Alienizing Translation In Xu Zhimo’s Translation Of Thomas Hardy’s Poems

Xu Zhimo’s poems have been well known for their dainty sentiments andexquisite wording for a long time and there are heated discussions about his personallife, romance and prose and poetry creation while his translation has been neglected,especially his poetry translation. Although the situation has been improving recently,the conclusions of those few researches are highly disputed. Some are speaking highlyof his poetry translation but some are criticizing it harshly.The author has found out that there are a lot of differences between the sourcepoems and the target poems translated by Xu Zhimo after comparing his translatedpoems with Hardy’s source poems. It is the “unfaithfulness” that is one of the mostimportant reasons why his translation draws negative evaluations. The author studies,in terms of the alienizing translation, the diction, the syntax, the images, the rhythmicpatterns and the poetic forms of the translated poems and Xu Zhimo’s choice of thesource poems as well. The result turns out that there are both gains and losses in therespective aspects; however, no regular rule or obvious evidence could be found toprove Xu did the changes out of a specific purpose but out of his subjectivity and hispreference actually. Then the author looks into the gains and losses in his translationin light of the translation norm proposed by Toury, in order to determine if thealienizing in Xu’s translation is reasonable and rational by putting the ontologicalnature of the source poems in the first place.Finally, the author believes that the translation strategy of Xu Zhimo (if there isany) does contribute to the aesthetic realization of the poetry in the TT, which is alienand unfamiliar to the readers, by estranging the TT from the ST and from the sourcelanguage/culture and the target language/culture as well. But in the long run, thesuccess could not be sustained and effectively accepted by the target culturecompletely. So its contribution to the development of the language or the culture islittle or even none. At least, no finding has been done or no evidence has been foundin this regard. His willful attitude, his subjective readings of the ST along with his rather arbitrary interpretations in the TT, all of them gain him the criticisms. However,the contribution of his introduction and exploration in the rhythmic patterns to thenewly born New Poetry in China is undeniable.