A Study Of Image-G Actualizing In Translating Li Bai’s Poems Into English

Li Bai is the most prominent romantic poet of the Tang Dynasty, canonized as the Poet Immortal. With masculine and elegant style, abundant imagination, and diversified images, his poems are among the treasures of Chinese and the world’s literary classics. As a relatively independent artistic object of literature, each of his poems is an organic integration of its linguistic elements and aesthetic factors, enriched with gestalt qualities that ought not to be overlooked.Since the18th century, translators at home and abroad have dedicated themselves to translating Li Bai’s poems into English and published many versions which make contributions to translation and diffusion of his poems in English world, but not a few translators overemphasize the correspondence or faithfulness of individual linguistic elements, while neglecting the reproduction of the original gestalt qualities, i.e. image-G actualizing in translating process. Grounded on the model of image-G actualization in literary translation, the process of translating Li Bai’s poems is a progression of image-G actualizing. Through descriptive and comparative methods, this thesis attempts to explore the progression of image-G actualizing in translating Li Bai’s poems by probing into the two stages of image-G actualizing, i.e. mentally actualizing and linguistically actualizing image-G. The thesis is targeted at illustrating the progression of image-G actualizing in translating his poems and giving guidance to translation practice so as to solve the problem that translators attach too much importance to the equivalence of individual elements without reproducing the holistic artistic image in translating process.On the foundation of reviewing the achievements and deficiencies of former translations of Li Bai’s poems and introducing the theory of image-G actualizing, this thesis points out the applicability of image-G actualizing to the process of translating Li Bai’s poems. Then combined with translation examples, it conducts detailed research into the progression of mentally actualizing and linguistically actualizing image-G. At the stage of mentally actualizing image-G, through dual activities of linguistic cognition and aesthetic experience, the translator continuously interacts with Li Bai’s poem, and meanwhile via operating his psychological faculties like imagination, reflection or accommodation, the translator constantly modifies his perceptual schema to construct the image-G of the original poem. This image-G should also conform to the target language schema to guarantee a simpatico and natural rendition outputted in the next stage of linguistically actualizing image-G. The progression of linguistically actualizing image-G is on the basis of the mental image-G constructed, striving to constitute a text with aesthetic effects in lexical choices, sentential and textual coherence in accordance with the image-G. This progression of translating Li Bai’s poems is probably subject to the constraints from the translator and the original poem, while the continual interaction between the translator and the source text makes image-G actualized eventually. It concludes that the outcomes of image-G actualizing are that the gestalt qualities of the original are reproduced and high-quality renditions with aesthetic effects are constructed to convey the artistic significance of Li Bai’s poems.