A Study On The Afterlife Of The Classical Chinese Poems In Ezra Pound's Cathay

The thesis focuses on the afterlife of the classical Chinese poems in Ezra Pound's Cathay through an elaborated analysis of Pound's Cathay.Deconstruction has long been influencing traditional translation theories. In "The Task of The Translator", Walter Benjamin, who is regarded as the founder of deconstructive translation theory, proposes a brand new relationship between the original and the translation, i.e., the survival of the original depends on the translation, its afterlife. Having attained Fenollosa's manuscript, Pound translated nineteen classical Chinese poems into English and published the anthology Cathay which has assumed a unique position in the history of English translation of classical Chinese poems. Cathay has enjoyed enormous popularity in the West and has a far-reaching influence on Imagist poetry, although many Chinese scholars and translators can hardly believe that it deserves to be called a translation work due to its numerous inaccuracies and errors resulting from Pound's ignorance of the Chinese language and his free inventions. Aiming at achieving a better understanding of Cathay, the thesis is neither to defend nor to criticize Pound, but to investigate how classical Chinese poetry gains its afterlife in Cathay and in Imagist poetry with the help of Benjamin's idea of "afterlife".As a revolt against conventional thoughts, deconstruction overthrows the traditional dualistic mode of thinking in Western philosophy, and Benjamin turns the relationship between the original and the translation upside down by claiming that the translation is not the derivation or adherence, but the afterlife or survival of the original.As a leader of Imagism, Pound benefits quite a lot from the Sinologist and poet Fenollosa. In translation Pound aims at direct treatment of the thing and the transmission of the...