On Ezra Pound's Creative Translation Of Tang Dynasty Poetry From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

On an extensive basis, relevance theory by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) was born with great applicability. And it has been proved to be so by the fact that it has already been successfully put used in many fields. In 1989, Ernst-August Gutt for the first time applied it to translation. He interpreted translation as a communication which adhered to the cognitive nature of human beings. Therefore scholars in translation ventured to expound different translation genres from the relevance-theoretic perspective, reaching fruition. As for poetry translation — a special genre in translation, it definitely can be examined from the perspective of relevance theory.Since poetry translation is too broad a topic to be discussed in this comparatively short thesis, Ezra Pound's (1885-1973) translation of the Chinese Tang Dynasty classical poetry will be the focus. Ezra Pound has translated many Chinese Tang Dynasty classical poems into English, making a great contribution to the Sino-American communication. However, in the history of translation, he has been quite a controversial character. People both in China and America have differed sharply in their opinions towards his translation. Some have considered his translation full of mistranslation and unfaithfulness while others have treated his translation as cannon in the poetry history. Quite surprisingly in recent years, some people initiate a positive turn to re-evaluate his translation and thinking highly of his poetry translation.This thesis tries to re-analyse and re-evaluate Ezra Pound's translation from a new angle provided by relevance theory so as to testify that Ezra Pound's creative translation of Chinese Tang Dynasty classical poetry is not mistranslation or unfaithfulness as people reckoned before. Instead, Ezra Pound's translation is rather a faithful and equivalent one in the cognitive sense, abiding by the cognitive nature of the human brain. Therefore, Ezra Pound's creative translation does not violate the faithfulness but represents a new level of...