A Contrastive Study On The English Translation Of Su Shi’s Lyrics From The Perspective Of Translation Aesthetics

On par with Tang poetry in the history of Chinese literature,Song lyrics,with a high artistic and aesthetic value,are ranked as one of the two peaks of the ancient Chinese poetic art.The Northern Song Dynasty(960–1127)was the prosperous period of Song lyrics,and many outstanding lyricists emerged.Among them Su Shi had the highest achievement and the greatest influence.The content of Su Shi’s works is close to life and easy to understand,yet they contain philosophies that are endlessly evocative.Su Shi’s works have been translated many times,but these translations and related studies present a small quantity and low quality.Due to the untranslatable nature,the aesthetic value of Song lyrics is often compromised in the process of interlingual conversion.How to completely bring out the artistic conceptions of lyrics poses a great challenge to translators.Translation Aesthetics is a combination of translation and aesthetics,which uses the theory of aesthetics to focus not only on the analysis of words,but also on the aesthetic experience and aesthetic feeling of people in the interlingual transformation,and elaborates the problem of aesthetic reproduction in translation from the dialectical unity of the aesthetic object and the aesthetic subject.Up to now,American scholar Burton Watson’s Selected Poems of Su Tong-p’o and domestic scholar Xu Yuanchong’s Selected Poems of Su Shi are still the two most famous translations.But how did the two translators convey the beauty of Song lyric? What are the differences between their translation strategies? What accounts for the difference? These are all questions worth exploring.Guided by the theory of translation aesthetics,this thesis makes a systematic comparative analysis of Watson and Xu Yuanchong’s translation from the two levels of formal system and non-formal system.It is found that the beauty of the formal system of Watson’s translation is mainly reflected in the phonemic level and sentence level,and he creates good aesthetic experience through rich rhyming ways and flexible grammatical transformation.Xu Yuanchong pays more attention to the reproduction of the beauty of words and sounds.He mostly uses domestication to satisfy readers’ aesthetic habits in choosing words.The beauty of non-formal system is a kind of vague beauty,which is also the essence of Song lyrics.Watson’s translation is free of form.He uses literal translation to convey the lyrist’s emotions clearly through colloquial expression.He retained the metaphor phenomenon in Su Shi’s works,and better conveyed the artistic conception beauty of Song lyrics through the compensatory strategies such as rewriting and additional translation.The two translators use different translation methods to fully reproduce the aesthetic value of the original text,but because of the untranslatability of the poetry and lyrics,the translator’s subjective initiative and so on,the two translators show obvious differences in the way to reproduce the beauty of Su Shi’s works.Meanwhile,cultural differences between bilinguals also lead to the inevitable mistranslation in Watson’s translation.However,it is undeniable that Watson’s and Xu Yuanchong’s translations have great reference value for the aesthetic representation of Chinese classical poetry translation.Both of them have made great contributions to the transmission of Chinese traditional culture,which is worth our continuous study and research.