A Study Of Mistranslation In Rexroth’s English Translation Of Chinese Poetry

Contemporary American poet Kenneth Rexroth not only made great progress inthe creation of poetry and poetic theory, but also made an achievement in poetrytranslation. His poetry anthologies of English translation of Chinese poetry publishedin the United States has been widely praised, and become another classic afterwardsPound’s Cathay. Some of them were collected by American newspapers andmagazines. However, Rexroth’s translation strategy was different from the principlesof traditional translation—“faithfulness” and “equivalence”. He made a number of“errors” by the strategy of creative translation, but such mistranslation and rewritingdid not affect the status of his English translation of ancient Chinese poetry.Since “cultural turn” in1970s, people’s understanding towards translationgreatly changed: translation activity is a complex human activity, it is not a simplelanguage conversion, it is the transformation of two different cultures, it is a kind ofintercultural communication, translation is not made in a vacuum, but is subject tocertain social and cultural factors. As the subject of translation, the initiative role ofthe translator is gradually highlighted in the process of translation. So we can notcriticize translators just because the translation deviates from the original text, instead,study mistranslation in specific social culture environment.Due to the diversity of culture, differences of language and ideology, as well asthe translator’s cognitive limitations, it is almost impossible to achieve completelyequivalent translation, so unconscious mistranslation can hardly be avoided. But as akind of translation strategy, intentional mistranslation has positive significance. Thispaper will quote the classification of mistranslation by Xie Tianzhen---unintentionalmistranslation and deliberate mistranslation and study Rexroth’s translation.The thesis basically consists of five chapters. Chapter I serves as an introduction, including a brief introduction about Kenneth Rexroth, the research background andthe purpose and significant of this study.The second chapter is a literature review, illustrating mistranslation history bothat home and abroad. And then this paper will give a relatively detailed introductionabout Kenneth Rexroth and his translations. At last, previous studies on Rexroth inChina and his translation of Chinese poetry will be presented.The third part and the fourth part are the main body of this thesis, separatelyincluding the deep study of Rexroth-translated Chinese poetry, as well as the causes ofmistranslation. Chapter3firstly analyzes the unintentional mistranslation in Rexroth’sEnglish translation of Chinese poetry from the perspective of mistranslation ofvocabulary，subject and theme, and then discusses deliberate mistranslation inRexroth’s English translation of Chinese poetry in detail. This part is divided into5main points: transformation of style and syntactical structure, deliberatemistranslation of title, creating a new theme, building new poetic situation andcultural filtering. This thesis gives every point one or more examples with detailedanalysis and explanation. Why are there mistranslations in his translation? In order tosolve the question, Chapter4summarized some important causes of mistranslationincluding causes of Rexroth’s unintentional mistranslation and causes of deliberatemistranslation. The causes of Rexroth’s unintentional mistranslation are discussedfrom the points of Rexroth and Chinese. The more important is the causes ofdeliberate mistranslation analyzed from poetics, Rexroth’s intention and his personalexperience. The last chapter ends up the whole thesis with a conclusion.