Parallelism And Deviation In Poetry Translation

Guo Moruo is a great translator as well as a poet, scholar and archeologist. His translation has a unique style. Most studies of him are confined to his literary creation, only a few are focused on his translation. Of those who have studied Guo's translation, few have adopted linguistic approaches. Traditional opinion towards Guo's translation is that he is in favor of free translation or, as he claims, flavor translation.Derived from Russian Formalism, foregrounding theory mainly deals with the language forms that stick out of the background of language and deviate from the norms of language, trying to dig up their thematic significance. Deviation and parallelism are the two basic forms of foregrounding. The former is marked by choosing beyond the norm of language while the latter is marked by repeating the same choice. The importance of the foregrounding theory to translation criticism and translation practice lies in that the foregrounded features are always thematically significant, thus based on to what extent the translation has retained the original foregrounding, we can tell to what extent it has grasped the original thematic significance. Translation practice can be guided in the same way.The study analyzes Guo's poetry translation within the framework of foregrounding theory. The first chapter is an introduction of foregrounding theory and its development. It also serves as a summary of related translation strategies and his translation practice. The second chapter discusses how the foregrounding is handled by Guo Moruo at the level of phonology. Parallelism and deviation are discussed respectively. The third chapter focuses on the syntactic foregrounding and its translation in Guo's version. Also, deviation and parallelism are brought under discussion. The fourth chapter is mainly about Guo's translation of metaphor and symbolism, two aspects of semantic foregrounding. Chapter five is a summary of Guo's translation strategies. The limitation of applying the foregrounding theory to translation practice and possible further study are also mentioned.According to the analysis, the author believes that Guo is not supposed to be regarded as a translator who favors free translation. His statement of flavor translation is indeed a strategy that foregrounding should, to the utmost extent, be transplanted and retained in the translation at different linguistic levels while those poetic forms that are not foregrounded can be adjusted.