A Study Of Bian Zhilin's Self-Translation

From the 1940s on, the great translator and poet Bian Zhilin (shortened as Bian hereinafter) published altogether 20 self-translated English poems of his Chinese originals. These 20 self-translated poems have certain studying value because they typically represent Bian's combing roles of a poet and a translator. While in the numerous existing theses and monographs about Bian Zhilin, most of them merely focus on his being a poet or being a translator separately and rare pays attention to his two roles together, let alone to the subject of his self-translation.Bian's many valuable theories on poems-writing and poems-translation, especially his emphases on rhythm and rhyme, have great and profound influences on both his own practice and the development of Chinese new-style poetry. On the basis of Bian's poems-writing and poems-translation theories, this thesis, by a thorough analysis on the features of Bian's 20 original Chinese poems mainly from the perspectives of such poetic forms as rhythm, rhyme and structure, and by a detailed comparison between his English-Chinese poems translation style and self-translation style, gets an important phenomenon that Bian's self-translated versions couldn't strictly follow his some relating theories in rhythm and rhyme but make good transformation in inner structure.This thesis, by a series of researches on this phenomenon, aims to make a discussion on the cause, significance and impact of such self-translation style as well as the significance of Bian's self-translation activity and the significance of its study.