On The Translatability Of Classical Poetry:With The Rendition Of Li Qingzhao's Xing Xiangzi As A Case Study

Recent years have seen increasing academic concern over and discussions on the "going out" of Chinese culture. As the cream of Chinese literature, classical Chinese poetry is being translated into many other languages and introduced to more people. The efforts have, however, given rise to some issues, of which the one about translatability is the most troublesome. Guided by hermeneutics theory, this paper tries to study the C-E rendition of the poem "Tune:'Song of Wafting Fragrance'" by Li Qingzhao, a great poetess in Song Dynasty, through a comparative analysis of its two English versions by Xu Yuanchong and Kenneth Rexroth (Chinese name "???") respectively, so as to probe into the translatability of the Chinese classical poetry.For this purpose, a detailed examination is made of the characteristics of the two versions in both form and content, with the latter consisting of syntactic features as well as wording and phrasing. This examination aims to disclose the two translators'different understandings of poetry translation, as well as the different translation strategies they have employed accordingly. As for research method, this paper adopts a contrastive-comparative approach, looking into the similarities and differences of the two versions.The investigation shows that classical Chinese poetry is to some extent translatable in spite of the huge linguistic and cultural differences involved. As long as the translators comprehend and explain the original text correctly, they are capable of producing translations that reproduce the linguistic beauty of the original text, striking a chord in targeted readers. The efforts made in this paper are expected to shed some light on issues concerning how the language gap can be bridged so that classical Chinese poetry could be better introduced to non-Chinese audiences.