Creating While Translating

In the history of the20th century’s Anglo-American poetry, a large number of outstanding modernist poets emerged, such as Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, etc. Among them, Pound is one of the most famous and the most influential. Pound translated and published the collection of the Chinese classic poems Cathay in the case that he did not understand Chinese, which had led to the momentous Imagist poetry movement in the history of British and American poetry; he created the longest poem in the history of British and American poetry Cantos, which contained117chapters and was written in18languages, including Chinese; he was a fascist and anti-Semite who made the fascist speech through the radio station in Rome during World War Ⅱ, but he received the American Bollingen Prize because of his distinguished poetic achievement after the war. Then, what kind of person is Pound? Why is his works so popular in the west? This thesis tries to make analysis of Pound’s Cathay from the perspective of functionalist approach and find the reason for it.The functionalist translation theory was born in German in the1970s. At its birth, this theory provided a new research perspective for the translation studies and showed a strong vitality. And after the development by Reiss, Vermeer, Manttari and Nord, the functionalist translation theory has gained a systematic theoretical framework. Among these theories, Functional Category of Translation Criticism from Katharina Reiss, Skopostheorie and Beyond from Hans Vermeer, Theory of Translational Action from Justa Holz Manttari and Function plus Loyalty from Christiane Nord could be considered as four milestones in the development of the functionalist translation theory. After gaining the systematic theoretical basis, this application-oriented theory has received more and more attention and has been applied more and more widely. Therefore, we choose this theory as the theoretical basis of this thesis to make analysis of Pound’s Cathay.The thesis falls into six parts. The first part is a brief introduction of the research orientation and purposes. It is the statement of the background of the whole thesis. Chapter One is about the literature review of the thesis. In this part, we will make a review about the development of functionalist translation theory and people’s research of Cathay. Chapter Two mainly discusses the theoretical framework of functionalist translation theory, its contribution and limitations. Chapter Three gives a brief introduction about Pound’s life, translation thoughts and the creation of Cathay. Chapter Four is the main body of this thesis. In this part, we will discuss the translation strategy of Pound’s Cathay at the levels of language and culture. At the linguistic level, we will mainly research the poetic style, wording and grammar and the images in the translation of Cathay. At the cultural level, we will study the strategy of note, transliteration, substitution and deletion. The final part is the conclusion of this thesis. In this part, we will make a summary of the influence of the Cathay, the revelation of the translation of Cathay and the suggestions for further studies.