On English-Chinese Poetry Translation

Alexander Pope is one of the greatest poets in English Enlightenment and his long heroic couplet, An Essay on Man, is now regarded as an important part of the eighteenth-century literary tradition. However, the poem is severely under-researched in China both in terms of discussions on this poem itself and its Chinese translations—there have been no authoritative or comprehensive research and the only full Chinese version of it was produced in classical Chinese by a missionary more than one hundred years ago.The current research is basically a research in translation practice of An Essay on Man. It has included the following tasks: 1) Looking into the background of the poem; 2) Discussing the essential meanings and characteristics of this poem; 3) Collecting and evaluating the existent Chinese versions of the poem; 4) Constructing a strategic mode for guiding its translation; 5) Applying the mode to work out a new Chinese version of "the design" and the first two epistles, which is the major effort of this research; 6) Evaluating the effectiveness of the mode. As to the methodology, this research mainly involves induction and deduction.It can be concluded that the translation of a classical poem such as An Essay on Man requires a serious research into its author, historic background, possible meaning, characteristics, and many other related issues. The translation practice shows that there is always a gap between the ideal version and the realized one and the process of translation insists leading the way by itself instead of the translator. Moreover, as no complete equivalence can be actually achieved between two languages in poetry translation, the translator should constantly adjust his/her strategy and pre-set objectives in translating process. Although it is impossible to realize full dynamic equivalence in the final translated version, the guiding value of the translation policy is beyond doubt for translators of classical works.