A Comparative Study On Two Translated Versions Of Emily Dickinson's Poems From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

Poetry is an indispensable literary subject and plays an important role in the history of literature.Therefore,in the field of literary translation studies,the importance of poetry translation is self-evident.Among all the poets,Emily Dickinson plays a pivotal role in the history of American poetry and is hailed as "one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century." Her works broke the literary norms of the social traditions of the time and tried a brand new writing mode,forming a unique style belonging to the author herself.In recent years,Emily Dickinson's poetry has been analyzed and commented by many scholars.However,in China,the number of translations of her poetry is still relatively small.Although some domestic scholars have looked at Dickinson's poetry for research,most of those studies are limited to the content and analysis of poetry.There are still few systematic studies on her poetry translation.In order to enable Chinese readers to better understand Emily Dickinson and the meaning behind her works,the study of the Chinese translation of her poetry seems particularly important.From the perspective of Reception Aesthetics,this thesis focuses on the two most important concepts of the theory,namely the “Horizon of Expectation” and the“Indeterminacy”,selects the Chinese translations of Jiang Feng and Wang Hongyin and analyzes how the two translators handle the “indeterminacies” in respect of graphonology,phonology,lexicology,and syntax.The results of the study show that,at the graphological level and syntactical level,Jiang Feng has retained the dashes in the original text to the greatest extent possible,and has achieved the “ capitalization” by changing the sentence pattern and adjusting the poetry lines in his translation when dealing with the “capitalization” and the“dashes” in the source text.Moreover,Jiang Feng perfectly retains the sentence features of the original poems,and conforms to the characteristics of Chinese poetry and the reading habits of Chinese readers,so that the target language readers can produce the same reaction as the source language readers.Although Wang Hongyin'stranslation cannot fully reflect them in this respect,he reduced the number of dashes in his translation,which is more consistent with the form of the Chinese poems.At the phonological level,Mr.Jiang Feng kept the rhythm of the original poem as much as possible,but ignored to transfer the overall rhyme perfectly.In contrast,Wang Hongyin has retained the rhyme of the original poem perfectly and has fully reproduced the “sound beauty” of the original poem.At the lexical level,both of the translators have their own merits.Jiang Feng pays more attention to the connotations behind the poems and excels at conveying the accuracy of the vocabulary.However,we cannot deny that the words he chooses contain a certain sense of masculinity.As for Wang Hongyin's version,he prefers to proceed from the perspective of a female poet.His translations are exquisite and precise,which can reflect the characteristics of poetry written by a female poet perfectly and will bring some new ideas to the retranslation of Dickinson's poems.This thesis tries to analyze the aesthetic elements of the translations of Jiang Feng and Wang Hongyin under the framework of the theory of Reception Aesthetics,so as to provide a new perspective for poetry translation studies and to help Chinese readers better understand Dickinson's poetry.At the same time,the author also hopes to make some contributions to the Chinese translation of English poetry through the study of different translation styles and strategies of the two translators,as well as to provide some new inspirations for the retranslation of Dickinson's poetry in the future.