The Reception Of Cold Mountain Poems In The United States

The polysystem theory has an enormous influence on the development of translation studies. It shifted traditional emphasis upon the linguistic rendering of translation to the larger socio-cultural context by taking the extraliterary elements such as the historical, cultural, economic condition into consideration, thus broadening the horizon of the researchers in the field of translation studies and enabling the coming of the "cultural turn" in translation studies. It opened the way for translation theory to advance beyond prescriptive aesthetics.When the polysystem theory is applied to the study of the reception of the English translations of Han Shan's poetry in the United States, it provides us with a deeper insight into this particular case in the history of cultural communications between China and the United States. Han Shan, or Cold Mountain (寒山), has been a puzzling literary figure. On the one hand, as a poet, Han Shan has undergone many ups and downs in his native country China, but generally has remained a minor poet. This has much to do with different political and historical factors at different times in China. On the other hand, in the United States, he suddenly became an idol of the Beat Generation in the late 1950s. Cold Mountain poems have found their way into quite a few anthologies of Chinese literature in English translation, in which Han Shan's name appeared side by side with those of the greatest poets that China has ever produced, such as Li Bai (李白), Wang Wei (王维), and Du Fu (杜甫). As a result, in the United States Han Shan has achieved a literary position that he could never have dreamed of.Different fates of Han Shan's poetry in China and in America serve to highlight the relationship between the historical and cultural context and the reception of the translation. The translation and reception of the translation take place in a specific historical and cultural context. For a translation to have an impact upon the target system there has to be a particular need in that system, and the skills of the translator have to be such as to meet the need and bring changes and innovations into the target system. Furthermore, the translation of Han Shan plays an important role in the survival of Han Shan's poems in a new context, thus giving them a new life.Consequently, emphasis of our study must be shifted from the translation process to the result, i.e., the translated text as a historical fact, and to the reception of the translations of Han Shan's poetry in the target culture, so that we can understand the disparity in the literary positions of Han Shan in the two cultural contexts.With this aim in view, the reception of Han Shan's poetry will be first studied from a historical point of view, and the forces that interfere with the translator's decision-making and affect the ideology and aesthetical experience of target language readers will be illustrated, and then the reason why the translation of Cold Mountain poems is regarded as a means of enriching the target literary system will be discussed from the perspective of literary criticism.The whole thesis is made up of five parts. Part One is a brief introduction to Han Shan's life, the characteristics of his poetry, and his literary positions in China and the West. Part Two presents the literary review of studies on the translation and reception of Cold Mountain poems both in China and in the West, the inadequacy of the studiesand what the author has done in furthering the study of Han Shan. At the end of this part, polysystem and its limitations are discussed. Part Three elaborates factors working behind the phenomenon, showing the important role that socio-cultural factors such as ideology, poetics, and patronage have played in the canonization of the Cold Mountain poems. Part Four discusses the rediscovery of Cold Mountain Pomes and Han Shan in China after their success in the United States. Finally, a tentative conclusion is derived: culture determines the production and survival of a certain translation; American literature which ex...