A Translation Study On Zhai Yongming’s Poetry From The Perspective Of Hermeneutic Motion Theory

Zhai Yongming,one of the most famous contemporary Chinese poetesses,leads the trend of “women’s poetry” in China.Her poems are based on women’s own experiences and express her individual emotions in confessional language.Since the 1980 s,more than ten translators have translated Zhai Yongming’s poetry,hence the number of translations is considerable.However,no scholar has yet combed through the translations of Zhai Yongming’s poetry,and the translation study of her poetry is left insufficient.The Changing Room,the only English volume of Zhai Yongming,was translated by Andrea Lingenfelter,a Sinologist and poetess with a Ph D from the University of Washington.Winning the Northern California Book Award of translation in 2012,this volume has gained high reputation overseas.This study takes this volume as the research objective.By introducing Steiner’s hermeneutic motion theory,this paper adopts the methods of documentary analysis and case study to conduct academic translation research on Zhai Yongming’ s poetry.This paper finds that Steiner’s hermeneutic motion theory has reference value on the study of poetry translation.During the translation activity,the translator shall work closely with the poet,so as to establish a translation of high quality.Meanwhile,the translator ought to pay special attention to the characteristics of the poetry text,and flexibly adopts different translation methods to convey the textual meaning of the poem as much as possible while preserving the poetic quality.Besides,the translator is also constantly expanding the meaning of poetry,the open-structured text,through translation,and prolonging the life of poem.Therefore,it can be said that translating a poem is a creative activity accomplished jointly by the author and the translator.This paper applies the hermeneutic motion theory to the study of poetry translation,and broadens the research horizon;the text analysis of The Changing Room enriches the translation research of Zhai Yongming’s poetry to some extent.Since it is a successful case of the translation and overseas dissemination of excellent contemporary Chinese poetry,the author expects this study to provide references on strategies and methods for Chinese contemporary poetry translation.