On Translating Li Shangyin’s Poems From The Perspective Of Reception Theory

Traditional translation theories considered original texts and target readers as isolated and quiet objects, and ignored translators and target readers’active and creative role in the process of translation, while the appearance of Reception Theory in1960s broke the limitations of traditional translation theories. With Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser as its representatives and Phenomenology and Hermeneutics as its theoretical basis, Reception Theory is against the traditional theories that only focus on authors and original texts, and changes the center of literature researches from authors and texts to readers. The literary text is filled with gaps and indeterminacies, inviting readers to participate in the reading activity, fill gaps and concretize indeterminacies. The translator is the reader of the original text and the writer of the translated text. He can complete his translation only by the fusion of his horizon of expectations and the text, the analysis of response-inviting structure and the filling of gaps.Li Shangyin’s poems are filled with ingenious ideas, extensive contents, subtle images and gorgeous rhetoric, representing the highest achievements of poetry art in the Late Tang Poetry. There are different comprehensions towards Li Shangyin’s poems, because on one hand his poems contain hazy and beautiful artistic conception, complex and unique images that are filled with gaps and indeterminacies, on the other hand, readers have different horizons of expectations due to their different experiences, aesthetic ideas, life values, etc. With Reception Theory as the theoretical framework, this thesis adopts horizon of expectations, fusion of expectations and response-inviting structure to analyze the different English versions of Li Shangyin’s poems, tries to find out the reason why there are so many different English versions of Li Shangyin’s poems, and provide some theoretical directions for the translation of Li Shangyin’s poems. The author discusses the reproduction of poeticness of Li Shangyin’s poems mainly from the reproduction of rhythm, images and artistic conception. In order to reproduce poetic quality of Li Shangyin’s poems better, the translator has to consider the target reader’s horizon of expectations, moderately fill gaps and try to arrive at the fusion of the translator’s horizon of expectations and the original text and the fusion of the translator’s and the target reader’s horizon of expectations.