A Study Of Rhythm In E-C Translation Of Metrical Poetry

Like Chinese poetry, English poetry, as the very essence of literature, has its own aesthetic approach,artistic assessment, creational practice and a great power in the expression of human feelings, so Chinesetranslation of English poetry reasonably plays an important role in the field of translation. English metricalpoetry, as an important organic part of English poetry, is highly appreciated by readers both at home andabroad and worthy of being translated. However, English and Chinese people have so sharp differences intheir thought patterns and aesthetic perceptions that poems in both languages differ from each other in theirrhythm, rhyme, metric, sentence patterns and so on. As a result, it is the unfailing pursuit of all poetrytranslation and theorists to convey and reproduce those features of original poems, enable the Chinesereaders to appreciate the beauty of the poetry in sense, sound and form from the full context of anotherculture, and achieve the auditory, visual and spiritual enjoyment.Rhythm is an indispensable element of poetry musicality. Naturally, translating rhythm of poem is oneof the important issues in literary translation. French scholar Mechonnic and his disciple Dessons, point outthat the “rhythm” is not only a kind of periodic form in a text, but an internal organization of a text, holdingthe work style and content, reflecting the particularity and the value of the latter. This new understanding of“rhythm”can bring many insights into translation practice and theoretical research.With the help of the Lefevere’s poetic theories and achievements having been formed in the translationpractice, this paper, therefore, by analyzing the nature of poetry translation and the characteristics of Englishmetrical poetry, explores rhythm in E-C translation of metrical poetry theoretically and further discusses themethods of translation of English metrical poetry rhythm into Chinese and provides some strategies, holdingthat metrical verse should be translated as metrical verse. According to Lefevere, a poetics consists of twocomponents: the inventory of literary devices, genres, motifs, prototypical characters and situations, andsymbols; and the concept of what role literature plays, or should play, in the social system as a whole. Thisthesis, under the guidance of Lefevere’s poetic theory, elaborates and illustrates the merits and demerits ofrhythm in E-C translation of metrical poetry to enable the translators to make best use of the advantages andbypass the disadvantages by analyzing a large number of different translation versions from the perspectiveof poetic features an functions of rhythm. And fainally this thesis further puts forward effective methods oftranslating the rhythm of English metrical poetry into Chinese. It is helpful in producing appreciable versions and improving the quality of poetry translation to choose the effective method of translating therhythm of English metrical poetry into Chinese.