Manipulating And Manipulated

As a great political leader, Mao Zedong is an outstanding poet as well.The poetry created during Mao's political practice of more than fivedecades is a peak of classical Chinese poetry and bright pearl of Chineseliterary treasury. Mao's personal charm and the great appeal of Chineseliterature have held much attraction for scholars and translators at homeand abroad to translate Mao's poetry into different versions of variouslanguages which enjoy great popularity all over the world.The English versions discussed in this thesis are Mao Tsetung Poemspublished by Foreign Languages Press in 1976 and Selected Poems ofMao Zedong translated by professor Xu Yuanzhong and published byChina Translation & Publishing Corporation in 1993. Firstly the authorintroduces the original text including its artistic features, status in Chineseliterature, and a survey of its English versions at home and abroad. Thenthe author elaborates the studying perspective: the translator'ssubjectivity and the manipulation theory, focusing on the display of thetranslator's subjectivity and the influence from ideology and poetics onthe translator. In the following content a comparison of the two versionsis made at the levels of words, sentence, form and sound. At last, from theperspective of the translator's subjectivity and the manipulation theory the author re-evaluates the two versions, putting forward that manipulatedby the dominant social ideology in translation, the translator ismanipulating translation under the help of his (or her) own subjectiveconsciousness simultaneously. Such a relationship of manipulating andbeing manipulated provides a new angle to explore how a translation iscreated under the influence of factors in the ideological realm, which isconducive to our just and objective judgment about different versions ofthe same work, Besides, such a relationship inspires us to examine therelationship between the national culture and the exotic culture at a newlevel.