On The Translation Of Impersonal Artistic Mood In WANG Wei’s Landscape Poetry

Landscape poetry is a special classic Chinese literary domain which integrates thoughts of Taoism and Buddhism. Representing a "drunk in nature" way of living and spiritual status, Chinese landscape poetry has high value in cultural communication. Standing on the summit of landscape poetry, WANG Wei, who owes his debt to TAO Yuanming and XIE Lingyun, two forerunners of landscape poetry, constructs a remarkably impressive "impersonal artistic mood" with his simple words and clear images. This "impersonal artistic mood" is imbued with Zen philosophy. As it is generally acknowledged, to translate a poem is to translate its artistic mood. Therefore, the translation of "impersonal artistic mood" is central to the communication of WANG Wei’s landscape poetry. At present, in the academic circle of translation, people mainly focus their attention on images when translating artistic mood, whose successful transplant, however, doesn’t necessarily mean the transplant of artistic mood in general. Artistic mood is more than a result of simple connections between images, but rather an organic unity from montage combinations, representing the same mood and leading to an immense space of imagination. Therefore, this paper aims at the translation of WANG Wei’s "impersonal artistic mood" from the perspective of image combinations, and furthermore providing a new insight into the translation of artistic mood, the perhaps most sophisticated Chinese literary term.This paper is divided into three chapters which discuss the translation of "impersonal artistic mood" from image combinations, eye of poem and Zen philosophy, three levels of WANG Wei’s image combinations. The first chapter studies translation of juxtaposition, climax and bound, three most typical ways of image combinations in WANG Wei’s landscape poetry. The second chapter delves into the special role eye of poetry plays in image combinations, puts forward three translation strategies of eye of poetry according to Russian Formalistic Defamilirization theory, and adopts these strategies to study the translation of "eye of a sentence" and "eye of a poem" in WANG Wei’s landscape poetry. The third chapter studies the translation of Zen philosophy and discusses how to reproduce Zen philosophy through the translation of pronoun as well as "空" from the perspectives of respective dissolution of poet’s self-awareness and Zen’s philosophical idea of emptiness.