A Comparative Study On The English Versions Of Chang Hen Ge-an Image-gactualization Theory Perspective

Chang Hen Ge, a masterpiece by the famous poet Bai Juyi, is a long narrativepoem featuring the touching love story of Emperor Xuanzong and Lady Yang. For theunique artistic value, Chang Hen Ge has attracted many scholars of translation studiesboth at home and abroad. However, most of the current researches center on one orsome certain aspects of this poem, few have taken the poem as a holistic unit. Image-Gactualization theory, originating from psychological studies, has now been frequentlyadopted in the field of literary translation, especially that of classical Chinese poetry.Image-G actualization theory emphasizes the holistic quality of literary worksand points out that every piece of literary work is an image-G with a “scene-frame”structure which possesses certain Gestalt qualities, and literary translation is just areproduction of original image-G and it includes two stages: the mental actualizationand linguistic actualization of the image-G. And Chang Hen Ge is a long poem ofwhich the Gestalt quality should be particularly emphasized in the translation process.So the aim of the current study is to provide a new perspective for relative studies oflong poems as well as to broaden the applicable domain of this theory. Based on this,this paper made a comparative study of the translations of Chang Hen Ge (by XuYuanchong and Bynner respectively) guided by image-G actualization theory.In the comparative process of this study, detailed analysis of specific exampleshas been provided to examine the reproduction of original image-G. Both qualitativeand quantitative methods were adopted with the descriptive-explanatory approach inthe analysis of individual examples and statistic approaches to show the degree of thepreservation of the image-G.And after thorough analyses done on semantic, sentential and textual levels ofChang Hen Ge, the conclusion has been drawn that successful translation of theoriginal poem is based on successful image-G actualization, and this theory proveseffective and applicable to translation studies of long poems.