A Comparative Study Of The English Translations Of Du Fu’s Poems In Light Of Rewriting Theory

Du Fu’s poetry has been long esteemed the epitome of the classical Chineseliterature. Under the “Going global” cultural strategy in China, great importance is attached to the translation of Du Fu’s poems. Despite the difficulty, many translatorsat home and abroad still rose up to challenges and made unremitting struggle totranslate Du Fu’s poems. Among them, Hebert Allen Giles, Kenneth Rexroth andStephen Owen are three prominent translators with outstanding contribution to thepropagation of Du Fu’s poetry into the Western world. Contrasted with thesignificance of their translations, the specialized researches on this issue have beenscarcely conducted at home, far from exhaustive.Given the status quo, the present thesis intends to make a detailed comparativeanalysis of the three translators’ translations of Du Fu’s poems anthologized in Gemsof Chinese Literature: Verse（1923）, One hundred Poems from the Chinese（1956）and An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to1911（1996） to summarizetheir features respectively. The study shows that their differences are primarilymanifested in the selection of poems in terms of subject matters and in such aspects asthe reproduction of meaning, form, rhyme and cultural imagery in the process oftranslation. In general, Giles’ translation projects a simple Du Fu in his personal andidyllic world; Rexroth presents a hermit enjoying meditation in his loneliness; and inOwen’s renderings, he depicts a Confucian voicing his principled responses to thedynastic upheaval and social suffering, yet constantly lamenting his magnitude ofcompetence being little practical use to the state. It is not hard to discover that thethree translators all rewrote the original works of Du Fu in certain degrees, and haveprojected three different images of the poet Du Fu, distinct from the traditionalperception of the Chinese readers.Lefevere, an influential translation theorists of the cultural school, who advocated observing and studying translation in the broad context of historical society,held that translation is a type of rewriting, and it is potentially the most influential inthat it can project the image of an author and/or a (series of) work(s) in anotherculture, the process of which is under the multiple constraint of cultural factors in thetranslator’s society.Illuminated by Lefevere’s rewriting theory, the thesis endeavors to make athorough investigation of the ideology and poetics of the periods when thesetranslations appeared and to figure out which concrete factors in what waysinfluenced the translation. It discovers that it’s the ideology and poetics dominant in acertain historical society that basically manipulate the translators’ rewritings of DuFu’s poems. To be specific, the ideological factors and the functional component ofpoetics primarily constrain the selection of translated poems in terms of subjectmatters or themes and the reproduction of poetic meaning, while the inventorycomponents of poetics dictate the translation techniques in the reproduction of literaryforms. What’s more, the translators’ cultural identities and their varied literarycompetence as well as aesthetic preference also exert certain influence on therewriting of an original work.