The Influence Of Chinese Poetry Translation Upon Modern American Poetry

This study explores the influence of Chinese poetry translation upon the 20^th century American poetry, from the perspective of Even-Zohar's Polysystem Theory.Chapter 1 offers an introduction to Polysytem Theory. As the first of its kind to view translated literature from a macro perspective, Polysystem Theory composed by Israeli theorist Even Zohar views translation not as the linguistic equivalence of the source text, but as a result of the struggles of competing subsystems for the domination position within the larger socio-cultural polysystem. Even Zohar gets its inspiration from the works of late Russian Formalist literary theorists, and develops their central concepts of "system" and "relational", making them the core of his polysystem theory. He puts forward three pairs of binary oppositions in the literary system's internal workings, and points out that translation can play various roles in diverse cultural systems. Though the marginalized status is the common position translation occupies in a system, it is not always the case. Even Zohar sums up three kinds of situations when translations can be primary activity and contribute to the elaboration of new literary forms. Then chapter 1 moves to Even Zohar's further investigation concerning the following two problems: how texts to be translated are selected by a polysystem and how the translation responses to the canonized form in a polysystem, which are of close relations with the thesis's analysis of Pound's recreation of Chinese poetry.In Chapter 2 the author of the thesis uses Polysystem Theory to analyze the relationship between Chinese poetry and American Imagism Movement. To begin with, the author studies the overall situations of the larger socio-cultural polysystem in Britain and America in the late 19^th century and comes to the conclusion that the Chinese poetry were widely introduced to America at the beginning of the 20^th century is not an occasional incident, but a natural result of the interaction between related subsystems such as cultural, economical and religious polysystems. To back...