Analysis Of Poetic Imagery And Translating Poems By Lin Daiyu In Hong Lou Meng

"Hong Lou Meng" has always been regarded as a monument in Chinese literaturehistory and the poetry it contains is impressive in number, variety and artistic value.Chinese classical poetry is concise in language, rich in content, rigid in rhyme andextraordinary in artistic value. Thus, how to render it in English with the exact flavor andeffect of the original is a great challenge to all translators and is also the problem this thesistries to resolve. Because of the limitation of time and scope, this thesis will mainly focuson the poems of Lin Daiyu.This paper chooses poetic imagery as the starting point because it is the basic unit ofpoetry. It is both the specific vehicle the poet uses to express his innermost thoughts andemotions and the clue the readers use to appreciate the poetry and to understand the poet’sinner world. It serves as a bridge between the author and the readers. Therefore, it is ofgreat significance to translators as they are both the readers of the original work and theauthors of the translated work.Out of various kinds of poetic images, this thesis will mainly focus on symbolicimages and allusive images. Both of them mean much more than what is actually said:symbolic imagery, through repeated occurrences in different literary works, has become acultural symbol while allusive imagery will activate the related allusions in readers’ minds.How to translate them depends on the specific situation: when they are of great importanceto the whole meaning or overall poetic effect, explanations are necessary, whether withinthe text or as annotations. But when it comes to those with little significance, omission isacceptable given consideration to the brevity of the poems and domestication can also beused as long as it achieves the same effect as the original.In the later part of this paper, much attention will be given to the combinations ofdifferent poetic images as poetic images deliberately chosen and arranged will result ininteractions, producing some indescribable artistic effects. As Chinese is a uninflectedlanguage, its grammatical structure is rather loose and flexible and many constitutingelements of a sentence can be dispensed with. Therefore, translators should take heed ofexchange of perspectives and switch of time and space in the original text and choose thecorrect subject, tense and natural way of expression during translation. Besides, Chinesepoets have a preference for repetition and comparison of poetic imagery. Poetic images in these two cases should be preserved as much as possible to maintain the emotionalintensity and the original style and it is important to figure out and express the relationsbetween them. Last but not least, the phenomenon of double levels of meanings is verycommon in Chinese classic poetry and how to preserve it in translation is really a headache.Translators may make the underlying meaning overt, whether within the text or in notes, orto conceive another method to compensate the same effect.This thesis compares the two most-acknowledged English versions of HLM,translated by Yang Hsien-Yi and David Hawkes respectively and makes use of linguisticanalysis method to analyse the meaning and origin of the poetic images and text analysismethod to analyse the meaning of poems and their relation to the whole novel.