The Transference Of Artistic Conception In Translating Classical Chinese Poetry

This thesis seeks to brighten the focus on translating as art. Poetry is central, being the ultimate challenge at the complex heart of the art of literary translation. The discussion of the techniques and principles of poem translation is vital for the perfection of the translated version. The translation of Chinese classic poems has a long history, translators contended and their works bloomed for almost three hundred years, bringing about various schools of poem translating such as the rhymed translation, prose translation, adaptation translation and modern verse translation. The contentions of the schools and the use of their skills all aimed at reproducing the original style or artistic conception. Artistic conception is the soul of classical Chinese poems and is made up of the holistic whole of various images in a poem. The main principle of Gestalt psychology, itself based on experimental studies carried out by Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka, is that the whole is more than the mere sum of its parts, and an analysis of the parts cannot provide an understanding of the whole. To apply the psychology category gestalt to image analysis is to study images as functional wholes, to discover the position of parts in the whole. Based on a survey of the essence of poetry and the previous studies on poem translation, through comparing and criticizing some of the noted translations of the Chinese classic poems, this thesis tries to expound the importance and the actualization of artistic conception through the dynamic process of translating...