On Five Translations Of Mao Zedong's Poems

Mao Zedong is a very famous strategist and a great leader of the Chinese people. However, at the same time, he is a gifted and accomplished poet as well. He wrote scores of poems which have enjoyed great popularity for generations. Because of the particularities of the poet himself and the times when these poems were written, Mao Zedong's poems show his strong ideological orientation which clearly reveals one essential characteristic of his poems. Due to this feature, the translation of Mao Zedong's poems is a great challenge.This thesis discusses five different English versions from different times and by different scholars. The first version (V1) is also the only one translated by two foreigners in 1959 and the word-for-word one. V2, which is called "the official version", embodies the efforts of a group of distinguished scholars in 1976. V3 is the work of Huang Long in 1980. V4 and V5 are from two famous translators, Xu Yuanchong and Gu Zhengkun respectively in 1993.The ideological implications of these interpretations, which are brought out by the linguistic usage, are discussed in this thesis from three aspects, that is, sound-beauty (rhyme and reduplication), form-beauty (tune name, parallelism and line length) and meaning-beauty (verb choice, noun choice and adjective choice). These different translations are the expression of "the differing of the spacing and the deferring of temporalizing" or the "difference". "Differance", which was coined by Derrida, comes from the translation theory of deconstruction. Deconstruction originated from the 1960s by some scholars, including Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and others. The concept of "differance" emphasizes that the text is fluid and understandings of the same text are varied according to different spatial and temporal restraints. Interpreters put their understandings into their translations under the influence of different ideologies. The translations of Mao Zedong'g poems are the very proof to show the "the differing of the spacing and the deferring of temporalizing" or the "differance" of the original poems under the influence of the different ideologies. It is inferred and concluded therefore that a text (in this case.