Translating Poetic Images In The Light Of Conceptual Blending

This thesis is meant to examine the translation of poetic images from the perspective of Conceptual Blending.Image is the key factor of a poem.It is the combination between an objective picture with the poet's feelings and reflections,and it is also where the ingenuity of a poem and the subjectivity of a poet were found.Poetic image always occurs in clusters to form up a system of images,or imagery.What's more,poetic images are typically rich in cultural elements,for example,a simple image of “moon” carries a number of cultural meanings in Chinese that are not present in English.For these reasons,understanding and translating poetic images is challenging,and thus attracting attention of a great number of translators and translation theorists.Some discussed the translation of poetic images from traditional or non-cognitive viewpoints such as equivalence of meaning,reader's response and aesthetic effects,while others tried to bring it under the light of cognitive viewpoints such as gestalt theory,image-schemas and conceptual metaphor.Those studies have achieved fruitful results but there are still more to be done.Conceptual Blending is a theory developed within the framework of cognitive linguistics,based on the achievement of conceptual metaphor.By reflecting on the merits and limitations of conceptual metaphor,scholars raised a new theory of Conceptual Blending which uses blended space and emergent structure as tools to reveal the metaphorical features of cognition.Like other cognitive viewpoints,it emphasizes the human experiences underlying people's cognition that understands the strange through the familiar metaphorically.As poetic images are often metaphorical,the Theory will be fitting as the theoretic basis.As a matter of fact,some scholars have already explored the possibilities of employing the Conceptual Blending theory in explanation of poetic images and in relevant translation studies,but its potential has not been adequately explored.Mindful of the significance of poetic images in poetry translation,this thesis is meant to explore the answer to three questions from the perspective of Conceptual Blending.What's the structure of poetic image and how to translate it? What's the structure of poetic image group and how to translate it? What's the recommended approach to deal with cultural image in poetry?Wordsworth was a major lake poet who pioneered the Romantic Age in English literature.His poem is intense with feelings and he had claimed that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”.What's more,he is one of those poets who advocate that the beauty of nature is the remedy for the alienation derived from the industrialized city,therefore,he loves to use natural images as the carrier of his feelings.Among his prolific works,this thesis chooses The Daffodils,She Was a Phantom of Delight and She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways for illustration,because they are rich in poetic image and because they are most translated so that the comparisons of translations can be arranged conveniently.In sum,this thesis is intended to explore practicable rules of translating images in poetry in a structured manner by using the Conceptual Blending theory.But due to the limitation of resources and knowledge,the results found here may not be applicable to images in other literature forms such as fiction or essay.