A Comparative Study Of The Chinese Translation Of Edmund Spenser's Amoretti

Amoretti,composed of 89 sonnets,is a sonnet sequence written by Edmund Spenser.In content,it follows the traditions of Petrarchan courtship as sonnets written by others,but it is infused with some innovated ideas.In art form,it is incomparable.Except the 8th sonnet in Amoretti,88 other poems all use the Spenserian,the innovative verse form created by Spenser himself,whose poetic skills have had an immeasurable impact on other contemporaries and later poets.However,the translation of Amoretti starts very late in China,and its Chinese versions are rare.The first complete Chinese version—Cao Minglun's?????,was not published until 1992.The second Chinese version,Hu Jialuan's??????,was published in 1997,with forty-four sonnets of Amoretti translated.The third complete Chinese version is Xing Yi's unpublished manuscript????????.What is worse,there are fewer studies on the translation of Spenser's Amoretti.So far,no one has systematically sorted out translation thoughts and practices of the three translators'rendering Amoretti.Based on the above three Chinese translation versions of Amoretti and directed by the three translators' own translation thoughts,this thesis studies the differences in translating Amoretti among Hu Jialuan,Cao Minglun and Xing Yi.Through comparison,translation thoughts,features,and values of these diverse translation versions will be revealed.Thus according to the extent of faithfulness to the original verse in translation,this thesis can be divided into three parts,relatively of the translations of Hu,Cao and Xing.Each part begins with the summary of one translator's thoughts on poetry translation,and then the application of his thoughts in practice will be analyzed.Through the analysis,the features of translator's rendering Amoretti will be discovered from two aspects of content and form.In content,their features will be exhibited from four aspects,including the semantic representation,language style,image rendering and syntax representation.In form,their features will be presented from four angles,including the structure,arrangement of line length,rhythm and rhyme.This thesis reaches the following conclusions.First,translation thoughts of the three translators—Hu's faithfulness,Cao's dualistic translating criterion of the closest and most natural standard,and Xing's localization—represent three typical ideas on poetry translation.Their thoughts are fully embodied in their practices of translating Amoretti.So Hu's version is the closest to the English verse both in the content and form,Xing's version is the most flexible,and Cao's version seems to stand in the middle,and takes the balance of the faithfulness to the English original and habits of Chinese readers into account to show a balanced feature.Second,the three Chinese versions reflect their respective values,so a more tolerant attitude to translation should be taken.Consequently,the comparative study of this thesis is helpful to promote the theoretical and practical discussion on poetry translation and contribute to better translation.Besides,the values of each translation version revealed can provide a good reference for Chinese readers to read and study Spenser's Amoretti.