| We can easily approach the criteria for an aesthetic literary work; but what about a translation? No matter what approach to aesthetics we take, no matter if we believe in the translatability of poetry or not, we do agree that artistic beauty is a product of human soul. So, the aesthetic value of both source text and target text should be the same. However, here another crucially important factor comes into, i.e. the aesthetic capacity of the two languages, which are almost never equal. That is exactly why they say that poetry is impossible to translate, although no theoretical proof has ever been given for this impossibility. Aesthetics by itself is not a criterion of a good translation. Instead, it is the equality of aesthetic levels in both the ST & TT that counts. Xu Yuanchong's "sanmei" standards actually provide us a good criterion to handle and evaluate a translation of literature works. But there is still one thing can be added, which is the beauty of emotion. In ancient Chinese poetry, emotion is a significant factor, which conveys plenty of cultural and aesthetic meaning. So this article tries to illustrate the standard of ''emotion beauty".In the second part of this article, I first state the concept of aesthetics and translation, then the relationship between them. Then I briefly introduce the development of literature translation theories in China, and mainly focus on the aesthetics translation theories of Xu Yuanchong and Liu Biqing. Then on the foundation of these, I analyze the aesthetic-oriented translation principles. In the third part, I mainly discuss the four dimensions in aesthetic translation, harmony in phonology, semantics, aesthetics and artistic conception and emotion and aesthetics. After that, I illustrate my ideas by comparing different English versions of ancient Chinese poetry. |
