On The Translation Of Ancient Chinese Narrative Poetry: A Narratological Analysis

Ancient narrative poetry, for its unique style and function, has an important position in literature field. From Shijing(《诗经》)to the Tang Dynasty narrative poems, narrative techniques have got tremendous development, which contributes a lot to the development of ancient Chinese dramas and novels. Narrative poetry not only has the general features as poetry, such as rhythm and style, but also contains the narrative elements, such as speech, plots and structure. For the narrative poems, the thematic significance derives from the surface meaning and the deep level connotation. Therefore, during the translation process of narrative poetry, translators not only need to regard the general features of poetry, but also attend better to narrative elements of poetry.Narratology is the scientific study of narrative. Different from other theories of literary criticism, it adopts the linguistic models to research on the inner rules of narrative works and the interrelationship among various elements. In recent years narratology has been introduced into the literature translation study. However, most studies generally focus on the fiction translation but only few on the translation of narrative poetry, which also presents the distinctive narrative features. From this point, the thesis attempts to apply the theory of narratology to the translation practice of narrative poetry, aiming to propose a new method to the poem translation practice and criticism.Changhen Ge and Pipa Xing, as the representatives of classical narrative poems, contain most typical narrative features of ancient Chinese narrative poetry. They are translated into English by many translators both at home and broad. For the sake of the case analysis, different versions of the two poems are introduced. By presenting the narrative features of the original and comparing the transference of narrative perspective, speech presentation and narrative image in different versions, the thesis comes to the conclusion that only if the translation successfully transfers the narrative type of the source text can it completely convey the thematic significance and aesthetic values of the original. In this sense, the thesis proves that narratology is instructive for narrative poem translation and provides objective evaluation for literary translation criticism.