An Icm Study Of The Representation Of Poetic Text Coherence In Translation

A poetic text expresses rich meanings with concise language,and the meanings are very creative and closely interrelated.As a result,few explicit cohesive devices are used in a poetic text,which makes it difficult for readers to understand the coherence of a poetic text.In poetry translation,text coherence is related not only to the reproduction of textual features of the original text,but also to the transmission and reproduction of the beauty of poetic meaning.The language in Mao Zedong's poems is concise and full of profound connotation.It is of great significance to represent the textual features and the beauty of poetic meaning of Mao Zedong's poems in the English versions.Idealized cognitive model(ICM)was proposed on the basis of Fillmore's frame semantics and Fauconnier's mental space theory,which has the characteristics of relevance,experience and creativity.These characteristics of ICM coincide with the coherence of a poetic text.In addition,the image schematic model,metaphoric model and metonymic model of idealized cognitive model also have coincidence with the construction of imagery,metaphoric and metonymic coherence of poetry.Therefore,the use of idealized cognitive model has strong explanatory power to explore the coherence of a poetic text.This paper uses four cognitive models of ICM to analyze the coherence of propositional meaning,imagery meaning,metaphoric and metonymic meaning in the original poems,and to further explore the devices in the five English versions to represent the above coherence.There are three main findings:(1)For the propositional model,text coherence of the original poem is achieved through the activation of propositions;for imagery coherence,coherence of imagery meaning in the original poems is achieved by the container schema,source-path-goal schema and linear schema;for metaphoric coherence,two representative metaphors of Mao Zedong's poems are selected to explore metaphoric meaning behind them to represent coherence of metaphoric meaning in the original poems;for metonymic coherence,from three aspects of attribute-category,part-whole and specific-general reference,coherence of metonymic meaning in the original poems can be achieved.(2)Through the comparison of five English versions in the representation of text coherence of the original poems,there are similarities as well as differences in the five English versions,and the reasons for this is that cognitive models of different translators vary from each other,which causes difference in understanding the meaning.(3)In the five English versions,two coherent devices,inter-words and inter-sentences coherence are used in representation of the text coherence of original poems.