Xu Zhimo's Poetry Translation: A Defamiliarization Perspective

The research object of this thesis is the great poet and poetry translator Xu Zhimo. As a talented poet, Xu Zhimo played an important role in New Cultural Movement. He received two entirely different cultures-Western and Eastern cultures, he had rich life experience and particular life background. His unique poetry writing brought rich materials into Chinese New Poetry, meanwhile, Xu Zhimo loved to translate poetry from foreign languages and he had rich poetry translation practice, he also put forward some unique poetry translation ideas, in a word, he made great contribution to Chinese New Cultural Movement and Western-Eastern communication as well. However, compared with his poetry creation, his contribution to translation has not attracted much attention. Taking the researches on Xu Zhimo in the domestic and abroad under consideration, it can be found that most of them are focusing on his literary creation while the study on his translation is relatively less. Some monographs discussing the history of Chinese modern literary translation practice and theories in the period of New Cultural Movement appreciably mentioned Xu's contribution to translation; some researches briefly introduced Xu's translation work when they were summarizing the achievements of Chinese modern literary schools, while others did some investments on the value judgment on his poetry translation.Defamiliarization theory is a discipline with rich connotations for translation, and it has great significance for poetry writing and poetry translation. Defamiliarization is the core concept of the Russian Formalist School, it is often used in poetry studies, defamiliarization had been in fact applied in poetry much earlier before it was first put forward as one theory by Russian Formalist Shklovsky. Shklovsky considered that the aim of poetry was to change the automatic and habitual states of the usual things, and made people have "defamiliarization" for the things that they are familiar with. Defamiliarization is used in poetry writing, and it is undoubtedly one important translation method in poetry translation. The idea of "defamiliarization" has brought new blood into translation theory, and has brought new study perspective for poetry translation. Xu Zhimo made his poetry translation have fresh and unique effect by his unique aesthetic bias and by making such linguistic elements as words, sentences have the characteristic of defamiliarization."Defamiliarzation"doesn't share the same meaning as the term "dissmiliation", in fact, it has much richer meaning. And as a beginner in translation, a study will be done in this thesis mainly on defamiliarzation of language expression and the feature of freshness produced by it on the basis of alienation and hybridization which are the two ways producing defamiliarization effect in Xu's translation. Defamiliarization should be appropriately used; meanwhile, Xu Zhimo's poetry translations are not all perfect, but the study on the thesis will have enlighten effect for poet and poetry translator to display their subjective fully and to make them improve their endowments in poetry writing and translation, and it will be helpful for poetry writing and translation to be developing forward.