A Cognitive Approach To The Translation Of Poetic Metaphor

"Prose is words in their best order; poetry is the best words in their best order."Coleridge's remark demonstrates the unique value of poetry as the most important literary genre. However, by contending"poetry is what gets lost in translation", Frost represents an opinion that poetry is untranslatable. This is true in a sense that every poem is the unity of form and meaning, with linguistic transformation, certain poetic elements such as sound, meter and rhythm, inevitably get lost in translation. Then how to preserve the essence of a poem while displacing its linguistic form is a predicament, in which any translator struggles hard. As one poetic element, metaphor can be found in almost every poem; it is fairly called the soul or backbone of poetry. By way of metaphor, poets are able to express something that cannot be otherwise communicated. However, the study of metaphor is controversial and complicated. Traditionally metaphor is regarded as a rhetoric device or alternative way of expression. Advent of cognitive linguistics renovates people's stereotypes on metaphor. Cognitive linguists regard metaphor as a basic cognitive model that people adopt subconsciously to understand and describe abstract concepts in terms of concrete concepts which can be directly experienced. Now that metaphor is a cognitive phenomenon rather than simply a linguistic ornament, a poet's cognitive world is embodied in the way s/he elaborates metaphors. Poetic essence resides in the intrinsic structure of the language a poet uses. So metaphor in poetry is practically the key to understanding and transferring poetic essence. If the translator strives to recreate a metaphor in another language, s/he can at least preserve the"poésie"(poetic essence) embodied in it and bring it alive in translation. The challenge is how to preserve the poet's originality while in the meantime not let cultural differences get in the way of proper understanding and appreciation.With further development of cognitive linguistics, cognitive approaches to translation arise as well. Especially in recent years, conceptual integration theory is regarded by researchers as better in explaining translation process. Translating practice is treated as blending process, and a conceptual blending network of translation is proposed. The network involves four mental spaces, i.e. input space1: the source text; input space 2: the translator' mental space; generic space: similarities of the two inputs; and blended space: the translation. The blending process consists of two sub-processes: the de-integration of the conceptual structure out of the source text; then the integration of the conceptual structure with translator's encyclopedic knowledge of the target language. Conceptual structure is a kind of mental representation through linguistic expression and the very essence that should be preserved and woven into translation. All translating practices fall into this blending network, so does metaphor translation.Inspired by cognitive views on metaphor and translation, the author has the conceptual blending network of translation specified for poetic metaphor. Through illustrating elements and stages in the blending process, the author proposes points for attention and a criterion system for translating operation of poetic metaphor. Translating a metaphor is much more than finding equivalent expressions for the image and the object. It involves a dynamic language processing: to comprehend the source text alternately at different levels of meaning; and to decide what structure to emerge into the blend. Then the thesis applies the above stated theory to Auguries of Innocence and Xiangchou (Nostalgia), and does a comparative study on each poem's translated versions of different styles. After analyzing and comparing the performances of each version in copying the conceptual structures, the thesis concludes that when it comes to translating poetic metaphor, it is crucial to preserve the conceptual structures of the original metaphor, in order to close on the poet's cognitive world and originality. So the strategy of foreignization should be considered as the first option. Nonetheless this criterion is not absolute. If keeping the conceptual structures will bring the translation beyond readers'cognitive abilities and cause misunderstandings, the translator may as well modify the structures as s/he sees fit, taking the strategy of domestication.This thesis attempts to study translation of poetic metaphor from a new perspective. The author hopes that the thesis could contribute to the study of metaphor translation and help translators to improve on poetry translation practice.