Taoist Aesthetics And Wai-lim Yip's Translation Of Classical Chinese Poetry

Wai-lim Yip enjoys a high reputation worldwide as a bilingual poet and an expert in Comparative Poetics,on the basis of which he formed his own theories of translation and aesthetics and enriched both the Chinese and western culture with his excellent translation works.This dissertation discusses his thoughts of Taoist aesthetics and his translation theories,and concludes his important Taoist thoughts such as pure experience,viewing things as things view themselves and the pre-predicative state of language.The reflection of Taoist aesthetics in the classical Chinese language is also stated.Then,based on Taoist aesthetics,this dissertation focuses on learning the specific strategies that Yip applies to his translation of the classical Chinese poetry.This aim will be achieved by textual and linguistic analysis of his translation works,in order to conduct a relatively overall study at the level of punctuation,characters,phrases,sentences and passages,and to find connections between his translation theories and Taoist aesthetics.Yip has successfully reproduced the Chinese syntax such as the sentences without personal pronouns and tense,which is quite exotic and unconventional in the English language,embodying his translation strategy of foreignization.He avoids using personal pronouns,enabling the English lines to be free from the constraints of tense,in order to realize the real-life world with self-generating and self-transforming objects.By using punctuation to take the place of prepositions and conjunctions,he realizes the juxtaposition of images in the translated poems,in order to eliminate the analytical words and constraints from human interference,realizing the pre-predicative state of language.This dissertation makes a comprehensive and systematical study on Yip's Taoist aesthetics and his translation practice,which is indeed a typical one combining the theories with practice,providing new perspective to the studies of classical Chinese poetry translation.