may bear diverse variations.Domesticization and foreignization, as two different translation strategies, have been one of the focuses of translation studies and debates carried out among translation researchers. Generally speaking, foreignization refers to the type of translation in which a target text is produced which deliberately breaks target conventions by retaining something of the foreignness of the original while domesticization describes the translation strategy in which a transparent fluent style is adopted in order to minimize the strangeness of the foreign text for target language readers. Domestication is an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target language cultural values,bringing the author of the source language into the target language culture.This entails translation in a transparent,fluent,"invisible"style in order to minimize the foreignness of the target text. And foreignization constitutes an ethno-deviant pressure on (target language culture) values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad".It is"highly desirable", in an effort to restrain the ethnocentric violence of translation. In other words, the foreignization strategy can restrain the"violently"domesticating cultural values of the English language world.Should translators domesticize the ST for the sake of fluency of the TT in the target language or foreignize the ST to restore the heterogeneity of the ST? The choice appears vital in today's contexts where globalization is speeding up.Ancient Chinese poetry can be compared to a unique flower in the garden of Chinese literature. Translation is a favorable way to inform people in other countries about ancient Chinese poetry and Chinese culture. Xu is a diligent translator who makes great efforts to translate some ancient Chinese poems in both English and French and has achieved a lot. Xu advocates that a translator should pursue beauty in sound, meaning and form in ancient Chinese poetry translation and he applies this principle to his translation practice. To some extent, his translation theory on the ancient Chinese poetry is a departure from those that ancient Chinese poetry should be translated in free verse. However, various problematic practices are found in Xu's translation. I think Xu's translation of ancient Chinese poetry can be called as dometicization-oriented. In Xu's translated texts, fluent and rhymed sentences are painstakingly pursued whereas the heterogeneous elements in the original texts are ignored.To illustrate my point, I am going to analyze in this thesis some poems which Xu translated into English.The structure of the thesis is like this: in Chapter One the relationship between difference and translation, the ethical turn and the ethics of difference are discussed; in Chapter Two, domestication and foreignization are explored; in Chapter Three, a brief introduction of Xu Yuanchong and his translation theory are presented; in Chapter Four, some of poetic-texts translated by Xu are analyzed; in the part of Conclusion, the pursuit of beauty and difference in ancient Chinese poetry translation is discussed.