On The Source Text Selection For Poetry Translation By The Crescent Society

In the history of China's poetry translation, many poet translators of the early 20th century have been studied, but little attention has been paid to translation practice and theory of organizations. As one of the most influential literature groups in modern Chinese literature, the Crescent Society has played the role of medium and backbone to introduce foreign cultures. Despite its short life, the Crescent Society played an important role in the development of China's translation history.In the New Culture Movement, new poetry concept was introduced from imitating foreign poems whereas the traditional poetics was hard to survive in such a transformational cultural context. In order to promote the modern transformation of Chinese poetry, poet-translators in the Crescent Society introduced and adopted forms of western poetry from translating and put forms of English poems into their poetry writing. This paper researches into the translation activities of the Crescent Society by analyzing its choice of translated poems and literary thoughts under the influence of the concurrent dominant ideology, dominant poetics, poetics of the Crescent society and many other factors.The thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter One makes clear the literature review, objective, methodology, theoretical framework and structure of this thesis. Chapter Two presents an overview of the Crescent Society's poetry translation, concurrent dominant ideology, dominant poetics, poetics and key figures of the Society. Chapter Three demonstrates the source texts selection for poetry translation by the Crescent Society, and then makes a detailed study of its key members'choices of original poems. The last chapter comes to the conclusion which enhances what has been studied, brings forward the prospect and points out the limitation of this study.