A Study To Ku Hungming's Cultural Poetics And His Translation Of Lun Yu

Ku Hungming,who was called as “Cultural Geek”,has a legendary life experience.He was born in Southeast Asia,studied in the west,got married in Japan and became an official in Beijing.Affected by his life experience and the complex social historical background,he loved China with the long splendid history,advocated Chinese Confucian culture,and hated the slavery and aggression of the imperialists.Under the influence of this unique background,his cultural vision is different from other domestic intellectuals.He gradually formed his special cultural poetics,which ran through his translation activities.As a famous translator and cultural celebrity in modern China,Ku Hungming has devoted himself to the translation of Confucian classics.His translation works mainly include Lun Yu,Zhong Yong,and Da Xue.Under the complex social and political background in the late Qing dynasty and the early Republic of China,Ku inversed the trend of “Eastward Transmission of the Western Science”.He has always been committed to the westward transmission of Chinese Confucian culture.He tried his best to maintain the dignity of Chinese culture and promote the value of Chinese civilization,hoped to eliminate the prejudice and misunderstandings against Chinese people,and he even sublimed Chinese culture among the westerners through his translation works.His translation and cultural thoughts made an important influence both on China and the west.This thesis mainly studies Ku Hungming's cultural poetics and takes his translation of Lun Yu as an example to analyze the specific translation strategies and effects under the guidance of his cultural poetics.The thesis is mainly divided into three parts: introduction,main body and conclusion.The introduction part mainly introduces the research purposes,significance,difficulties,creative points and the main contents of this thesis.The main body includes four chapters.Chapter One is about literature review,which introduces the research status about cultural poetics at home and broad,and the research situations about Ku Hungming's translation of Lun Yu.Chapter Two explores Ku Hungming's multi-cultural identities and the background as well as the reasons for his translation of Lun Yu.Chapter Three introduces poetics,cultural poetics and the cultural poetics of translation,and then summarizes Ku Hungming's personal cultural poetics from his life experience.It can be summarized as: the adherence to Confucian ethics,mutual understanding and corroboration between Chinese and western culture,and reinforcing the authority of Chinese culture through translation.Chapter Four is the most important part of this research,which analyzes the elaboration of Ku's cultural poetics in his translation of Lun Yu.It mainly manifested as the appropriate omission of the barriers,cultural adaptation of Confucian key words,assimilation of common core cultural terms,the thick translation with regard to cultural reappearance and the translating textual structures in corresponding stylistic forms.At last,the writer came to the conclusion that Ku Hungming has devoted his whole life into the transmission of Chinese culture.His views of Chinese people and Chinese culture have laid the foundation of his cultural poetics.Upon this basis Ku Hungming considered translation activities as a complex integrity and focused the holistic method during the process of his translation.At the same time,Ku Hungming mainly adopted free translation methods in his translation to pursue the flexible equivalence between the original text and his translation.All in all,Ku Hungming adhered to Confucian ethics in his translation of Lun Yu under the guidance of his cultural poetics.And he looked upon Confucian philosophy with a religious spirit.The objective of his translation of Confucian classics and his promotion of “The Westward Transmission of Eastern Culture” is to fight against the discourse hegemony of the west.At the same time,Ku's translation practices and his cultural thoughts provided a model to the new strategy of Chinese culture to go out.