Esthetic Reproduction In Poetry Translation

With examples of different Chinese versions of John Donne's poems, the writer of this thesis discusses some essential problems for poetry translation, focusing on the esthetic reproduction in poetry translation.John Donne (1572—1631) was the representative of metaphysical poetry in the seventeenth century in Britian. Donne's poetry has undergone extreme praises and violent reproaches both in the west and in China, which well illustrates the complicacy of Donne's poems as well as people's different attitudes towards poetic art. It is of typical significance for the study of poetry translation to take the different Chinese versions of such a controversial poet's works as examples.Katharina Reiss, the famous German translation theorist divides all kinds of texts into four types: 1. the content-focused text (such as news reports, operating instructions, etc.), 2. the form-focused text (all the artistic literary works), 3. the appeal-focused text (such as advertising, preaching, propaganda, etc.) and 4. the audio-medial text (such as radio newscasts and reports, dramatic productions, etc.). Viewed from the angle of text types, poetry belongs to form-focused text, whose language function is to express rather than to inform. Therefore, a poetry translator should try to convey the esthetic values of the source text rather than the information only.The task for a poetry translator is to convey the poetic meaning, the poetic form and the poetic beauty of the source text. The poetic beauty is usually contained in the poetic meaning and form and a poetry translator is supposed to be adept at finding it and reproducing it in the target text. The challenge a poetry translator faces is how to deal with fidelity and betrayal, accuracy and beauty. As a translator, his duty is to keep his fidelity to the original, trying to be accurate; but it usually happens that beauty will lose because of accuracy. This is because the language---the poetic material---has been changed in the target text, the original beauty is also changed. In order to keep the esthetic glamour of his translation, a poetry translator sometimes has to betray some...