Translational Poetics And The Chinese New Metrical Verse

As a famous translator in China in the second half of the last century, Yang Deyu translated a large amount of poetry works of Shakespeare, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Longfellow. His translated works were praised by the famous poet Bian Zhilin as "the maturity of Chinese poetry translation". In 1998, his Chinese translation of the Selected Lyrical Poems of Wordsworth was given the Rainbow Award for Poetry Translation, which won him a big fame. A famous contemporary Chinese poet, Bei Ta, published an article in which he highly values this book. The translated poems are regarded by him successful in reproducing both the form and the content of the original poems, and the language of the translated poems are beautiful. Besides, Yang's translated poems of other English poets are also widely favored.Yang's translation activity lasts fifty years. In the very beginning, he adopts the form of free verse to translate English metrical verse. But, at last, he insists to translate English metrical verse into contemporary Chinese metrical verse. The poetics of Yang's translation gradually changes. The aim of the thesis is to present the translator's strategies and techniques for translating English metrical poems based on the textual study of the Selected Lyrical Poems of Wordsworth from the perspective of translational poetics. It lays stress on the prosody of the translated poems. Furthermore, the thesis tries to study Yang's translation in the cultural context.This thesis consists of three parts:the first part is an introduction to the background, motivation, scope, methodology, and expected significance of the research project as well as introductions to the translator, his view on translating English metrical poems, his Chinese version of the Selected Lyrical Poems of Wordsworth, its significance and influence. The second part—Chapter One is a study on the rhythmical effect in Yang's translation, including the aspects of regularity of pause, regularity of characters in verse lines, and the composition of verse lines. The author of the thesis tries to present to the readers how the translator experiments on the regularity of the pause to reach the "structural beauty" which the school of Chinese New Metrical Verse advocates. Then Chapter Two studies Yang's strategies and techniques for translating the rhymes of the original poems, including the aspects of rhyme equivalence to the source text, variety of rhyme scheme, and the tonal effect in translated poems. The author of the thesis adopts the method of Descriptive Translation Studies in the research to show exactly how the translator makes the rhymes and tonality equivalent to the source text. After that, Chapter Three offers a research on Yang's translation within the cultural context, trying to find the relation between the translator's poetics and the poetics in that specific literary period. The last part is a conclusion which presents the significance of the thesis.