A Study Of Dialogues In The Translating Of Li Bai’s Poems

Li Bai(701-762) is one of the greatest Romantic poets in Chinese history of literature. Featured by strong passions and emotions, bold and unrestrained spirit, rich and wild imagination, and plain and natural language, Li Bai’s poems mirror not only his own temperament and personality, but also the spirituality of the High Tang period.So far, his poems have been translated into many languages by translators from different nations at different times. This thesis takes three representative English versions of Li Bai’s poems as the research subjects, namely, W. J. B. Fletcher’s Gems of Chinese Verse(1918) and More Gems of Chinese poetry(1918), Shigeyoshi Obata’s The Works of Li Po(1922) and Xu Yuanchong’s Selected Poems of Li Bai(1987).Fletcher’s translation is the first endeavor ever made to translate Tang Poetry exclusively, while Obata’s is the first attempt to deal with Li Bai’s poems exclusively.And Xu is a prominent expert in the field of translation of classical Chinese poetry in China. Within the framework of Reception Aesthetics, this thesis makes textual analysis and comparative analysis of the image and artistic conception, cultural factors, syntactic schemes, rhetoric devices and rhyme schemes contained in the three versions mentioned above, in the hope of exploring the dialogues between the original poem, the translator, and the target reader in the translation process.Reception Aesthetics, born in Germany in the late 1960 s, was spearheaded by Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. Jauss holds the view that a reader enters any literary work with a “horizon of expectations”. In the reception process, the reader confirms, changes or even reconstructs the horizon and finally reaches a unity, or“fusion of horizons” with the work. Iser asserts that a literary work provides readers with a “schema” structure--- there are “blanks” and “indeterminacies” at all levels in a text, forming a potential “appealing structure”, which encourages readers to fill in or“concretize”. In a nutshell, Reception Aesthetics lays an emphasis on reader’s active participation in the reading process, maintaining that only by the interaction betweenthe text and the reader can the meaning of a literary work be realized. The viewpoints of Reception Aesthetics bring about a great enlightenment to the translation of Li Bai’s poems: the translation of Li Bai’s poems is a process of dialogue. In the first place, the translator communicates with the original poem as a reader. The translator enters the source text with his horizon of expectations and, checks, changes, and adjusts his horizon in the reading process until he reaches a fusion of horizons with the original poem. In the second place, the translator communicates with the target readers as the creator of the translated text. To make his translation more understandable and acceptable to readers, the translator must take into consideration the readers’ level of acceptance and horizon of expectations and adopt proper translation strategies accordingly.It is noted that the three translators all strive to activate their horizon of expectations to read and interpret Li Bai’s poems. Meanwhile, because of the blanks and indeterminacies in the original text and the differences in their nationalities and times, the translators vary in their comprehensions now and then. In terms of translation strategies, Fletcher and Obata both take domestication as the major strategy and foreignization as a supplement, while Xu Yuanchong attempts to balance the two strategies approximately. In accordance with homely dignified Victorian poetic style,Fletcher employs rhyme and stanzaic forms. In addition, rich references to classical English poems and dramas are made to help the readers understand the translated text.Obata follows the tide of poetic revolution at the beginning of 20 th Century in America,adopting the free verse and making his language plain and straightforward. Appling his Three Beauty Principle to the rendering, Xu follows closely to the original form of the poems but deals flexibly with the meaning. When it comes to translation methods, all of the translators combine literal translation with liberal translation rather than employ only one of them. Such methods as addition, omission, substitution, and paraphrase are used to preserve the original meaning on the one hand, and improve the readability of the translated text on the other hand.The dialogic attribute reveals the complexity and difficulty of translation activities in a sense and accounts for the diversity of translated versions. In light of Reception Aesthetics, the translation process is viewed as a dynamic and open process of dialogue, which evokes a better awareness of the coordination between multiplefactors behind the translated text, hence he evaluation of a translation is no longer confined to static standards of loyalty and accuracy. In view of this, the study on dialogues in the translating of Li Bai’s poems from the perspective of Reception Aesthetics opens a new way for the translation of classical Chinese poetry.