A Study Of Yang Xianyi’s Translation Of Wild Grass-from The Perspective Of Translation Aesthetics

For thousands of years, translators, scholars and writers in China and western countrieshave never stopped their study and debate about the relationship between translation andaesthetics. It’s their persistence that accelerates the combination of translation and aesthetics.The theory of translation aesthetics is first put forward in1970s. From then on, it began toattract people’s eyes from the academic world. Translation aesthetics opens up a newperspective for the study on literary translation, in particularly poetry translation and prosetranslation. However, until1995when Professor Liu Miqing published his masterpiece AnIntroduction to Translation Aesthetics the basic framework of the theory of translationaesthetics is firstly built up in a systematic way. Based on the modern aesthetic principles andby applying the traditional aesthetic thoughts on translation to the translation practice, Liuproposes that the translation aesthetic object is the original text and translation aestheticsubject is the translator himself, elaborately talks about the formal system and non-formalsystem of the translation aesthetic object, and makes an exploration on the aestheticrepresentation in literary translation.Prose poems Wild Grass is written by Lu Xun who is one of the famous writers inChinese contemporary literature. It’s not only contained profound ideas but also of greataesthetic value, which attract people’s attention at home and abroad. However, so far, there isnot a monograph on the research of its translation, let alone the systematic study on it fromthe perspective of translation aesthetics.The unique aesthetic feature of Wild Grass determines translation aesthetics is a veryimportant method to evaluate it and its translation. Therefore, as per the aesthetic feature, theauthor discusses about the aesthetic representation of the translated Wild Grass by Yang Xianyi’s from the formal system and non-formal system based on the theory of Liu’stranslation aesthetics. Comparing the original text with its translation, the author finds that thetranslator, with his proficiency in source language and target language and hisaccomplishments in literature and art, reproduce the beauty of the source text to the maximum,which makes the target readers enjoy as much aesthetic information as original readers. Thetranslation of Wild Grass does not only show the translation talent but also can be consideredas a model in prose poem translation.