Places Of Indeterminacy And Concretization In Verse Translation:

In Chinese classic masterpiece Hong Lou Meng, the writer wrote large quantities of poems, adding up to more than two hundreds which have their unique rhythms and forms and were generally called verses which include particular thoughts or ideas. These beautiful verses become the treasure of China even of the whole world. Therefore, Hawkes and Yang Hsien-yi paid large attention to verse translation in order to be accurate and achieve the aesthetic value as the original one achieved.Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden pointed out in his book The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art that literary work of art contains a series of "places of indeterminacy". We find such a place of indeterminacy wherever it is impossible to say whether a certain object or objective situation has a certain attribute. If one wants to achieve an aesthetic apprehension of the work, one must often go far beyond what is actually contained in the objective stratum of the work in the process of objectifying the portrayed objectivities. One must "concretize" these objects at least to a certain degree, and within boundaries set by the work itself.From the perspective of the phenomenological aesthetics, specifically, based on Roman Ingarden’s theory of indeterminacy and concretization in literary works, this paper is an attempt to explore the places of indeterminacy in verse translation with Hawkes and Yang Hsien-yi’s English versions of Hong Lou Meng as cases, and then to analyze the concretization strategies applied in verse translation in the two complete English versions of Hong Lou Meng. Through analyzing examples of verses translation, several conclusions can be arrived at:In verse translation of Hong Lou Meng, a large number of undetermined factors which are called the places of indeterminacy exist.During the verse translation of Hong Lou Meng, Yang Hsien-yi and Hawkes adopt concretization strategy to fill in the places of indeterminacy. They use words:nouns, adjectives and verbs to fill in the places of indeterminacy or rewrite the sentences to achieve concretization which is applied through changing the structure and rhyme of the verse.The reasons for concretization strategy are the calling of the text, active reading of the translators and their abundant imagination and association on the basis of the original work.Yang Hsien-yi and Hawkes when concretizing the places of indeterminacy follow the rule of appropriate concretization. They achieve faithful comprehension at first. Then they play active roles when reading the original text actively. Most importantly, they use abundant imagination and association on the basis of the original work to achieve concretization in order to conclude, to some degree, the same aesthetic value of the original one.