The Art Of Yang Xianyi’s Poetry Translation In Hong Lou Meng In Light Of Literary Stylistics

Yang Xianyi (1915-2009) is a world-renowned translator, expert of literature andpoet. At the turn of the century, he was able to indulge himself in both Chinese andWestern culture in the unique historical and cultural environment. With the help of hiswife, Gladys Yang, he had been devoted to a career as a translator for more than half acentury. He did not only introduce a large number of foreign literary works to Chinawith his translation, but also presented the rest of the world many Chinese classicswritten in the last two millennia by translating them into English. He was dubbed aliteratus who had "translated the whole China" for his incomparable accomplishments.In terms of Chinese-English (C-E) poetry translation, Yang was a prolific translatortoo, having quite a few anthologies published, e.g. Li Sao, Poetry and Prose of theHan, Wei and Six Dynasties, Poetry and Prose of the Tang and Song Dynasties etc..Xu Yuanchong, a renowned translator and scholar, regards Yang as a representativeof the school of free verse translation. But having said that, the academe have madeonly a small number of studies on Yang’s C-E poetry translation and made fewattempts at discovering the aesthetic value in his works.This thesis sets out to find out the artistic features of Yang’s poetry translationand unveil his translation principles from the perspective of literary stylistics. Thepoems in Hong Lou Meng (HLM) plays a crucial role in the development of the storyand in the expression of both the fictional characters’ and the novelist’s feelings.Besides, they also interact with the whole novel and reflect the relatively highquality of poetry in the Qing Dynasty. Yang has a considerable number of poetrytranslations in A Dream of Red Mansions, his version of HLM, which is the workcompleted late in his career when his style was well-evolved. Hence, it is chosen asthe material for this research as it is likely to best reflect the artistry of Yang’stranslation. Literary stylistics, a branch of stylistics, assists readers in appreciating awork starting from the textual level and has made significant achievements in the analysis of poetry. The author adopts Leech and Short’s model for text analysis andmodifies it based on the characteristics of poetry. The analysis is conducted onYang’s C-E poetry translation at the phonological, lexical, syntactic and contextuallevels, with reference to both Chinese and Western poetic theories to discover thebeauty of Yang’s works from the text per se up to the whole socio-cultural context.Through the analysis the author believes that Yang reconstructed in the target textthe poetic world of the source text in terms of sound, diction, figure of speech,syntactic patterns and coherence etc.. He displayed a poetic painting with traditionalChinese characteristics, leading readers into an inspiring experience which integratesthem with the nature. While Yang chose to translate poetry into English with a strongChinese flavor, Western readers may encounter difficulties to a certain extent as theyattach importance to the separation between things and that between self and theworld. With some understanding of the way Chinese poetry inspires readers, they areable to better enjoy Chinese culture and get better acquainted with Chinese literaturevia Yang’s translation. The study fills the gap of a systematic analysis of Yang’spoetry translation. By researching into the representative figure of the school of freeverse translation, it may contribute to the overall studies of various schools. Theobservations may also provide insight for the translation practice.