A Contrastive Study On Chinese Translations Of Wallace Stevens’s The Snow Man:from Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

Being a poet active in the first half of20th century of American literary world and facing human being’s universal disbelief and demoralization in an era of chaos, Wallace Stevens meant to search for a new order in the wasteland of modern world through his poetic works. This thesis takes one of Stevens’s representative poems The Snow Man and its Chinese translations as examples to have a comparative study of different translations under the perspective of Reception Aesthetics. The comparative study is aiming to explore the aesthetic values of different translations under the perspective of Reception Aesthetics and to analyze the elements that affect translators during their translation process and to discern what is chosen to be translated in different translations and in what way the translations are similar and different so as to explore the aesthetic values of different translations.Reception Aesthetics holds that the work itself is an "appealing structure" which contains "indeterminacies" and "gaps" which waits readers to complete the understanding and reconstruction of the work with their own "horizon of expectations". To explore the reception and artistic values of different translations of Stevens’s The Snow Man, this thesis resorts to the theory of Reception Aesthetics. Socially, this paper is inspired by the social reality of our time, a time filled with fickleness and utilitarianism, a time at which people have so many desires that they can’t see the real world as it is, a time that can give us everything but a clear and quiet mind. The social background of this poem is much similar with that of contemporary China and Buddhist concept of nothingness as well as Taoism which Wallace Stevens had searched throughout his lifetime are genuinely expressed in this poem, the writer is meant to explore the reception and artistic value for different translations (readers).There are altogether five parts in this thesis. The first part is a brief introduction to Wallace Stevens and The Snow Man. The second part is literature review. The third part is statement of Reception Aesthetics theory and its application to comparative study. The differences and similarities of the translations are discussed in the fourth part illustrated with translation examples. The last part is the conclusion of the thesis which contains the main findings and limitations of the study.