On The Transmission Of Emotion In The Ivanslation Of Shi Jing-from The Perspective Of Gestalt Theory

Emotion is an essential element in poetry. The poet, unlike the man who useslanguage to convey information alone, chooses his words for emotion as well as formeaning, and uses language as a means of reflecting his emotion. This indicates the strongrelationship between the linguistic and the emotional levels of poetry. That is to say, thetranslator should not only consider the literal meaning of the poem, but also the uniquecombination of language forms that is attached to the semantic level of the poem and has apractical effect on the transmission of emotion.This thesis will study the transmission of emotion in poetry translation from theperspective of Gestalt. Gestalt, which means configuration in German, derives from theresearch of Psychology. In1912Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffkafounded the Gestalt psychology. Based on experiments and empirical studies, this school ofpsychology proposes that a Gestalt is holistic whole in psychological experience, and itdetermines the qualities and significance of its constituent parts. Only in a whole can theparts have significance, which in turn will be lost without the whole. The Gestaltpsychologists insisted on the universal validity of Gestalt, and proposed that it can beapplied in various academic fields such as aesthetics, philosophy and psychology. In2002,Professor Jiang Qiuxia published the monograph Aesthetic Progression in LiteralTranslation: Image-G Actualization and applied Gestalt theoryto literary translation,providing a new theoretical perspective to translation study. Since then, lots of papers havebeen published on the application of Gestalt theory to English learning and teaching and1iterary translation.Through the analysis of the transmission of emotion in the translation of Book ofPoetry, this thesis holds that a Gestalt approach to poetry translation is effective for the realization of emotion effect. The translator’s duty is to preserve the emotion of the sourcepoem in the target poem. In the source poem, the emotion of the poet is expressed by thecombination of language forms. Thus, in order to make the emotion of the source poem befully identified and conveyed, the translator should analysis the poem from an overallangle. The Gestalt theory makes the combination of the linguistic and emotional levelspossible and the emotion of the target poem to be rendered naturally and corresponding toits meaning in the target poem.It must be noted that this thesis has no intention to ignore the subjectivity of emotion,or to deny the interference the translator’s emotion in the process of translating, but bringsa new light to poetry translation and expands the scope of poetry translation study.