A Hermeneutic Study On Twenty English Translations Of "Feng Qiao Ye Bo"

The word"Hermeneutics"derives from"Hermes", who is the messenger of the immortals in the ancient Greek myth. His mission is to transmit the immortals'messages to the mortals. Because of the differences between languages, he has to interpret the source message before conveying it to the mortals. Translation scholars in western countries carried on translation studies within the framework of philosophical hermeneutics in the 1970s. It is acknowledged that hermeneutics has reached its maturity thanks to Gadamer. In China, both the introduction and application of philosophical hermeneutics in translation studies came at a later period and were less influential. After the 21st century, more Chinese translation scholars are interested in translation studies on the perspective of philosophical hermeneutic theories. These theories give deep insights into the nature of translation and deepen our understandings of translation.The first notion of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics is a fundamental rehabilitation of the concept of prejudice. In his view every interpreter has his/her own prejudice in the face of a source text and not occasionally, but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. Another important concept is the horizon."The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point."(Gadamer, 1999:269) A person's horizon also includes everything that can be seen by him or her and his or her partner in the hermeneutical dialogue. Based on the validity of prejudice, Gadamer proposes the concept of"fusion of horizons". Since horizon includes everything that can be seen by oneself and one's partner in the hermeneutical dialogue, the process of understanding can be seen as a matter of coming to an agreement, which means establishing a common framework of horizons. Therefore, understanding is taken to be a process of fusion of horizons.Poetry is universally regarded as the most difficult genre to be translated, so much so that Robert Frost sighed,"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."Rather it is insensible to say that poetry is untranslatable simply because of some losses in the process of translating. The fact that every year a large number of poems are translated from one language into different languages is self-evident. The Tang Poetry reached the peak in the development of classical Chinese poems. It is remarkably extensive in the range of subjects, and ingenious in artistry. Among the large number of excellent poems, there are some selective classics. As for classics, Frank Kermode ever observed"The books we call classics possess intrinsic qualities that endure, but possess also an openness of accommodation which keeps them alive under endlessly varying dispositions."(Kermode, 1975:44) Zhang Ji'S"FENG QIAO YE BO"is regarded as a classic, which enjoys the great popularity at home and abroad, and has been translated into many different languages. As far as English translations are concerned, we can see a multiplicity of translations.As we can see, the multiplicity of translations results from the discrepant understandings and interpretations of the poem and the thought that an interpretation is correct"in itself"is foolish if translators or critics fail to take the nature of tradition into consideration. Each translation has to adapt itself to the hermeneutical situation, to which it belongs. Translating is a two-way process of understanding and interpreting and translators do not come to any object without presuppositions. Instead, they are always preoccupied with the primordial understandings, and all translations are influenced by the translators'basic level of fore-understanding or prejudice.The present thesis aims to compare and analyze the twenty English versions of"Feng Qiao Ye Bo"and the author ventures to produce his own translation on this basis. It will give some explanations about the reason why translators have translated the poem in their ways, facilitate the readers'appreciation of the beauties of this classic poem from different perspectives and enrich our understandings of this masterpiece. The variety of reinterpretations will also present us with a panorama of the openness of a classic.