Iconicity And Poetry Translation

Iconicity, or motivation, as one of the important theories in semiotics and cognitive linguistics, has been under heated discussion both at home and abroad. With great efforts, linguists have described a great amount of iconic phenomena in language, and generalized many iconicity principles and fully developed the theoretical system of iconicity. In recent years, scholars have set out to combine iconicity theory with stylistics, and have had fruitful achievements. This thesis, based on the current studies of the application of iconicity to stylistic analysis and literary appreciation, makes an attempt to apply iconicity theory to poetry translation between Chinese and English. Such a research is believed to be able to shed new light on poetry tanslation study.Iconicity theory regards linguistic structures and forms as directly reflecting concepts and experience structures. In other words, there exists an inherent connection between linguistic form and content, namely, iconicity. After a brief review of iconic study in literature and a systematic introduction on iconicity theory, which includes its historical concern and theoretical foundations, the definition and classification of iconicity, this thesis maintains that the theory of iconicity provides us with a new perspective for the poetry translation, and enables us to reassess the significance of poetic form as well as the debate between form and content as a long standing issue in poetry translation. K. Wales points out:"literature can be regarded as iconic in the broad sense that its form may strive to imitate in various ways the reality it represents."(qtd. in Wang Shouyuan, 1996: 256) And there is no exception to poetry. According to Peirce's trichotomy of the sign, iconicity can be classified into three subtypes correspondingly: imagic iconicity, diagrammatic iconicity and metaphorical iconicity. Here we shall restrict our study to imagic iconicity and diagrammatic iconicity, the former identifies two types of iconicity: phonological iconicity and graphological iconicity, while the latter, the iconic principles of order, quantity, symmetry and distance. A systematic research into iconic phenomena with many examples in poetry text(both Chinese and English) proves that iconicity, as an important rhetorical device in poetry creation, pervasively exists in poetry discource. In other words, linguistc forms on such levels as sound, word, sentence and text resemble, to some extent, what they refer to. Such an investigation is valuable for the argument of translatability in poetry translation and the translator's comprehension of the texts and choices of translation strategies.In a word, as long as the poetry translation study from the perspective of iconicity theory is concerned, the thesis argues that a translator, besides a theoretical basis and skills of poetry translation, should pay more attention to the iconic motivations underlying the poetic language so that he can reproduce such motivations in the target poetry to achieve the same or similar iconic effects of the source text. Meanwhile, a poetry translator also should take note of cultural differences, which are beyong the discussion of this thesis, in addition to the transference between the two languages since poetry translation relates to not only languages but also cultures.It must be noted that this research has no intention in exaggerating the role of iconicity, or in denying the arbitrary principle of linguistic signs, but brings new light in poetry translation and widens the scope of poetry translation study.