On The Translation Of Fuzzy Beauty In Sikong Tu’s Shipin From The Perspective Of Image-G Actualization

It is universally acknowledged that the key to C-E poetry translation is to preserve the original fuzziness and implicitness. Thus fuzzy beauty of Classical Chinese poetry should be preserved to the largest degree. In2002Jiang Qiuxia put forward the image-G actualization theory based on the concept of gestalt in Gestalt psychology. According to her opinion, literary translation can be regarded as a process of image-G actualization. Translation is never word-for-word or sentence-for-sentence but to actualize the gestalt qualities of source text by means of the linguistic structure of target language, i.e. the aesthetic qualities of source text such as atmosphere and mood. Sikong Tu’s Shipin is a work typical of fuzzy beauty. This paper aims to explore how to actualize fuzzy beauty from the perspective of image-G actualization by comparing four translations of Shipin by Yang Xianyi&Gladys Yang, Wang Hongyin, Xie Yaowen and Giles respectively and the reasons for ablation of fuzzy beauty in translation. It discovers that two factors influencing the ablation of fuzzy beauty, different aesthetic attitudes towards fuzzy beauty as a result of different psychological types and the difference between translators, and then gives some advice to translators concerning how to avoid ablation of fuzzy beauty. Starting from the most conspicuous characteristic of Classical Chinese poetry, namely its fuzziness and terseness, the paper applies image-G actualization to guiding the translation of fuzzy beauty based on the wholeness of image-G so that fuzzy beauty is preserved to the largest degree in TT and translators are able to keep balance between word-for-word translation and overly explicit translation which leads to the loss of meaning not stopping where words end in Classical Chinese poetry.