On English Version Of Mao Zedong’s Poems From Susan Bassnett’s Cultural Translation Perspective

China is a land of poetry. It has been a period of more than 2000 years since the appearance of The Book of Poetry. Within the period, Chinese poets composed many popular poems which greatly enriched the treasure-house of human culture. In recent time, with further development of international communication in culture, excellent Chinese poems have attracted attention of the world, much of them even have been translated into various languages and widely circulate in the world. In 1972, American translator, Willis Barnstone published a book, The Poems of Mao Tse-tung: Translation with Ko Ching-po, Introduction, Notes by Willis Barnstone, the book received warm welcome from English readers. In 2008, Barnstone published another book, The Poems of Mao Zedong: Translations, Introduction and Notes by Willis Barnstone, the book was also popular among English readers. From 1972 to 2008, Barnstone had studied poems of Mao Zedong for more than 36 years. His continuous study indicates the unique charm of Mao‘s poems. With great momentum, magnificent artistic conception, concise and natural language, Mao Zedong‘s poems are essence of his life and revolutionary experience, are loved by people of the world.Integrated with merits of classical Chinese poetry, borrowed historical allusions in large quantity, Mao‘s poems are of outstanding artistic quality, ideological content and cultural characteristic. In the meantime, interwoven with events of the time when the poem was created, Mao‘s poems also take obvious features of the time in which it was composed. Translating Mao‘s poems, translators not only have to overcome the common difficulties encountered in translating ordinary poems, but also have to respect original status of Mao‘s poems, and honestly transfer meaning and cultural information into target text. Therefore, it is a very challenging and difficult work. The thesis writer took Susan Bassnett‘s cultural translation theory as a guide, took Willis Barnstone‘s The Poems of Mao Zedong in 2008 as an analysis object, investigated issues such as relation between culture and language, types of translation, decoding and recoding, problems of equivalence, loss and gain in the process of translation, untranslatability and creativity of translator concerning the version, with methods of literature review, descriptive translation study, and comparative analysis. Translation strategies and rules contained in the version were explored and investigated. After analysis, it was found out that Barnstone took domestication as the main strategy for his version, sometimes simultaneously used strategy of domestication and foreignization, and occasionally used foreignization strategy according to requirement of translation; most literal meaning of Mao‘s poems was translated into target text; on the basis of translator‘s creativity, cultural meaning of some words and imagery was supplemented in the form of intralingual translation, forms of Mao‘s poems and imagery presented in Mao‘s poems were reproduced in target texts to some extent.