Image Reconstruction In Chinese-English Poetry Translation From The Perspective Of Hermeneutics Theory

Poetry translation has played a very significant role in disseminating a country's culture to the outside world. Scholars of both at home and abroad have done a large amount of research on poetry translation from various perspectives. Image, as a means to convey the meaning and present the artistic appeal of poetry and an indispensable element of poetry, is considered as the soul of poetry, so its importance in poetry translation should by no means be neglected. Nevertheless, image translation involves a myriad of aesthetic and cultural factors, a shared image in two cultures may often bear different connotations, even if the same image has been honestly transferred to the target language, it still cannot arouse the same aesthetic feelings among the target readers, as a result, the original poet's intention cannot be demonstrated in the translated poem. Hence a translator, when translating images, reconstruction is a must to help the poet realize his intention and arouse the closest aesthetic feelings in both the original readers and the target readers. However, so far, statistics show that research concerning this aspect is still far from enough among the translation circle.This thesis, by adopting Ezra Pound's translation of Chinese poetry as a case study, aims to explore image reconstruction in Chinese-English classical poetry translation from the prospective of hermeneutics theory pioneered by Hans-George Gadamer, who proposed two important conceptions: "prejudice" and "fusion of horizon". "Prejudice" refers to the judgment and orientation of an interpreter formed under a certain historical condition. "Horizon" is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. Since each horizon is unique, so when the horizon of the interpreter and the horizon of the text encounter with each other, "fusion of horizon" occurs. This thesis is intended to analyze the reasons of image reconstruction so as to verify the reasonability and significance of image reconstruction in poetry translation; to reveal the process of image reconstruction, namely, when the translator begins to reconstruct image in poetry translation, he would first interpret the original image with his "prejudice". Later, when he begins to reconstruct image, he also would take into account the target readers' "prejudice". The author of the thesis summarized four "prejudices" which determined Pound's image reconstruction with the help of a case study to exemplify how these "prejudices" determine Pound's image reconstruction. Finally, the paper attempts to explore the possible limitations which hampered image reconstruction, namely, cultural defaulting and cultural misreading.Image reconstruction is a very complex phenomenon involving not only linguistics, stylistics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, but also studies on psychology and cognitive activities. This thesis is only a tentative research on image reconstruction from hermeneutics theory based only on limited data, and the conclusions drawn in this thesis need to be further explored.