Aesthetic Empathy And Artistic Concretization In Poetry Translation

This thesis aims to explore the significance of aesthetic empathy in the artistic concretization of poetry translation.Poetry is the most subtle and delicate type of literature.It is the natural overflow of human emotions.The success or failure of a translation work depends,to a large extent,on whether the translator has aroused similar aesthetic and emotional experiences in TL readers.Emotions are the very entities that artists want to bring out. As emotion plays a significant role in poetry translation,this Author,by way of objective description,comes up with the idea that poetry translation must not only be beautiful in meaning,sound and form,as put forward by Prof.Xu Yuanzhong,but also be beautiful in emotion.And this beauty in emotion can be realized by the application of empathy.Empathy,an aesthetic concept elaborated by Theodor Lipps,a German aesthetician,emphasizes a process of feeling into the emotions expressed in the movements or dynamic postures of people,aesthetic objects or natural scenes(引自朱光潜,2002:590).It is of great significance in poetry translation.Actually,some literary critics in China such as Liu Xie also put forward similar concepts with empathy.The whole thesis can be divided into six chapters.The first chapter emphasizes the definition of poetry from the perspective of emotional conveyance and lists some comments on the functions of poetry translation.Among these,Xu Yuanzhong's "theory of three beauties"(beauties in meaning,sound,and form)in poetry translation is listed as a guiding principle in the judgment of poetry transition.But this Author of the thesis,strongly believing that emotion is the most important part in poetry translation,adds the beauty of emotion to XYZ's "three beauties".Chapter two gives a brief introduction to the concept of empathy from both psychological and aesthetic perspectives.Empathy functions at both levels of form and content.This chapter also lists some empathic obstacles which lead to the fact that poetry translation is only a matter of translatability.Chapter three discusses the relativity in poetry translation.The issue of translatability and untranslatability has long been in dispute.This author first lists the untranslatable factors in linguistics and culture.Then,more importantly,the reasons of translatability are mentioned.Finally a conclusion is made that the poetry translation is a matter of relativity.Chapter four points out that poetry translation is an art.Poetry translation is a work of re-creation.Its language is aesthetic and artistic.Unlike science which lays emphasis on accuracy and preciseness,poetry translation is full of fuzzy beauty. Besides,poetry translation contains many sensuous images,which conforms to Hegel's definition of art.Chapter five introduces the use of empathy in the artistic concretization of poetry translation in form and content.The author first argues that form and content are integral contributing factors in artistic materialization.Form is understood at both phonetic and syntactic levels.And content is touched upon from the aspects of theme, style,pattern of association,and figures of speech.Whether in form and content,only by application of empathy can the translation be made appealing and moving.The last chapter concludes that translator should be competent in language, culture,aesthetic awareness in order to bring out satisfactory translation works.This thesis adopts a descriptive rather than a prescriptive approach to my investigation of aesthetic empathy in poetry translation in order to reach an understanding of the procedures undertaken in the act of translation.Not only linguistic analyses such as phonetic and semantic analysis,but also aesthetic psychology and artistic criticism have been used in this thesis.This Author holds that the translating process is not a mere procedure to replace one text with another,for it involves dynamic mental activities as intermediary agents. Therefore the traditional static procedure of analyzing texts is supplemented by a concern with the dynamics of the translation process.