| With the growing awareness of China’s cultural exports in recent years,the translations of Chinese classical works have been attracting increasing attention.Among these,Song Ci-poems hold a significant place as a representative of traditional literature.Li Qingzhao,the representative poet of the graceful and restrained school of Chinese poetic genres,has gained popularity among readers both domestically and internationally due to her elegant and refined language,vivid imagery,and sincere and touching sentiments.However,the English translations of her poems often fail to connect with readers due to language and cultural differences.While there are many studies on poetry translation,there are few in-depth micro-level analyses of poetry translation from the perspective of cognitive translation.From the cognitive level,translators have to give full play to their subjective initiative to recreate the aesthetics,and reconstruct of the original scene and emotion embedded from the perspective of the poet.Therefore,by resorting to the cognitive stylistic analysis framework,this essay explores how various aesthetic phenomena in poetry are conceptualized and reconstructed in translations,and launches a comparative analysis and systematic criticism of the quality of different translations in multiple aspects.This subject has the potential to enhance the quality of translated poetry and increase the popularity of English translations of Chinese poetry in foreign markets,ultimately expanding the impact of Chinese culture abroad.This study chooses several classic works of Li Qingzhao’s as the research object,under the framework and guidance of cognitive stylistic analysis,discusses and analyzes the translation of several aesthetic phenomena including conceptual metaphor,metonymy,perspectivization and other diverse construals existing in the poetry.It elaborates how translators realize the cross-cultural reconstruction of the original scene,emotions conveyed and aesthetics,assessing the translation quality based on the three cognitive stylistic principles of translation.At the same time,the study explores how the cognitive process of the poet influences the translator’s behavior and the cognitive obstacles existing in the translation of classical Chinese Ci-poetry,and makes a critical analysis of the translator’s strategies and corresponding stylistic effects.It has been found that the English translations of Li Qingzhao’s Ci-poems share the following features: Firstly,when dealing with culturally-loaded metaphors and metonymy,some translators tend to resort to generalization and omit the original schema,rendering the text more comprehensible but deviating from the original scene and reducing expressivity.Secondly,translators sometimes creatively extend the scene by adding or distorting imagery without following the principle of cognitive optimal relevance.This thesis posits that for culturally-loaded imagery,the optimal strategy is to add annotations while preserving the original metaphorical patterns and scenes.Thirdly,some translators attempt to pursue the beauty of sound and restore rhyme within the space limit,which often undermines faithfulness.Finally,Li Qingzhao’s Ci-poems deliberately weaken the presence of the poet as a way of defamiliarization,which may pose cognitive burdens for the target audience.In translation,translators tend to utilize perspectivization to highlight the presence of the poet or even the audience,enhancing the interactive subjectivity and expressive degree of the poem. |
