The Development Of Chinese Poetic Language Seen Through The Translation Of Tagore's Poems

During the period of May 4th Movement when the Vernacular Movement was being carried out, foreign poetry was introduced and translated into China, and the translating method of Europeanization was employed. In the cultural movement of that time, Europeanization was a controversial phenomenon not to be ignored. There were two totally different views. Some scholars held the idea that Europeanization was positive enough to enrich the vocabulary and grammar of the Chinese language, and contributed a great number of expressions to it; while others harshly criticized the Europeanized grammar and vocabulary, insisting that they had destroyed the original order and aesthetic feelings of Chinese.Nowadays, some people still hold a one-sided view that Europeanization has done harm to Chinese language and resulted in loss of its original beauty and elegance. They also think that Europeanization has deprived the Chinese language of its individuality, emotive force as well as its unique glamour. This thesis holds a point which is to some extent opposite to these ideas and attempts to give detailed interpretation to this issue, with some data drawn from the translation of Tagore's prose poems in the period of May 4th Movement.The basic theory employed in this thesis is language contact theory. Language contact may cause structural change, such as borrowing of some exotic elements or syntactic constructions. Through language contact, one party would take in some elements of the other party to enrich and improve its own expressive structures. In the cultural movement of 20th century, there was more indirect contact between Chinese and English in the form of written literature, which led many to believe that the western modes of thinking and their precise grammatical system characterizing the English language were brought into Chinese. In that process of language contact, the translation activity was the primary channel. Many translators carried over the constructions of the language they were translating into their translated versions, and then into the writing in Chinese language. Therefore, to some extent, translation can be regarded as a kind of language contact which enriched Chinese expressions and pushed forward the vernacular movement at that time.New verse may not develop fast without taking in new ingredients from foreign prose poems. Based on the language contact theory, this thesis makes a case study on the translation of Tagore's prose poem in the period of May 4th Movement. A quantified statistics is carried out with four primary works of poetry translated by Bing Xin and Zheng Zhenduo, namely, Stray Birds, The Gardener, The Crescent Moon and Gitanjali: Song Offerings. Three typical syntactic structures---word order change, the passive voice with"被"and the differentiation of the third pronoun"he"are elaborated successively.An important finding would be made that many syntactic structures and expressive methods are Europeanized through the course of the translation, and even later make their appearance in the Chinese new verse language. As time goes on, this kind of exotic usage has made contribution to the development of Chinese language. We might say that the translation of prose poems and the employment of Europeanization were of great importance at that time and remains so today.Through the case study of Tagore'poem translation, this thesis reaches a conclusion that language researchers should do justice to Europeanization as well as to the translation of foreign poetry of that time , and thus pay more attention to their positive significance.