A Study On The Images In Ezra Pound’s The Classic Anthology Defined By Confucius

Ezra Pound is an American poet, critic, translator as well as a translation theorist. Asone of the main founders of modern western literary, Pound, an initiator of imagism,advocated a movement in poetry at the beginning of the twentieth century and exerted agreat influence in the world. Pound has also successfully translated a number of classicalChinese poems and benefited a lot from classical Chinese poetry. Classical Chinese poetrywith rich images greatly influenced Pound and played a positive role in promoting Pound’simagism. Therefore, the study on the translation of classical Chinese poetry by Pound hasbeen an important topic in the field of translation studies.As the source of Chinese literature and that of classical Chinese poetry, Shi Jing ismarked for its beautiful and implicit poetic language, with images as the most vivid andattractive part. Images in Shi Jing have always been a focus of study and played a specialand important role in the cultural exchanges between China and western countries.Previous studies on images in Shi Jing are mainly based on the English versions bytranslators such as James Legge, Arthur Waley, Xu Yuanchong, Wang Rongpei, RenXiuhua, etc., from perspectives of cognitive linguistics, translator’s subjectivity and theReception Aesthetics and so on. Researches on The Classic Anthology Defined byConfucius by Ezra Pound are by far still inadequate, leaving much room for more studies.Taking images as the core of the study, this thesis attempts to conduct acomparatively systematic research on Ezra Pound’s rendition of The Classic AnthologyDefined by Confucius, aiming at discovering in what ways Pound creatively reproduced theimages in classical Chinese poetry, expounding the relation between images in westernpoems and those in Chinese poems, and investigating what elements have influencedPound’s translation of the classical poems. It is a qualitative study, which makes analysesof considerable examples based on Pound’s translation theories and imagism from theperspectives of preserving, changing the original image and recreating images. Throughthis thesis, hopefully, the integration of Chinese imagery aesthetics and Pound’s imagismcan be visualized, a new perspective for the study of Shi Jing can be proposed, and insightsfor the translation of Shi Jing can also be provided to some extent.