Image Actualization In The English Translation Of Li Bai’s Poetry:Perspective Of Image Gestalt

In the decades, an increasing number of domestic and foreign translators have been attracted to the English translation of Chinese classical poetry, particularly Tang poetry. Li Bai, known as "Poet Transcendent", has drawn considerable attention of many scholars such as Ezra Pound, Xu Yuanchong and so on. Despite the effective promotion brought by the English translation of Tang poetry to sino-foreign cultural exchanges, there still exist some deficiencies in the English versions due to the lack of suitable translation theory. It’s a pity that the artistic image as a whole is frequently ignored in poetry translation resulting from the translator’s rigid adherence to the poetic meters, their excessive attention to the word translation, and their overemphasis on the faithfulness of verse meaning.To solve this problem, the thesis endeavors to study the image actualization in the English translation of Li Bai’s poetry from the perspective of gestalt. It has three parts:Introduction, Text and Conclusion. Introduction is a brief statement of the motivation, the methodology, the literature review and the significance of the study. There are four chapters in Text. Chapter one explains what image-G is, unfolds the gestalt properties of literary works, and introduces the laws of gestalt theory. Two phrases of image-G actualization:mental actualization and linguistic actualization are also illustrated to provide theoretical basis for case study. Chapter two is the appreciation of images in Li Bai’s poetry. The features, the categories and the aesthetic properties of his images are induced, which proves that the English translation of Li Bai’s poetry is just the process of image-G actualization. Chapter three is the core of this thesis, in which case study is put forward. The author demonstrates the process of both mental and linguistic actualization of image-G in Li Bai’s poetry, especially the most typical images such as moon, water, wine and sword. The principles of gestalt theory are used to deduce the process. The fourth chapter, which serves as a supplementary explanation of the above, points out that image-G actualization will suffer constraints both from the translator and the original text. It is the interaction between the translator and the original text that makes image-G actualization possible. Therefore, we arrive at the conclusion, i.e. successful poetry translation can be obtained if the re-construction at image-G level is realized; applying image-G based model (Jiang Qiuxia,2002) to the translation of Chinese classical poetry represented by Li Bai’s is proved to be feasible and applicable.