Comparative Study Of Poetic Features In Two English Versions Of Hong Lou Meng Based On Cognitive Poetics

Hong Lou Meng is a great poetic novel.Its poetic features cannot be neglected in both literary study and translation.Its poetic features are reflected in many aspects,such as musical beauty,formal beauty,language beauty,rhetorical beauty,the beauty of image,artistic conception and so on.Among these aspects,the beauty of image and artistic conception is of the most importance.By far,the studies about Hong Lou Meng mainly focus on language,culture,translators and their strategies,etc.,while those few studies on poetic features mainly concentrate on rhetorical beauty,musical beauty and formal beauty.Image and artistic conception are paid less attention.This thesis chooses image and artistic conception as the objects and adopts cognitive poetics to analyze and compare two English translations,that is,the translation by David Hawks and John Minford,and the translation by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang.Cognitive poetics is very significant to translation studies.Its theories,image schema and figure/ground theory,can not only be used to analyze images and artistic conception,but also to guide the construction of image and artistic conception in literary translation.Therefore,Chapter three in this thesis adopts image schema to analyze images,including spatial images and motor sensory images,and Chapter Four uses figure/ground theory to analyze artistic conception,including spatial organization principle and temporal organization principle.Through analysis,Hawks' version is more close to the original in terms of the poetic features.He tries hard to convey the pleasant feeling of reading Hong Lou Meng to readers.Therefore,he concentrates on the purpose and readers all the time and creatively conveys the beauty of the original.Under the influence of the target culture and translation poetics,he chooses domestication strategy.He deals with translation flexibly and pays more attention to details,in order to retain the information and beauty of the original.Yang Xianyi and Glays Yang pay more attention to Chinese culture.They are loyal to the original in form.To sum up,Hawks' version conveys more poetic beauty.This thesis consists of four chapters,besides apart from the introduction and conclusion:Chapter one emphasizes poetic features and makes a survey of the present studies about the translation of of Hong Lou Meng.It finds that the studies focusing on poetic features,especially image and artistic conception are less.Chapter two introduces the definition and origination of cognitive poetics and the application of cognitive poetics theory to translation.Chapter three and chapter four are the main parts of the thesis.Chapter three studies the image with image schema,including spatial images and motor sensory images.It also analyzes the similarities and differences of the two English versions.Chapter four studies the artistic conception with figure/ground theory,including spatial organization principle and temporal organization principle.It also compares two translated versions.