The Metafunctional Analysis Of Poetry In Two English Full Versions Of Hong Lou Meng

Hong Lou Meng, as a representative of the splendid and ancient Chinese culture, is one of the most outstanding works in Chinese classical literature, also is the treasury of world literature collection. It stands out in world literature ranking with Hamlet and War and Peace. As an encyclopedia of Chinese culture, the history of translation of Hong Lou Meng has almostly reached 200 years and has been translated into more than 20 kinds of languages, including two English full versions, respectively translated by David Hawkes and the couple of Yang Xianyi. These two versions have made great contribution to cultural communication and exerted great impact on western world.Two English versions also translated the poems in Hong Lou Meng, these poems play an important role in illustrating the spirit and the personal features of the characters, foreshadowing the destiny of the figures and deepening the theme of the novel, so they are indispensable to the whole novel.The study on poetry translation is always the hot point in the research field of translation. Especially in recent years, the researches on poetry translation are accelerated rapidly.Through the analysis of related works and literature in this field, the author finds that content of these researches mainly focuses on translation practice, translation theory, comparison between translated versions and studies of famous translators from different perspectives of aesthetics, linguistics, culture and philosophy. This thesis makes an attempt to analyze the original text and two English versions translated by three well-known translators-the couple of Yang Xianyi and David Hawkes from perspective of discourse analysis based on the theory of Systemic Functional linguistics, and mainly focuses on semantics comparison of two translated versions how to realize three metafunctions of source text. Through the analysis from three aspects, i.e. the ideational function, the interpersonal function and the textual function, the author finds that both translated versions basically realizes the equivelance of three metafunctions of source poems, but Yang's version is better to realize the equivilance of ideational function than Hawkes' version, Hawkes does better than Yang in embodying the interpersonal function. The thesis also demonstrates the practicality and the operability of SFL to poetry translation, and provides new way to poetry translation practice and poetry evaluation.