A Study On The Translation Of Classical Chinese Poetry Into English In Light Of Poetics

In the late twentieth century, translation studies orient to the cultural studies. The world famoustranslation theorist Andre Lefevere, the representative of the cultural school, puts forward the theory of theseveral constraints acting on literary translation: ideology, professional, patronage and dominant poetics.He said poetics can be said to consist of two components: one is the inventory of literary devices, genres,motifs, prototypical characters, situations and symbiosis; the other a concept of what the role of literature is,or should be, in the social system as a whole. Poetic features are literary devices, genres, motifs,prototypical characters, situations and symbiosis and poetic function is the literariness, including the socialfunction, the aesthetic function and the moral function,etc..Poems are believed to be untranslatable, due to linguistic and artistic problems. Most translationtheories fail to interpret or guide such translation. Fortunately, poetics sets up a complete frame ofreference either for translation analysis of poetry or for translating practice. Typical of poetic features,poems represent a good target of such studies.This thesis studies the translation of Classical Chinese Poetry under the theory of Andre Lefevere’spoetics. The thesis firstly studies the notion of poetics both at home and abroad. In China,“Shi Xue” ismainly about the study of poetry, including poetry creation, poetry appreciation, poetry criticism and theknowledge of its relative series of literary theories and aesthetic and cultural matters from the ancient timesuntil the modern times. But in the West, poetics mainly talks about the ancient Greek drama (tragedy) fromthe ancient times to the Middle Age, especially in Ancient Greece. It studies as a whole, the main genres ofthe time: comedy, epics and lyrics etc.. By discussing the origins, history, characteristics of poetry, the studyfurthers to elaborate the Westerners’ literary conception. They call this kind of study “poetics”, which hassimilar meaning with “Shi Lun”,“Shi Xue” in Chinese. Today, poetics mainly concerns and studies thereasons why literature exists and its values, the canonical forms in which literature meaning comes out andthe conditions on which literature exists on the language level. It is more of the study of literary criticism.Scholars prefer to use “poetics” to show a sense of history and inclusiveness. The relative literatures arestudied in the second chapter.The thesis studies the representative poetic features: musicality, poetic imagery and poetic conception,as well as the poetic functions---social function, aesthetic function and moral function of Classical Chinese Poetry and English poetry. Next, the thesis studies the poetic features (musicality, poetic imagery and poeticconception) and poetic functions of the seven-character regular poem Climbing the Height (its social,aesthetic and moral functions). Then the thesis makes a contrastive study of the four English versions ofClimbing the Height from the micro level-poetic features(musicality, poetic imagery and poeticconception), the macro level-poetic functions: the social, aesthetic and moral functions. By contrasting thepoetic features and the poetic functions of the four English versions on the two levels, the thesis finds theversion carrying equivalent poetic features and poetic functions with Classical Chinese poetry. Thesummary is that the English version by Zhu Chunshen is the best one with the most similar poetic featuresand poetic functions to the source text.The major findings are: the poetic features of the source text can be transferred into the target text bymaking use of the similar poetic features of the target text (represented by Xu Yuanchong’ s version inmusicality and Zhu Chunshen’s version in poetic imagery and poetic conception). If the target text has nosuch poetic features of the source text, the same poetic function can be achieved to compensate the poeticfeatures of the source text (represented by Zhu Chunshen’s version). The poetics of the target text and thepoetics of the translator also play an important role in choosing the ways to translate. What poetic conceptsthe target text holds, how a translator interprets poetics determine the poetic forms and functions of thetarget text. Five-character and seven-character poems influence the translation in linguistic domain, whilepoems of appraisal or of criticisms of the social and political being affects the poetic functions, with poeticimage and conception in view.As poetics covers musicality, poetic image and poetic conception, an analysis of translation of poemsis better done. Such analysis could be applicable to translating practice since a better frame of reference isproposed, esp. for poetry translation.