A Study Of Willis Barnstone’s Version Of The Poems Of Mao Zedong In Light Of Lawrence Venuti’s Theory Of Foreignization

In the recent years,the CCP Central Committee has emphasized the Four Matters of Confidence.The key to stick to the Confidence in culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics among them,is maintaining cultural diversity,wherein translation plays an inevitable role.How to convey the voice of China to the world and tell the story of China well have placed higher demands on translators.It necessarily entails acknowledging,respecting and conveying differences in translation.A rare talent,Mao Zedong’s contributions are comprehensive and systematic,including that in poetry writing.The Poems of Mao Zedong witnesses the founding and building of the People’s Republic of China and is the crystallization of a high degree of integration of literature and history.This study selects the translation of Willis Barnstone,the most popular and influential English translation of Mao Zedong’s poems in the English-speaking countries,with the Chinese official translation in 1976 and Xu Yuanchong’s 2015 English translation for comparison.This study intends to address the following issues: can Barnstone’s translation convey Mao’s emotion to western readers precisely through foreignization? When reorganizing the text,can Barnstone’s version fully display the traditional Chinese culture contained in the original? In light of foreignization,how to reproduce the balance between the content and form of poetry? This study works on the meaning of poetry,cultural allusions,imagery,language expression,sense of rhythm and the poet’s emotions from three aspects: vocabulary,sentence pattern,and text arrangement,with the aim to respond to the above-mentioned research questions.Through a close study of Barntone’s English translation of Mao Zedong’s Poems,it is found that: in cultural transmission,foreignization can preserve the culturalimagery and connotation of traditional allusions in the original poem to the greatest extent,despite of the slight lack in expressiveness and emotional expression;the translator should carefully evaluate and weigh between different elements to strike a balance: for each poem and even each line,the elements that the author wants to focus on are different–they can be emotion,linguistic expressiveness,formal beauty,or implicit cultural connotations and allusions.All these require translators to fully understand the original poem’s writing background,the author’s personal experience,the source language,and culture.It is at times necessary to make a choice between the connotation and language form of a poem,in order to achieve the equilibrium between different elements therein,reproduce the original meaning,and better convey the differences.