A Norm-Based Approach To Ezra Pound's Cathay

As one of the most influential literary figures in the 20th century in the West, Ezra Pound is a renowned poet, critic and translator. As a leading advocate of Imagist movement, Pound advanced greatly the development of modern poetry. In addition, he translated a number of classical Chinese poems with the Cathay as his representative work. By introducing Chinese poems to Western readers, Pound had contributed considerably to the communication between two cultures.The success of Cathay coexists with accusations from both critics and Sinologists. All the controversies focused on the creditability of Cathay as a collection of translations from Chinese. This paper, based on a target-oriented approach, investigates and analyzes Pound's translation in Cathay from a social and historical perspective.The thesis begins with a brief review of Pound's early poetics and principles of translation, indicating that Pound is a creative translator. By adopting the categorization of norms made respectively by Toury and Chesterman, the thesis makes a detailed descriptive analysis of Pound's translations in Cathay from different aspects in a given historical context. The preliminary norms and initial norms have contextualized Pound's translations in a given historical era, while the operational norms accounted for Pound's manipulation of the source texts. Expectancy norms and professional norms are adopted when the thesis takes into consideration other elements in translation process such as the readers' expectation, ethics and integrity of the translator. By means of descriptive study, the thesis concludes that various norms have been involved in the translation process, which in turn, governs the outcome of the target text. In conclusion, the translation of Cathay is a norm-governed activity, which breaks some old norms and strengthens new ones.