| This study seeks to examine the concept of alienizing translation as it relates to the artistry of Xu Zhimo's unconventional poetry translation during the formative stage of the New Poetry in China in the 1920s. I define the concept of alienizing translation and describe how Xu, a poet-translator, achieves the alienizing translation effect and, in so doing, I arrive at a better understanding of the innovative versification in his translated poems and of the artistic and cultural significance of these poems to the development of the New Metrical Verse. This proves to be an appropriate and effective approach in that it combines conceptual and empirical research based on the causal model and viewed through the lens of historiographically-oriented approach, enabling us to form a clear picture of Xu's position as a distinctive poet-translator in the New Poetry movement and in the history of modern translated literature.This study is developed in seven parts. Chapter One reviews Xu's ten-year (1922-1931) poetry translation practice and thinking in light of his artistic search for the new, specifically, his diverse range of source texts and his interest in literary uniqueness, his conscientious effort to retain the spirit and form of the source texts, and his desire to explore the expressiveness of the language of translation, especially vernacular Chinese. The social and cultural attempts at Westernization in the 1920s, the translation agenda of the time, and the biographical evidence of Xu's open-mindedness to the new have been captured so that both the contextual and individual variables for examining alienizing translation in his poetry translation can be addressed. Xu's ten-year poetry translation practice evinces two distinctive features. First, he distances himself from the traditional translation norms of his time in the poetic forms of his translations. His translations before September 1922 were rendered in the versification of the Gutishi, a classical regulated metrical Chinese verse form, which showed his wish to be different from his contemporaries who were then experimenting zealously with vernacular Chinese in poetry translation. After 1923 he, too, adopted vernacular Chinese, which reflected both his inclination towards the new and the influence of the New Culture Movement on his translation practice. Even his unusual indentation scheme contributes much to the effect produced on the target audience by his language and rhythm, which are deliberately made tortuous so as to impede reading. Second, he reveals his unconventional thinking in his choice of source texts and translation procedures. The source text he selects represents his romantic, anti-traditional meditations on love and his reflections on a world filled with change and mystery. His lifelong belief in love, freedom and beauty, as well as his understanding of the world and his views on life, are all embodied in his poetry translation.Chapter Two re-evaluates Shklovsky's theory of defamiliarization and Brecht's theory of alienation effect, and reviews the artistic nature of literary translation in order to demonstrate the features literary translation shares with other forms of literature in the pursuit of the new, the unfamiliar and the unusual. In my opinion, the effect of defamiliarization can be both aesthetic and social. Moreover, the devices of defamiliarization can energize both literariness and the artist's representation of reality. Therefore, Shklovsky's idea of defamiliarization and Brecht's alienation effect are seen to be mutually complementary. This leads us to the concept of alienizing translation, which is the application of the concept of defamiliarization in translation. Recognizing the subjective artistic nature of literary translation is a prerequisite to understanding the justification for employing alienizing translation in this genre. The literary translator, like other artists, makes his texts new through the subjective devices he uses to stimulate and refresh the minds of his target audience and revive their interest in foreign literature.Chapter Three proposes a tentative working definition of alienizing translation strategy based on an understanding of defamiliarization as described in previous translation studies, and involves a detailed examination of the phenomenon of the pursuit of newness and freshness in translation. This grew out of the curiosity aroused by Xu's unconventional poetry translations and has been developed from Shklovsky's defamiliarization and Brecht's alienation effect, and is based on the subjective artistic nature of literary translation. Alienizing translation is a formal mechanism(?) that reflects the literary nature of translation. The purpose of artistic translation techniques is to make objects in the target text unfamiliar, to make forms and image unusual, and to increase the difficulty and length of perception on the part of the target audience because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. I then explain that alienization and hybridization are two translation procedures for producing the alienizing translation effect and, at the same time, they are integral to the ontological nature of literary translation. Underlying these two procedures is one basic, distinguishing characteristic: something commonplace, customary or familiar is made to appear unfamiliar and fresh in one way or another. All these creative manipulations of the target text enhance the target audience's discernment of the artistic merit in the target text.Chapter Four explores the intersubjectivity, intertextuality, interdiscursivity and intergenderness in Xu's poetry translation, the recognition of which is a philosophical motivation for understanding his alienizing translation strategy. First, the intersubjectivity is observed in the sense that the shared cognition and consensus between Xu Zhimo and the source text poet is essential in shaping the ideas and the relation between him, a poet-translator, and the author of his source text, a poet. Those poets exerted a tremendous influence on him in the cultivation of his rebellious spirit, sense of poetic beauty, love for learning and lofty ideals of love and liberty. Second, the textual-linguistic features in Xu's translations can be recognized in their similarities to the source texts and to comparable texts in Chinese. As an advocate of the New Poetry, he displays a particular freedom in manipulating the target text, in breaking the prevailing conventions governing translation, namely, fidelity, expressiveness and elegance, and in treating the target text in ways such that textual traces of the source text and contemporary comparable texts are relayed in the target text. Consequently, the target text is a hybrid of the source text and comparable Chinese texts in form, and its structure is neither a relay of the source text nor a complete adaptation to the genre of the Chinese. It is adapted into a new form, displaying affinity of form. The resulting newness and freshness constitute Xu's contribution to the inherent nature of the Literary Revolution that influenced the Chinese cultural system of his day. Third, an interdiscursivity in Xu's poetry translations involves not only the interdependence of different languages or varieties of a language, that is, the hybridization of the target language with the source language, and of vernacular Chinese with classical poetic Chinese, but also a remarkably wide range of source text themes, literary schools and genres, all of which argues for his aesthetic pursuit of newness and freshness in translation. The source texts that Xu translated, unlike the poems with moral and educational themes such as liberation and revolutionary spirit that were popular in the Literary Revolution in the May Fourth Movement, are lyrical outpourings of powerful personal emotions. His choices of literary schools are quite diverse, including Naturalism, Romanticism, Aestheticism, the Symbolist Movement and the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as the Victorian lyric poets. Astonishingly, Xu translated more English poets than any of his contemporaries did. Finally, the intergenderness is evident in his distinctive choice of female poets and feminine-themed poems. He favors gifted female poets who have feminine elegance, as in appearance and disposition, and masculine talent and inspiration, as in literary writing, which for him defines the intergenderness aspect of feminine identity. In his selected female poets as well as in his choice of source texts, the stereotypical traits of feminine appearance and disposition are balanced with the attractiveness of more masculine traits in the female character. In fact, the images in fully a third of his translated poems are female-centered.Chapter Five shows how alienizing translation in Xu's poetry translation is the result of his conformity, in part, to the textual-linguistic norm and expectancy norms, and his breaking of the initial norm, translation policy norm and accountability norm as a poet-translator. In order to demonstrate what specific norms he either followed or flouted, I examine the translation norms prevailing in Xu's time with a focus on those that governed poetry translation. First, I find that Xu at first followed one of the textual-linguistic norms, that of the language of translation in the 1920s, because of the influence of his personal relationships with Liang Qichao and Hu Shi. Before August 1922, he translated English poems in the regulated metrical poetic style of classical Chinese. Then, after 1923, he turned to a highly Europeanized-Sinicized version of vernacular Chinese and rendered his translations in the versification of the New Poetry. These translations may still conform to the expectancy norms and achieve the alienizing translation effect as long as the expectancy norms are conducive to introducing alien flavor in the target text. His alienization satisfied the expectancy norms of the 1920s, when the passion for introducing Western prosody was considered as necessary for creating and developing the New Poetry. However, Xu's norm-breaking translation plays a more crucial part in producing the alienizing translation effect. He is very intentional about, and takes responsibility for, his norm-breaking translation practice, which means that he is committed to certain artistic values. This implies that his norm-breaking translations tend to go against fluent, standard usage and thus sound awkward and non-fluent. First, by breaking the initial norm prevailing in the 1920s of subjection to the source culture, his translations come nearer to subjection to the target culture. Next, his selection of texts, based on his literary preference for the new, runs counter to the prevailing realism-oriented translation policy norm. Among his contemporary poet-translators, he is the one whose choice of poets was the most diverse, and he is the one who translated the greatest number of poems. Moreover, the themes in those poems focus on the outpouring of sentimental feelings or on personal attitudes towards life and Nature. Last, he breaks the accountability norm of the 1920s, and his loyalty to artistry and his fondness for the new result in two particularly distinctive features in his poetry translation: his wide-ranging choice of source language poets, and his determination to convey the uniqueness and newness expressed in the source text into the target translation, which is borne out in the versification, diction and image reproduction he employs.Chapter Six demonstrates how Xu achieves the alienizing translation effect by means of the forms used in his translated poems. First, he alienizes the poetic forms by using English versification. In his quest for the new and the fresh through new metrical schemes, he either transfers the alien metrical patterns of the source text to the target text or avoids literal translation. His use of English versification, namely, free verse, prose verse and irregular indentations, gives rise to tortuous and impeded reading movement on the part of his target audience, namely, his literary coterie in the New Poetry and readers with an interest in poetry, who can recognize the alienization of those poetic forms in his poetry translation. Second, he hybridizes the Chinese versification, particularly that of the Gutishi genre, and his own meter and stanza forms of the New Metrical Verse, into his translations. It is through these new forms that he, as a poet-translator, expresses new sentiments in the target text, which makes his poetic translation distinctive and hold a special appeal for his target audience.With regard to the hybridization of the Gutishi, Xu develops bold variations of cadence with different numbers of characters to a line and numbers of lines to a stanza within a single poem, different caesura schemes, and colloquial diction. Moreover, he breaks the conventional rhyming patterns of the Gutishi with his frequent use of unconventional end-rhyme patterns, especially 106 Bu. Having used the versification of the New Metrical Verse, he achieves musicality in his poetry translation with irregular indentations, strong rhythmic meters, melodious rhyme schemes, and regular cadence within a single poem; and he achieves newness by devising new metrical forms for each translated poem.Chapter Seven is a study of Xu's alienizing translation through his distinct use of diction and imagery, focusing on how he alienizes poetic convention and translation convention by employing nonce words and colloquial expressions, images of Chinese beauty, his own sentimental feelings and the other images in Chinese culture. First, his coinage of nonce words and application of colloquialisms make his translations different from the traditional text of classical Chinese poetry, whose diction is elaborate, literary and hence formal. In contrast, Xu's language of translation breaks the expectancy of his target audience because he hybridizes the target text with words that belong neither to the diction of a Western poem nor to the diction of traditional Chinese poetry, and this produces a deliberately tortuous and impeded movement in reading. Second, Xu's distinct diction fuses several kinds of imagery into a single perception. He achieves the alienizing translation effect by using imagery drawn from various subjects of both the traditional standard of Chinese beauty and his own empathy for the awkward suffering in star-crossed love affairs, or other sentimental feelings, and by retaining imagery from the original poems in his translations. In other words, Xu overlays the original images with his own interpretation, in the sense that they are hybridized with imagery from traditional Chinese culture and from his own imagination. His central purpose is to illustrate his understanding of various kinds of love and feminine imagery, and to convey his personal sentiments, as a poet, in his translated poems. Thus, the imagery in his translations is always startling and his poetry translations are always arresting and surprising.In the Conclusion I evaluate the proposed concept of alienizing translation, pointing out its significance for recognizing unconventional manipulation of translation in both form and meaning in literary translation. Second, I make an overall assessment of Xu's poetry translation, drawing the conclusion that Xu is a poet-translator in search of artistic newness, freshness and estrangement in the context of the New Culture Movement, and that his alienizing translation makes an important contribution to the formation and development of the New Metrical Verse, which is one innovative aspect of the New Poetry. I also make some suggestions for further work in the study of other contemporary poet-translators active in the literary movement in China at that time.
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