On Translation Of Classical Chinese Poetry From The Perspective Of Newmark’s Translation Theory

Mao Zedong (1893-1976) takes an important position in the composition of Chinesepoetry, for his special historical status as a revolutionary leader and his wide interests andrich life experiences. Mao Zedong’s Poems is a perfect combination of proletarian spiritand classical Chinese poetry.The aim of translating Mao Zedong’s poems is to introduce their content and artisticfeatures, Mao Zedong Thoughts, classical Chinese poetry and even modern Chinese culture.Apart from the merits of classical Chinese poetry, his poems are grand in artisticconception, profound in meaning and rich in many allusions. A translator needs toreproduce the form and meaning of the original poems. Furthermore, the style and theartistic conception of the translated version should be close to that of the original poems.So, the translation of Mao Zedong’s poems poses great challenges to translators.Because the translation of Mao Zedong’s poems has continuously won attention oftranslators and translation critics, the pursuit of weeding through the old to bring forth thenew in English versions of Mao Zedong’s poems has never stopped. So far, Mao’s poetryhas many translated editions in English, French, German, Dutch, Japanese, Indonesian,Spanish, Arabic, North Korean, Esperanto and so on, and it also spreads widely in manycountries all over the world.The theoretical framework of this thesis is semantic translation and communicativetranslation, two translation methods discussed in the book Approaches to Translationwritten by Peter Newmark. Peter Newmark’s study of the two translation methods is themost important part of his translation theory and it is considered as his most influentialachievement in the translation studies. According to Buhler’s and Jakobson’s classification of language functions, Peter Newmark divides language functions into three main ones:expressive, informative and vocative functions, and based on this division, he establisheshis own text typology. All texts have the expressive, the informative and the vocativefunction to varying degrees. The division of semantic translation and communicativetranslation is an expansion of literal translation and free translation, and each of them hasits own applicable texts for translation. These two translation methods have applicability toa wide range of texts.Mao Zedong’s poetry is a representative of classical poetic work in form and content.Firstly, Mao Zedong’s poems inherit the forms of classical Chinese poetry: ci,seven-character-regular-verse, five-character-regular-verse, seven-character-quatrain, etc.Secondly, Mao Zedong’s poetry is rich in content, covering wide aspects of politics, history,philosophy and art. This “new content in ancient form” has greatly promoted thedevelopment of classical Chinese poetry. On the understanding that all translated textsshould be both communicative and semantic to some degree, this study expects that thediscussion of the framework of Peter Newmark’s theory may offer some guidelines for thetranslation of Mao Zedong’s poems.With a review of Peter Newmark’s text typology and semantic translation andcommunicative translation and his viewpoints on poetry translation, this thesis mainlydiscusses different translation strategies adopted in the two English versions of MaoZedong’s poems translated respectively by Gu Zhengkun and Xu Yuanchong, payingspecial attention to how the two translators deal with tune names, images, and allusions.With this discussion, it is expected to provide some practical application of the semanticand communicative translation methods to the translating of Mao Zedong’s poems as wellas the translating of classical Chinese poetry. This discussion results in the followingconclusions: firstly, semantic and communicative translation methods are inseparable and atranslator usually needs to use both the methods in poetic translation. Secondly, when theform is the distinctive feature of the original poem, and the translator should reproduce theform to the target readers to the greatest extent, the semantic method is a possible way out.Thirdly, the communicative translation method seems to be a preferred choice in dealingwith allusions and other culturally loaded contents, considering the cultural knowledge of target language readers.