A Deconstructionist Reading Of Ezra Pound's Translation Of Li Bai's Poems

Ezra Pound, the prestigious American poet, poetry critic and one of the founders of the imagist poetry school, selected carefully in 1912 nineteen Chinese poems among the scripts left by , the American scholar who has made contributions on the study of eastern culture. Of these nineteen poems, eleven of them were written by Li Bai, dubbed"the God of Poetry", who was one of the greatest poets in the Tang Dynasty and along the whole history of Chinese literature. In 1915, Pound published his work of the translation of Chinese poems with the name of Cathay and received surprisingly contrary feedback from the eastern and western world. In the west at that time, most of the scholars in the literary field think highly of Cathay which won Ezra Pound the reputation as one of the greatest poets. Back in China, on the contrary, nearly all Chinese literary scholars criticized it relentlessly for its unfaithfulness to the original Chinese poems.Since the second half of last century, there has been a switch in the translation trend in Chinese literary world, featuring multi-standard study of translation, which has brought rather more positive attitudes toward Pound's translation of Chinese classical works. These scholars lay stress not solely upon the traditional translation theory focusing on faithfulness, but upon various dynamic theories, such as"Formal Correspondence Theory"from Nida,"Skopos Theory"from Hans.J.Vermeer, Receptive Aesthetical viewpoint study, Subjectivity of Translators, Translation Rewriting Theory and so on. So far, however, there has not been a deconstructionist study on Pound's translation of Li Bai's poems in Cathay in a systematic manner. This is the reason why the author of this article makes a decision to choose this viewpoint in approaching Pound's translation. Given the fact that the author possesses limited knowledge of the related issue, this article is to consist of three main views of deconstructionism in the interpretation of Pound's Translation of Li Bai's poems in Cathay. They are the"before-and-after life"relationship between the source texts and target texts, the"creative translation"which corresponds with the study of creativity of translators and the"non-racial centralism theory"in terms of cultural and political orientation. On the basis of these triple theories in the light of deconstructionism, this article is to be made up of three chapters, with Chapter one describing the three deconstructionist theories mentioned above and Chapter two using these theories to interpret Pound's translation strategies and practices of Li Bai's poems and Chapter three introducing Pound's influences upon and contributions to the translation realm both in the east and the west.