A Tentative Application Of Imagery Theory To The Representation Of Poetics Of Blankness In Classical Chinese Poetry Translation

Chinese classical poetry is the gem of Chinese literature, an artistic form with special aesthetic values. Blankness and indeterminacies beyond the words greatly add to the artistic and aesthetic values. This blankness technique has been applied a lot by ancient poets to set up a deep and far-reaching ideorealm and strike a deep chord in readers’heart, thus producing profound and meaningful effects."Blankness" is the essence of the Chinese poetics which represents the artistic and aesthetic beauty of the classical poetry. It is of great significance to preserve the poetics of blankness to the greatest extent when we translate the classical Chinese poems. So how to transfer and represent the blankness aesthetics, and to what degree should we supplement the blankness space so as not to lead to "aesthetic shock" or to lose the aesthetic values and effects, are what we will explore in this paper.The blankness effects in the poems not only result from the particular and special linguistic structures but also reflect its internal cognitive mechanism. Cognitive grammar offers an alternate way to tackle this problem by connecting semantic structures with internal cognitive mechanisms. Imagery, or construal theory, is one of the most prominent in the Cognitive Grammar. According to Langacker, every expression involves an individually distinct way to conceive a certain situation with different degrees of salience on the same object. He refers to four dimensions, namely salience, level of specificity, selection, and perspective, as four parameters that determine the way to describe a particular scene. The blankness effects in classical Chinese poetry are characteristic of uncertainty and indeterminacies and allow various renditions and interpretations. Different translators produce different translation versions. The imagery theory, together with the four dimensions, can be applied to the transference of the blankness in the poems, since every Chinese poem from various levels from an image, imagery to the whole poem can be regarded as different units of scenes. Relative salience of the features, level of specificity at which they are treated, and the standpoint from which they are observed, all influence and determine how the scene would turn out to be. The transference of blankness effects involves both grammatical structures and the cognitive process of describing the scene in English based on the original texts in Chinese and should be practiced and analyzed on the conceptual level.This paper studies blankness aesthetics in the classical Chinese poetry within the framework of Cognitive Grammar. We come to the conclusion that translation activities should be considered on both linguistic and cognitive levels. Distinctions between the Chinese and English languages by established linguistic conventions should be taken into consideration in the process of translation, yet some translational salience shifts should be avoided so that the original aesthetic values could be preserved to the largest extent by comparing dimensions of imagery with particular linguistic means and cognitive process between the original poems and the translation versions.