The Aesthetics Of Cohesion And Coherence In Xu Yuanchong's English Versions Of CCPs

According to Gestalt psychology, psychological phenomena present themselves as a whole in their structure in the human being's mind. So a person's reflection of an object is not the simple add-up of his feelings on its separate parts but the generalization of its essence. This kind of generalization of human mind is of the basic nature of the Gestalt psychology.Chinese ancient poetry is the essence of the Chinese traditional culture. And Sino-English poetic translation is an important way to introduce the gem to the world. The translation is meant to have the foreign readers have approximate feelings as those of the original language (Nida, 1964). The course of the reader's understanding of translated works is a kind of process in which they continuously communicate and reconstruct the relative information stored in their mind and accepted in the new text, which is also a process of Gestalt cognition (Li Yunxing, 2001). So the translator is required to pay attention to the unity and harmony of his version. That is to say the process of the reproduction of the English version requires the translator to make more efforts in the application of textual cohesion and coherence, instead of just the transformation of the surface meaning of the original text. Textual cohesion and coherence means the unity of the text, including the cohesion and coherence in terms of phonetic patterning, lexicon, sentence cohesion, and so on.As a master of poetic translation, Xu Yuanchong's theory of "three beauties" is actually a kind of textual translation from the perspective of aesthetics, which advocates the union of the beauties of meaning, sound and form in poetic translation. Actually, the beauties of the three respects are the basic features of Chinese classical poems and the harmony of these respects can direct the readers to have a deeper understanding of the Chinese culture, which is in accord with the basic theory of Gestalt psychology approved by the thesis. On the other hand, lots of critics have made their comments on Xu's English version of Chinese classical poems from different aspects in terms of translation theory, translating skills and so on. However, few of the comments are from the nature of human thought and textual cohesion and coherence. This paper aims to a more detailed explanation and appreciation of his works from these two angles, with the hope of helping the readers to further their understanding of textual cohesion and coherence and make progress in their writing; meanwhile, the author hopes that the translators can gain some insights from this study in terms of literary translation so as to produce more comprehensive and harmonious versions.The whole thesis consists of four chapters in addition to the introduction and conclusion. The introduction mainly introduces the reason and purpose of the choice of this topic. At the same time, a discussion on the theoretical basis, research methodology and data collection is to be provided.Chapter One is the literature review of the studies on theories of the poetic translation of different styles in different times and the studies of the comments on Xu's English version of ancient Chinese poems. At the end of the section, the author points out the focus of this thesis.The second chapter presents the concept and composition of textual cohesion and coherence. The author introduces the aesthetic levels and their characteristics of poetic translation, which lays the foundation for the author to analyze Xu's English version in the next chapter.In chapter three, the backbone of the whole thesis, the author makes a detailed analysis on the textual cohesion and coherence of Xu's version from three aspects—textual cohesion and coherence in terms of phonetic patterning, lexicon, and sentence cohesion.The fourth chapter is a discussion of the implication of the study for and its application to translation and English writing.The last part is a brief summary of the whole thesis. It summarizes the contribution and limitations of the thesis and points out the prospects for future research.