A Study Of Poetry Translation By Poet From The Perspective Of Poetological Manipulation

As a subsystem of literature,the system of poetry is composed of poetry writing and poetry translation.However,most studies of poetry have been conducted from a single point of view.Some are simply concerned about the influence of context on poetry writing and some only focus on the role of various factors in poetry translation.There have been few studies that combine poetry writing with poetry translation.This study regards poetry writing and poetry translation as a whole and stresses the influence of a poet-translator's poetics of poetry writing on his poetry translation.A comparative study of three Chinese versions of To a Skylark is made to compare the poet-translator's poetological manipulation of translation and identify the consistency of the poet-translator's poetics for poetry translation with his own poetics for poetry writing,hoping to provide a new direction of the study of poetry translation.With the advent of “Cultural Turn” of translation studies in the 1970 s,translation studies has broken away from traditional translation research modes of aesthetics and linguistics.The Manipulation School represented by Andre Lefevere proposes that translation is a rewriting of the original and is the translator's manipulation of the text for a specific purpose.The literary translation is affected not only by the text itself,but also by the poetological manipulation.The translator usually makes appropriate adjustment to the original text so as to make the translation conform to the mainstream poetics of the target culture and realize his translation purpose.The manipulation of the poet-translator on the translation and the difference of translation effect are discussed in this study from the perspective of Lefevere's theory of poetics.In this thesis,three Chinese versions of To a Skylark(i.e Guo Moruo's version in the 1920 s,Zha Liangzheng's version in the 1950 s and Sun Dayu's version in the1990s)are qualitatively analyzed and the poet-translator's manipulation of translation and the consistency of the poet-translator's poetics for poetry translation with his own poetics for poetry writing are explored.The main analysis is divided into two parts.The first part expounds the poet-translator's poetics of poetry writing.Thesecond part takes eight stanzas of To a Skylark as examples to explore the poet-translators' treatment of poetic elements of rhyme,rhythm,language and imagery from the perspective of poetics and also analyzes the motivation behind the treatment.Under the influence of poetics of poetry writing and dominant poetics,the translator adopts different translation strategies,thus producing different translation effects.The research findings indicate that the poet-translators' poetics of poetry translation is consistent with their own poetics of poetry writing.The poet-translators manipulated their poem translation and the three Chinese versions of To a Skylark are basically faithful to the original text.Besides the poet-translator's poetics,the mainstream poetics,social culture as well as macro-factors of the literary system also exert impact on the translation of poetry and thus it is impossible to realize a completely faithful translation of English metrical poetry in terms of poetics.