A Comparative Study Of Aesthetic Values Of Different Translators In The Translation Of Mao Zedong’s Poems

Chinese literature has a very long history and Chinese poems are also wellknown to the whole world from ancient times to nowadays. Those Chinese poems areprecious deposits in a huge treasure house, of which Mao Zedong’s can be deemed asthe priceless ones. His unmatchable work with grand ideology and valuable artistrylead to the unique state in modern Chinese literature.Mao Zedong’s poems are one of the brightest pearls in modern literature, whichcan be proved by the everlasting admiration, research and translation of them all overthe world. Mao’s poems have already been translated into more than eighty countriesand dozens of languages. The thesis tries to analyze the relationships between thetranslations and the roles translators play and also to penetrate the multivariateviewpoints of aesthetic recreation from the respective of the different aesthetic valuesand translational beauty of poet, scholar and researcher. Xu Yuanchong, LiZhengshuan and Gu Zhengkun are the classic representatives of poet translator,scholar translator and researcher translator respectively. Their different living soildetermines their different aesthetic value which further influences their poetrytranslation deeply. Therefore we have various valuable translations of Mao Zedong’spoems which are differ from each other. The language of a poet translator is romantic,ethereal and beautiful. As a translator, a poet pursues the perfect recreation of theimagination beauty, but not only commit himself to the text. However scholar andresearcher pay more attention to the outward form beauty of the original poem, forexample, the corresponding relationships between words or sentences as well as the faithfulness to the original poem. They sometimes neglect the perfect recreation of theimagination beauty of the original poem. All the differences are determined bytranslators’different aesthetic values which are influenced by the roles they play.The two theories cited in the thesis are“Three-Beauty”Theory andManipulation Theory based on which the comparative study of different aestheticvalues of translators in translation of Mao Zedong’s poems is analyzed by thecomparing of the three versions. The thesis tries to point out the influence of differentaesthetic values on the poetry translation and offer some instructional and practicalsuggestions to different kinds of readers.