Thomas Hardy’s Poetry:Aesthetic Features And Its Translation

Thomas Hardy is both a great novelist and a brilliant poet. Through his lifetime, not only does he write several well-known novels, but also finishes eight poetic collections, including918poems, and an epic Dynasts. But Hardy as a poet still fails to receive enough attention from the Chinese audience. Even students whose major is English Literature are unfamiliar with his poetry. Fortunately, relevant studies gradually gain momentum in recent years. Till now, many papers have dedicated themselves to remarkable appreciation and analysis from literary perspectives, but only a few focused on the translation of Hardy’s poetry.Scholars, within or outside China, have noticed the "pessimism" in Hardy’s creation. However, the discussions of this concept, till now, have not touched its essence. Therefore, the paper explores Hardy’s inner world and finds that although Hardy is a basically pessimist, he still believes the terrible situation can be changed. And this thinking confirms his comment on himself as a "pessimistic meliorist".Hardy’s poems are mainly collected in three volumes and the most fruitful one covers247poems. Faced with the numerous creations by Hardy, Chinese translators have to work harder. The examination of Thomas Hardy’s poetry and its translation mainly considers two aspects--form and content. In his poems, Thomas Hardy pays remarkable attention to the invention of poetic form, the special quality of which is not only hidden behind elements such as foot and rhyme, but also manifests itself in the various layouts. In this sense, Thomas Hardy’s poetry is a combination of music and architecture. However, the existing translated versions ignore, consciously or unconsciously, the aesthetic creativeness of the forms to different degrees. Besides, as for the translation of poetic content, all translators make successful works in terms of the accuracy. But by taking other factors such as the poetic emotion and language style into consideration, different translators have different characteristics and none of the translated works can be chosen as the best one. The paper tries to point out these problems in the process of comparison and offer some advice to later translators.