On Chun Jiang Hua Yue Ye And Its Three English Versions From The Perspective Of Empathy

"As an orthodox literary form in China"(He Huiyu, Liu Zaihua,1999.), Classical Chinese Poetry condenses the complex sentiments of poet with its highly artistic language. Sentiment is a necessary part of Classical Chinese Poetry; poem would lose vitality without sentiments. In Classical Chinese Poetry, the beauty of rhythm, rhyme, diction, ellipsis, images, yijing (意境), the selections of syntax and the use of figures of speech are carriers to express the poets’sentiments to a certain extent; they are also factors arousing the aesthetic subjects’ empathy. These factors caused empathy can make the aesthetic subjects quickly integrate into a poem and bring different aesthetic subjects different aesthetic experiences. This is the reason why Classical Chinese Poetry has the immortal charm in the long river of history.As an important and mature research area in aesthetics, empathy enjoys a long history in China and the western countries. With the increasing of cultural exchange between China and foreign countries, empathy is gradually put into the translation field and becomes an important theory in translation aesthetics in China. There are detailed introductions of empathy in Li Miqing’s An Introduction to Translation Aesthetics, Zhu Hui’s Comparative Studies on the Art of Chinese and English Poetry and Zhuo Zhenying’s A Theoretical Outline of Chinese Verse Translation. The thesis takes Liu Miqing’s empathy theory of translation as the theoretical foundation.Chun Jiang Hua Yue Ye, praised as one of the best poems in Tang Dynasty, attracts many readers, and it has been put into different versions for its unique beauty. Its versions translated by Charles Budd and W. J. B. Fletcher are included in Lv Shuxiang’s A Comparative Study on English Translations of Old Gems, which can prove the authority of the two versions. And it is well known that Xu Yuanchong, who makes great achievements in the translation of Classical Chinese Poetry, also translates Chun Jiang Hua Yue Ye. Therefore, the thesis takes the three English versions as the research objects. By the analysis and comparison of Chun Jiang Hua Yue Ye and its three English versions, the thesis shows the emphatical obstacles met by translators when they represent the rhythm, rhyme, diction, ellipsis, syntax, figures of speech, images and yijng of the original poem. The analysis of the emphatical obstacles mainly originates from the perspective of time and space, culture, psychology and language. By the analysis and comparison of the three English versions, the thesis aims to prove that empathy is the foundation for translators to comprehend the original poem, and to enter the spiritual world of the poet and experience the complex changes of his (her) sentiments; empathy is also a key for translators to represent the spirit of the original poem. So translators should endeavor to improve their overall cultural accomplishments so as to get over the emphatical obstacles.