A Study Of Xu Yuanchong’s English Translation Of Tang Poetry From The Perspective Of Foregrounding Theory

Tang poetry is bright and invaluable treasure in the field of Chinese classical literature with strong beauty of rhythm, form and image. In recent years, more and more scholars at home and abroad have been keen on the English translation of Tang poetry, pushing Tang poetry towards the world. As to how to translate Tang poetry, scholars also have carried out a lot of positive and beneficial studies, no matter from the four schools of translation theories--philological approach, linguistic approach, communicative approach and social linguistic approach, or from the perspective of literature and art, or from the angle of stylistics and rhetoric, and even from the angle of discourse and system function emerging in recent years. But all these studies have one point in common: they all expand around the form and content of poetry.At home, Xu Yuanchong makes the biggest contribution in the field of Chinese classical poetry translation with remarkable achievements in both practice and theories. Accordingly, the domestic researches about his translation emerge greatly. Articles about Xu Yuanchong’s translation theories mainly relates to an overview of his translation theories, theory of verse rendering for verse, principle of three beauties, principle of three transformations, and theory of making full use of good expressions of the target language. And articles about Xu Yuanchong’s translation practice can be roughly divided into two kinds: one is analyzed from the perspective of theories in adjacent disciplines as external views; another is studied from the perspective of internal elements in translation processes, such as the expression of target language, artistic styles, the translator’s subjectivity, translation strategies, the acceptability of translated texts, and so on. In contrast, foreign studies about Xu Yuanchong’s translation are quite fragmented and subjective because of certain social or personal factors.This thesis will analyze Xu Yuanchong’s Tang poetry translation from the perspective of foregrounding theory. By taking 300 Tang Poems published by Higher education Press in 2000 as a case study, it attempts to explore foregrounding’s guiding role for the English translation of Tang poetry.Foregrounding is an extremely important concept in stylistics, which is first clearly put forward by Jan Mukarovsky(1891-1975) of Prague School in Standard Language and Poetic Language and then completed and developed by linguistics such as Roman Jakobson(1896-1982), M.A.K.Halliday(1807-1870) and Geoffery Leech(1936-). It was originally introduced from painting, one kind of visual art, referring to such a technique that the painter uses to make certain artistic image stand out from the background. What stands out becomes the foreground and what serves as a foil becomes the background. To put it simple, foregrounding is an intentional violation of standard language, as opposed to background, automation and convention. There are two means of foregrounding: deviation and parallelism.The foregrounding phenomenon is most reflected in poetry. In creation, the poet always adopts the techniques of foregrounding to attract readers and to achieve unique beauty of rhythm, form and image. Besides, foregrounding features also often embody the poet’s inditement intention and thus play a crucial role in the accurate understanding and appreciation of a poem. So it is essential for the translator to represent foregrounding features in the target text in Tang poetry translation, which can not only introduces the unique beauty of Tang poetry to English readers, but also endow the target text with similar artistic effect with the original text, making English readers appreciate the beauty of Tang poetry as Chinese readers.This thesis explores the necessity and feasibility of representation of foregrounding features with the corresponding translation strategies Xu Yuanchong adopted in Tang poetry translation from three specific aspects: phonology, lexicon and syntax, semantics. And each aspect is further studied respectively from parallelism and deviation. The commonalities between English and Chinese languages provide the possibility of representation of foregrounding features, for which the successful translation examples in this thesis are very good proofs. But after all, there exist differences between English and Chinese. Some foregrounding features in Tang poetry are untranslatable. At this case, the translator has no choice but to abandon the representation of foregrounding features. If the translator strives to keep them, the translated texts may become difficult for English readers to understand. Besides, it is an almost impossible task to reflect foregrounding features at each level in the translated text. When there is contradiction, the priority order should be semantic, phonology, lexicon and syntax.This thesis is a preliminary attempt to analyze the English translation of Tang poetry from the perspective of foregrounding theory. It is hoped to have certain theoretical and practical value for Tang poetry translation and have references for further studies.