On The Reproduction Of Artistic Sweep In Classical Chinese Poem Translation From The Perspective Of "Three-Beauty" Criterion

Numerous and charming as it is, classical Chinese poetry has formed its uniquecharacteristics during development. It is a bright-colored flower in the world’s literarygarden. It is terse and concise, short and neat. With its implicit and deep meaning, italways “means more than it could say” and “convey boundless meaning with limitedwords”. Apart from this, its harmonious rhythm and rhyme appeal to the ears. It is thecombination of beauty in sense, in sound and in form. Therefore, translators shouldreproduce the “three beauties” in the translation to the utmost so that more and moreforeigners could know about and appreciate the beauty of classical Chinese poetry andthus promote the intercultural communication.The unique glamour of classical Chinese poetry in world’s literary history attractsmany translators both at home and abroad, among whom Xu Yuanzhong can beviewed as the most successful and fruitful one. This thesis deeply analyzes the styleand features of classical Chinese poetry and English poetry. Chinese and Englishbelong to different language families. Chinese is ideographic script and English isalphabetic script; Chinese is a tone language with flexible syntax while English is anintonation language with strict syntax. Therefore, the two languages have theirrespective characteristics; especially Chinese, which is marked by the “three beauties”.Sense beauty concerns the images, allusions and figures of speech; sound beauty dealswith the rhythm, rhyme and reduplication; form beauty contains aspects of text andsyntax. This thesis, based on Xu Yuanzhong’s “Three-beauty” principle andcontrastive analysis between his and others’ versions, produces the conclusion thatXu’s versions convey the original beauty to the greatest extent.