A Study Of The Poetic Interpretation Paradigm For English Translation Of The Book Of Poetry

Literary works are only finished through the reader's reading.As the first anthology of poetry in China,the Book of Poetry,or the Shijing,had become a must-read textbook on the desks of Chinese scholars in ancient times.Confucius might be the earliest of its interpreters that put forward the interpretive principle of "When alluding to sayings of the past,the other sees what bearing they have on what was to come after".Subsequently after Confucius,there were many scholars who interpreted it,leading to a variety of interpreted texts due to the polysemy of the original text and the differentiation of the interpreters' standing points.Nevertheless,the Book of Poetry is the origin of the development of Chinese poetry,and,through translations by Western translators,has exerted a great effect upon the world culture,hence the Book of Poetry fever prevailing in the world.At present,as many appeal to the project of Chinese culture "going to the world" or Chinese literature "going to the world","going out","going global",etc.,the translation of such a representative of Chinese literary classics is receiving increasing concern.Among its dozens of translators,Mr.Xu Yuanchong,professor of English and French at Peking University,attracts the most attention because he is prolific in his translated works and unique in his translating style.Of the ten-odd translated texts available,translators in the West are the majority,while there are just a number of them at home.This thesis,based on hermeneutic theories,analyzes the poetical loss in the English translation of the book title,poem titles,six artistic elements and poems of the Book of Poetry through a comparative reading of its various English versions and puts forward a hypothesis of a paradigm on the basis of Steiner's hermeneutic motion;then,in the light of the supposed paradigm,it argues that a process of translation is composed of five stages,i.e.reading,interpretation,translation,criticism,and re-creative translation and this interpretation paradigm comprises a subjective paradigm,an objective paradigm and an ontological paradigm.Since the translator as the first reader of a literary text has naturally his/her own understanding and interpretation of the text,this thesis argues that the translator plays five roles in the five stages of interpretation,that a literary text has three levels:language,culture,and literature,and that the poeticality is reflected at three levels:the "true","kind","fair" nature.Furthermore,the author,from the perspective of poetic interpretation,selects a number of typical English translated poems to exemplify the feasibility of this paradigm,for the purpose of making a summary of the law of English translation of the Book of Poetry and establishing a poetic interpretation paradigm as a reference system for translating Chinese literary classics.