On Translations Of The Li Qingzhao’s Ci-poems From The Perspective Of Liu Miqing’s Translation Aesthetics

Song Ci, also as Song lyrics or Ci-poems rising after the flourish of Tang poetry, is aspecial form of literature and occupies a place no less important than that of Tang poetry inthe history of Chinese classical literature. Compared with Tang poems, it explores new areain literature by adopting various subject matters and styles and enjoys a relatively flexibleform carrying more refined, delicate, and subtle feelings.Among the great amount of the ci-poems, Li Qingzhao’s works catch much attention.As great female representative of ci-poem, her work invites a lot of domestic and overseasstudy. Apart from the common characteristics of ci-poems, Li’s works also have distinctaesthetic value which can not ignored in the translation.Translation aesthetics, the integration of aesthetic thoughts and translation, is putforward by Professor Liu Miqing(刘宓庆)in his work, An Introduction to TranslationAesthetics. By applying traditional Chinese aesthetic thoughts to the translation practice,Liu’s thought not only shed new light on the translation of Chinese classical literaturegreatly but as well promoted the development of Chinese translation theory. From anaesthetic perspective, translation is the representation of aesthetic value in the source text.While the aesthetic characteristics is the essence of Chinese classical literature, especiallythe poetry. Thus, the author believe that it is significant to dig out the aesthetic value in LiQingzhao’s works and how it is represented in the target text from the aesthetic perspectivein order to reproduce a successful translation to touch the readers.In this paper, a preliminary study is conducted on the aesthetic representation of Li’sworks in different translation versions. Based on Professor Liu Miqing’s translationaesthetic theory, the paper analyzes the aesthetic constituents of Li Qingzhao’s works andtranslations from two aspects, the formal constituents (include the phonology, lexis andsyntax) and the non-formal constituents (include the sentiments and images). Throughcomparison of the different translations, the thesis aim to find how different translatorsreproduce the aesthetic values of the original from various levels like phonetic level,lexical level, syntactic level, and so on which can provide a reference and guidance to thetheoretical research and translation practice of poetry to some extent. At the same time, through exploring the translation of Li’s works from the aestheticperspective, it is hoped that the introduction of this new perspective, will liberate classicalliterature translation study from the tie of linguistics and cultures and enlighten the futuretranslators dedicated to Chinese classical literature translation.