Creative Treason In The English Translation Of Jia Baoyu's Poems By David Hawkes

Hongloumeng is a landmark in the history of Chinese literature. According to statistics, there are over 200 poems in this novel. Among them, lyrical poems can help express people's feelings and emotions; some object-chanting poems help display people's attitudes towards life; some help promote the development of story and some are conducive to the portrayal of different characters in the novel. As one of the distinguished and honorable translators of Hongloumeng, David Hawkes had exhausted his life to finish a complete translation version, in which his poetry translation is quite unique.The term “creative treason” was first proposed by French litterateur and critic Robert Escarpit in his Sociology of Literature. He pointed out that “all translation is creative treason.” The idea was later introduced by Chinese scholar Xie Tianzhen who further expounded the notion in his Medio-Translatology. The concept is regarded as the theoretical basis of the book. This paper is intended to apply creative treason into the translation analysis of Jia Baoyu's 20 poems by David Hawkes in order to find and categorize different creative treason in them.The essay consists of four parts. Firstly, the author has provided a brief introduction of the present research. Part one is a literature review concerning studies on poetry translation in Hongloumeng and that of creative treason. Part two is a description of research material and research approach applied in the thesis. In part three, the author has firstly analyzed the features of all of Jia Baoyu's 20 poems in terms of their poetic forms, themes and rhetoric. After careful examination and classification of different poems, the author has analyzed different forms of creative treason in Hawkes' translation according to Xie Tianzhen's classification of creative treason, namely, personalized translation, mistranslation, abridged translation and adaptation. Finally, a conclusion is drawn to summarize the implication and limitations of the thesis in hopes that scholars can conduct more in-depth analyses in the near-future translation studies.