On The Operation Of Aesthetic Consciousness In Poetry Translation

With the formulation and development of translation aesthetics, its focal points of research have been extended from the aesthetic subject in translation (AST) and the aesthetic objects in translation (AOT) on the macro level to the aesthetic consciousness in translation (ACT) on the micro level. As one of the basic concepts in aesthetics, aesthetic consciousness refers to aesthetic subject's complex psychological phenomenon integrating such factors as sensation and perception, understanding, imagination and feeling etc. stimulated by something beautiful. As AST, the translator's aesthetic consciousness is guiding and influencing translation practices all the time, which is prominent especially in poetry translation. The syntax, rhythm, imagery, style and fuzziness, etc. constitute in full the aesthetic beauty of classical Chinese poetry. As a result, a poem has no final reading and is difficult to be translated on the one hand; it should be rendered and examined from the aesthetic perspective on the other hand.This paper demonstrates the operational process of ACT in poetry translation, tentatively makes compensation for the definition of ACT, and draws the translator's operational model of it based on translation aesthetics and the relevant knowledge of aesthetic psychology. The English translations of Jing Ye Si rendered by Western and Chinese translators help to illustrate that the success of poetry translation consists in the translator's making full use of ACT to discover and reproduce the aesthetic constituents of the original poem so that the aesthetic factors in poetry can be best conveyed in the translated version and the reader can have the feeling of aesthetic equivalence.The thesis first illustrates the necessity and importance of aesthetic consciousness in poetry translation as well as the reasons for the choice of Jing Ye Si as the study case. Then, it retraces the aesthetic source of translation in the West and China, and highlights the present research on ACT and Jing Ye Si. Following that, the AST and AOT in Jing Ye Si are fully discussed as well as the relationship between AST, AOT and ACT. Besides, the differences in ACT between Western AST and Chinese AST are explored from the linguistic, cultural, spatial and psychological dimensions. Owing to the differences in ACT, Chinese and Western translators are able to produce diverse English versions of the original poem. The paper systemizes the operational process of the aesthetic consciousness in poetry translation by integrating aesthetic anticipation, aesthetic expansion, aesthetic representation and aesthetic diffusion together. Finally, it summarizes the main points of what has been discussed in it by pointing out that the research on ACT is complex and challenging but practical and instructive to the theory and practice of poetry translation.