A Comparative Study On Translating Images In Mao Zedong’s Poems

Mao Zedong’s poetry, with its highly artistic, idealistic and cultural value, has beencherished as a gleaming gem in Chinese contemporary literature and made great influenceworldwide. Images are believed to be the soul of poetry creation and appreciation. Mao’spoetry is filled with various and vivid images and has formed its own system of images. It isof great importance, as well as great difficulty, to translate images properly in order tounderstand the beauty of Mao Zedong’s poetry. Therefore, this thesis focus on the translationof images in six selected English versions of Mao Zedong’s poetry, and aims to compare anddiscuss how the Chinese and western translators deal with images, and tries to exploitdifferent reproduction of images and the factors influencing it, and thus gains somethingenlightening for the translation of images and Chinese traditional poetry.First, based upon the interpretations of the image in China and the West, the thesispoints out that image is the integration of the poet’s subject feelings and the specific objectshe describes. The functions of the image can be summed up in the following three aspects: tocreate rich artistic sight, to display the poet’s subjective feelings and thoughts and to create aunique artistic ideorealm. It afterwards makes a detailed analysis of the images in MaoZedong’s poetry, including their classifications and functions. And then, six versions oftranslation of Mao Zedong’s poetry from both Chinese and foreign translators are studiedfrom the perspectives of different classifications and functions. By comparing the differenceslying in the reproductions of types and functions of images, the thesis comes to a conclusionthat the domestic translators and foreign translators deal with those images differently. Andthe factors influencing their translation are mainly due to their different thinking modes. Byand large, Chinese believe in the unity of subject and object while westerners take stock in theseparation of the subject and object. What’s more, Chinese always take objects as a whole andwesterners always regard things as individuals. Thirdly, Chinese are good at intuitive thinkingwhile westerners are famous for logical thinking. Last but not the least, Chinese is a languageof parataxis but English is mainly hypotaxis. These differences lead to different expressions intwo languages, poetics and different ways to represent images in poetry. Some suggestions are given to the translation of Chinese traditional poetry. Imageconstitutes the core of Chinese traditional poetry, so the translation of image is a largely amatter of poetry translation. Therefore, the translators should do their utmost to preserve theoriginal images to the largest extent. First, translators should interpret the image properly toconvey the emotion. Secondly, if there is no suitable equivalent English image to that inChinese, some images can be omitted to ensure that the connotation is represented agreeably.Thirdly, for those images revealing Chinese culture, extra explanations should be added topreserve the integrity of their visualization. Fourthly, translators should take the languagestructures of Chinese and Chinese poetry into consideration and try to remain the originalformulation. The innovations of this thesis are as follows: firstly, regarding image as the basicevaluating unit, it opens up a new horizon for the criticism of poetry translation; secondly,discussing the orientation of Chinese and western thinking modes influencing imagetranslation, it gives new insights into comparative study of poetry translation; finally, viewingthe representation of images as the core of poetry translation, it provides new translatingstrategies for the translation of Chinese traditional poetry, especially that of Mao Zedong’spoetry.