Xu Yuanchong's Art Of Creation And Rivalry In Translating Poetry

Xu Yuanchong is an outstanding representative of contemporary Chinese translators. He translates a large amount of classical Chinese poetry, and makes great contribution to spreading Chinese culture and promoting the status of Chinese literature in the world. Moreover, Xu Yuanchong not only devotes to translation practice but also inherits and develops Chinese traditional translation theory and puts forward the first complete translation theory system in Chinese translation history—"Art of beautifulization and creation of the best as in rivalry". Xu's translation theory breaks forth Chinese translation tradition based on "faithfulness" and brings forward a new artistic pursuit of "beauty" according to the characteristics of literature translation.Xu Yuanchong's translation theory, especially his theory of "creation" and "rivalry", leads to great controversy. There form two groups—that for the theory and against the theory. Most evaluators make comments on this theory from the point of "faithfulness", but they overlook the great cultural gap between Chinese and western cultures.This paper makes a detailed analysis about Xu Yuanchong's translation theory of "creation" and "rivalry". In theory, this theory includes ontological point, methodology, teleology and epistemology thus states the theory completely and systemically; furthermore, Xu's theory has the same nature with the American translation theorist Eugene A. Nida's theory--"functional equivalence"; at the same time, it is the development of Chinese traditional translation theories. In practice, there are great differences between Chinese and western cultures and this feature is reflected in literature works especially in poetry. In poetry, many words and rhetoric devices have the characteristics particular to a nation or have deep connotative cultural meanings. Blindly faithful translation may result in the actual unfaithfulness. The creation that changes surface forms of the original text is necessary and the idea of making rivalry with the original text will guide the translators to make full use of...