On The Limit Of Translatability Of Poetry From The Perspective Of Translation Aesthetics

The argument that meaning and form which is more important has lasted for thousands of years since human beings began to translate. There is the distinction between'interpreter'and'orator'of Cicero, the metaphor of'les belles infidels'of Gilles Ménage, the debate of'word for word'and'sense for sense'in the West and the controversy of substantialness and embellishment (文质之争) in China. Actually, they all talked about the relation between meaning and form.Poetry, as a special form of human languages, reaches an extremity of the intellection and aesthetic feelings of human beings. Both the internal meaning and the external performance of poetry highly abstract the cultural background of a language and the intelligence of people of a nation. We can say that poetry is the most effective combination of meaning and form in a particular language for it integrates the arrangement of sounds, the selection of words, and the expression of emotion together. It is because of the complexity and particularity of poetry that some scholars regard poetry as the untranslatable. The traditional linguistic school of translation can not solve all the complicated and peculiar problems in poetry translation. Therefore, to research the translation of poetry from an aesthetic perspective, seems to be more significant and valuable under the background of cultural turn in the 1980s.On the basis of the review of history and status quo of translation studies and poetry translation, and under the guidance of the translation aesthetic theory of Fu Zhongxuan and Liu Miqing, this thesis firstly probes into the relation between translation and aesthetic, expatiating the theoretical foundation of this combination and how widely this theory can be applied to translation practice; then, after introducing the research scope and methods of this thesis, the focus is moved to the translation of poetry, with a large amount of examples, to illustrate the different particularities and emphasis of western and oriental poetry. Finally, we'll find out the elements influencing poetry translation and draw the limit of translatability of poetry from the analysis of the combination of translation aesthetic theory and practical examples. Thus we hope to reach the most effective way to translate poetry with the least losing of its aesthetic value.