On Translatability Of Chinese Classical Poetry

Poetry translation, especially Chinese classical poetry (CCP) translation has long been considered a controversial topic. Through more than a century's endeavor, many translators both home and abroad have produced a lot of literary translation works. The publishing of many English versions of CCP have proved its translatability; but whether they can perfectly reproduce the literary glamour or not is still in heat discussion. This dissertation is to explore the translatability and its limitation in translating Chinese classical poetryChinese classical poetry and English verses are very different in their way of creating beauty in sound, form and sense. These differences cause some barriers in the process of translating, such as the transference of metrics, the change of grammar, and the understanding of culture and aesthetics. With these problems as the base, this dissertation tries to explore the limits of translatability in CCP. China and English languages have their common channel for message transferring --- the principle of isomorphs in semantic systems, the identity of forms of thought, the regularity of grammar differences, equivalence of semantic systems and mutual cultural permeability make CCP translatable; but, on the other hand, the obstruction of interlingua transference, the fuzziness of language, and the difference of cultural tradition lead to the limits of translatability. With Xu Yuanchong's theory of"Three Beauty"as its base, the dissertation goes further to analyze the translatability of CCP from the three aspects of beauty in sound, form and sense by comparing a lot of classical poems with their English versions. The different linguistic features of English and Chinese decide the different metrical rules of their poems. To make the translation keep the same sound beauty as the original is very hard, and translators usually try their best to make the English versions at least partly rhymed to fulfill the sound beauty; and in some cases the regular beauty of form can also be partly or nearly kept. Then the dissertation explicitly points out that the limits of transferring the beauty of sense are mainly caused by the polysemy and fuzziness of Chinese...