Blending Theory And Poetry Translation

Poetry is a special literary form. It has added a most illustrious chapter to the annals of classical Chinese literature. Today with the rapid development of cultural exchange, Chinese poetry translation, upon which more and more attention is fixed, is increasingly prosperous in the field of literary translation. Although at present there are a lot of English translations of Chinese ancient poetry, the quality is not so satisfactory. How to introduce Chinese poetry with more original taste to the outside world? This is an inevitable and serious task to every literary translator. Chinese poetic language is extremely implicit and concise, especially the image with unique artistic charm. A translator's cognition of image and his cognitive level will not only decide his operation on image encoding and decoding in translating process directly, but also influence the quality of the version greatly. It can be said that image translation is the core of poetry translation. The thesis aims to improve the quality of translation by discussing the transfer of Chinese poetic image into English translation in terms of the blending space theory.First, the "Blending Space Theory" of cognitive linguistics is introduced. It is a systematic cognitive theory with four cognitive spaces. Second, the origin and evolution about image are stated. Chinese poetic image has larger scope and is subtler than the image in Imagism. Third, this cognitive method is applied to the analysis of the author's blending operation in his poetry-creating process. Following that is the further study on interaction of the mappings and projections of several images in the frame of Chinese culture during readers' comprehending process. In the perspective of blending theory translation is destructed into two independent blending processes.As for the evaluation of translating effect, we can conclude it fromthe further theoretical analyses and detailed questionnaire investigations of the two versions of "Autumn Thought" that Schlepp's strategy, literal translation is more suitable in poetry translation. Literal translation can make the version more closed to the original one and leave as large imaginative room as possible to readers. Based on this, the conclusion is drawn that in poetry translation literal translation should be employed, succinct poetic language should be used to give readers the largest aesthetic space where readers can experience whatever they find. In the practice of Chinese ancient poetry translation, the original appearance of ancient poetry and its initial poetic image should be preserved. What we try to pursue is: the more original, the better. At the same time, the principle should be followed that two parties are equal in the context of intercultural communications.