A Study On English Translation Of Metonymy In Narrative Poetry Of Tang Dynasty From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

The Tang Dynasty is a time when the poetry is flourished. Especially Narrative poetry boomed in the Tang Dynasty because of the influence of politics, economy and literary schools. Humanism, documentary and sarcasm were united and merged in narrative poetry in the Tang Dynasty which has a high artistic value and holds an important social mission and mental connotation. Thus it has been followed with interest both at home and abroad. Therefore the English translation of Tang Dynasty narrative poetry is of great importance.A lot of metonymies and metaphors exist in poetry. In recent years people have done a lot of researches in metaphor, but it cannot be denied that metonymy also contributes very much in Tang poetry. With the development of cognitive linguistics, cognitive linguists hold that metonymy is not only a rhetorical device, but also a psychological mechanism and this mechanism constitutes the basis of many concepts (Zhang Hui&Lu Weizhong:2010) Cognitive linguist Lakoff (1989) believes that metonymy is a type of " Idealized Cognitive Model or ICM " and a concept mapping in a cognitive domain. Chinese scholars like Wang Yin (2007) and Li Fuyin (2008) etc. also have some studies on metonymy. So far, cognitive studies on poetry mainly focus on European or American poetry and cognitive analyses on Chinese poetry mostly lie in metaphors.This paper is to analyze the English translation of metonymy in narrative poetry of Tang Dynasty from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and makes some analyses and comments on English translation of metonymy in narrative poetry of Tang Dynasty utilizing cognitive knowledge like ICM, relative salience. This paper selects two long narrative poems as cases and analyzes comparatively the different versions of the English translations of metonymy and in the end proposes some proper translation strategies according to different kinds of metonymies.