| From ancient times to contemporary age and from home to abroad, poems, as the terse genre, are always used to express the intricate emotion and the unconstrained feelings. Chinese culture has made indisputable influences on the cultural progress of mankind with her splendor and brilliance as well as her trace of a long history. In the respect of literature, especially, the classical Chinese poetry which embodies an independent style of national feature is one of the most important forms of classical Chinese literature. Throughout the totally several thousand years' history in China, numerous outstanding poets occurred and composed numerous volumes of poems in various styles, such as Chuci poetry, Shi poetry, Ci poetry and Qu poetry, etc.Classical Chinese poetry is not only the treasure of Chinese literature, but also a brilliant pearl in the world literature. More and more scholars have paid many efforts to the translation of classical Chinese poetry, since the poems place a very important position in the world literary history. Then a question occurs: whether the classical Chinese poetry can be translated or not. One school has the affirmation that the poems are translatable, while the other has the opposite view. The debate on translatability and untranslatability of classical Chinese poetry have been discussed and argued for a long time. Based on Professor Gu Zhengkun's five categories concerning poetry translation: (1) completely translatable factor; (2) mostly translatable factor; (3) half translatable factor; (4) less than half translatable factor; (5) untranslatable factor (Gu Zhengkun, 2005:93), the present author thinks that the transference of the similarities and the commonness among different languages is evidently feasible, that's to say, there exists the translatability of poetry translation and the view that the poems are completely untranslatable is wrong. However, lots of limitations occur when we transfer some messages with diverse features across different languages. That's not only because "there exist the exclusiveness in different language system, but because there lacks of equivalence in the original and target language" (Xu Jun, 2005:82). Thus the author draws a conclusion: it is inevitable to realize the re-creativeness in the English translation of CCP. In addition to the influence of the differences in language systems, the author makes an analysis of the necessity of re-creativeness in C-E poetry translation from other angles: the influence of the differences between Chinese and English in culture, the impact of the target receptors, the subjectivity of translators and the requirements of linguistics, etc.We can literally translate the completely translatable factors into the target language. As for the factors that we can't translate in literal way, Professor Xu Jun says: "in order to make the translated versions to be accepted by the target receptors without any destruction of the value, we have to probe into the possible ways to realize the active transference" (Xu Jun, 2005:82). That's to say we should have a comprehensive recognition of the inevitability and necessity of re-creative thinking in the English translation of classical Chinese poetry, and then adopt re-creative ways to overcome such problems and make the translated version to be accepted by the target receptors.On basis of the analysis of many examples concerning C-E poetry translation, the present author sums up some re-creative methods which can group into three parts according to the three main elements of poetry—form, sound and meaning. At the same time, the author points out that these re-creative methods are not like the formulae in Mathematics, we should apply different re-creative ways according to different problems. The methods are summarized in order to expand the train of thoughts. |
