On The Appropriate Exertion Of Translator’s Subjectivity In Translating Tao Yuanming’s Pastoral Poetry

The translation of classical poetry is the most condensed embodiment of art and science, during which the translator is of utmost importance. He is not only the reader of the original poem but also the writer of the target text. Therefore, the appropriateness of his subjectivity is intensely influential in the lasting development of the classical poetry translation. Since "cultural turn" was put forward in1970s, the status and function of translator in translation have been greatly improved and researches on translator’s subjectivity have become increasingly more.The pastoral poems of Tao Yuanming are consistently famous for the plain and unadorned diction and authentic style as well as profound implications and thereby have attracted great attentions of uncountable scholars and translators at home and abroad. Therefore, each of them has more than ten renditions. Among them, the renowned English Sinologist Arthur Waley was the first one to translate them into English, who selected twelve of them into prose. And his renditions have had an important influence on other translators of Tao’s poems. The Chinese translator Xu Yuanzhong, who is expert in translating classical Chinese poetry into English, has preserved the beautiful rhyme and profound implications of Tao’s poems as far as possible in translation and accordingly his renditions are popular in China and other countries. Because of the seventy-two interval between their times, their renditions are distinct representatives of their own times, which clearly demonstrate their subjectivities as a translator under the influence of life experience and personality.Hence, based on the theory of the translator’s subjectivity, first of all, the thesis has defined the translator’s subjectivity and analyzed the influences of historical background and life experience as well as personality on its manifestation. Then the thesis has made a contrastive study on the different subjectivities of Xu Yuanzhong and Arthur Waley in translating Tao Yuanming’pastoral poetry, and thereby summarized the superiority and limitations of exerting translator’s subjectivity in translating classical Chinese poetry. Finally the thesis has also endeavored to seek some resolutions to the appropriate exertion of the translator’s subjectivity in translating the classical Chinese poetry into English. The author of the thesis hopes that this thesis could offer some referential values for the study of the classical Chinese poetry in the future.