On Aesthetic Representation Of Selected Modern Chinese Essays By Zhang Peiji

Essay is an important literary genre which, together with poetry, fiction and drama, has a history of several thousand years. "The modern Chinese essays" refer to the essays after the "May Fourth Movement" or after the introduction of the vernacular Chinese. During this period, a great number of outstanding essayists have emerged with a variety of excellent essays. However, so far the research on the translation of modern Chinese essays from translators and scholars is far from enough. For example, until now no monograph on the translation of modern Chinese essays is found, and very few MA or PhD theses centre around this theme, to say nothing of the research on the translation of modern Chinese essays from the perspective of translation aesthetics. Therefore, it's safe to say that the research on essay translation has long been lagging behind the research on the translation of other literary genres.Due to the huge differences between Chinese and English essays, the rendering of the Chinese essays into English (or vice versa) has never been an easy task, and there has even existed an opinion in the translation community that Chinese essays are actually untranslatable. However, most translation scholars hold that Chinese essays, being the essence of Chinese literature and the carrier of Chinese culture, are not only translatable but also worth translating. As one of the upholder of this view, Professor Zhangpeiji has long been devoting to the translation of modern Chinese essays, and thus has made a great contribution to the theoretical study as well as the practice of modern Chinese essays. The three volumes of Selected Modern Chinese Essays translated by him have been well received by readers and scholars, and are therefore worth further research due to the good reference and guidance they provide for the translation of modern Chinese essays.The emergence and development of aesthetics have provided a good platform and solid basis for the research of literature and of the translation of literary works. Aesthetics is a subject studying people's feeling towards beauty, and translation aesthetics is the combination of aesthetics and the research on translation, which has been attracting the attention from both scholars and translators. Translation aesthetics can better fit the research on literary translation since literature itself is the experience and representation of beauty, so the aesthetic awareness is of vital importance to translators in order to reproduce in the target text the same meaning, implication and aesthetic flavor of the original text. The author of the present thesis holds that the research on the translation of modern Chinese essays cannot be separated from aesthetics since the most typical characteristic of essays is loose in form but focused in soul, in other words, essay in the final analysis is the beauty of wholeness. The characteristics of essays decide that a good translation of essays should be the combination of form and soul, which can well be approached from the perspective of aesthetics.In view of the above, the author attempts to make a tentative study on the three volumes of Selected Modern Chinese Essays translated by Zhang Peiji on the basis of the translation aesthetics theory proposed by Professor Liu Miqing. From the angles of aesthetic subject, aesthetic object, aesthetic representation and aesthetic criteria, the author tries to conduct a relatively in-depth analysis on how the translated essays reproduce the aesthetic values of the original from various levels like phonetic level, lexical level, syntactic level, and cultural level so as to provide a reference and guidance to the theoretical research and translation practice of essays to some extent.The present thesis provides a new perspective (i.e. the aesthetic perspective) to the study of Selected Modern Chinese essays. At the same time, it also proves the feasibility and the value of translation aesthetic theory raised by Liu Miqing in the research of the translation of modern Chinese essays. It is hoped that the present thesis will be of some help to the theoretical study and practical work of the translation of modern Chinese essays.