A Tentative Study Of Metaphor And Its Translation In English Poetry

The study of metaphor has a long history, which can be traced back to Aristotle's time 2000 years ago. However, in the traditional sense, it is confined to the field of rhetoric. Metaphor is merely regarded as a rhetorical device to decorate language, just like the frosting on the cake, sweet and delicious in taste, but not really necessary. Since the 1930s, the study of metaphor has broken through the rhetoric restriction. Experts and scholars of various disciplines have explored metaphor from diverse perspectives such as cognitive science and psychology. Through two thousand years'development, the study of metaphor has achieved fruitful results. Various theories such as comparison theory, substitution theory, interaction theory and cognitive theory have been put forward successively.Nevertheless, there are relatively few writings expounding the specific methods of metaphor translation. Poetry is a sea of metaphor. English poetry, as a shining flower in the world literature, is the treasure-house of metaphor. It is an arduous and significant mission to explore ways to translate metaphor in English poetry into Chinese, for Chinese and English belong to different language families, and China and the western world have different cultures, customs and language styles, etc. This thesis expounds such features of metaphor as its definition and formation, systematically reviews the achievements in the theoretical study of metaphor, explicitly discusses the relationship between poetry and metaphor, the semantic structure of metaphor in English poetry and other issues. On the basis of the metaphor translation procedures proposed by Newmark, this thesis attempts to summarize three strategies, which are applicable to the translation of metaphor in English poetry, namely (1) recurrence of metaphor from the source language to the target language; (2) transference of metaphor into simile; (3) desertion of metaphor into non-metaphor. By illustration and analysis of concrete examples of metaphor in English poetry, these three strategies are further classified into seven translation approaches, i.e.,①reproduction of the same image in the target language;②replacement of the image in the source language by a standard target language image;③preservation of the same metaphor combined with sense;④transference of metaphor into simile retaining the image;⑤transference of metaphor into simile combined with sense;⑥conversion of metaphor to sense;⑦deletion of metaphor. Moreover, this thesis draws upon Xu Yuanchong (许渊冲)'s"Three Beauty Criterion"(beauty in form, sound and meaning) in the translation of poetry, so as to discuss the practice of translating metaphor in English poetry.As I. A. Richards (1953) asserts that translating is probably the most complex type of event in the history of the cosmos, the translation of metaphor in English poetry is by no means an easy job. Hopefully, this thesis can shed some light on the theory and practice of the translation of metaphor in English poetry.