An Image-G Based Model For The Translation Of Du Fu's Poems

In recent years, an increasing number of scholars both home and abroad have been attracted to the translation of Chinese classical poetry into other languages. The poems written by Du Fu, known as "poet-sage", have especially drawn the attention of such scholars as Rewi Alley, John.A.Turner, Yang Xianyi and Xu Yuanchong, who have been engaged in the translation of Chinese classical poetry into English. Notwithstanding their great contribution to cultural communication, there exist some deficiencies in their versions. This kind of deficiencies mainly results from their overemphasis on metrical form and individual linguistic elements, which leaves another significant aspect, i.e. artistic image as a whole, frequently ignored in their works of translation. To solve this problem, we endeavor to apply the image-G based model proposed by Jiang Qiuxia (2002) to the translation of Du's poems. Under the guidance of this model, most of the problems confronted in poem translation may have a possibly more satisfactory solution.The present paper is divided into three parts: introduction, text proper and conclusion. The introduction is a brief review of the traditional views on poem translation and the image-G based model. The text section of this paper consists of four chapters. In Chapter One, the author, with a general survey of image, points out that Du's poem translation is a process of image-G actualization. Chapter Two and Three deal specifically with the actualization process of image-G, in which two stages are involved: mental realization and linguistic actualization, with the former serving as the basis of the latter. The last chapter, as a supplementary analysis of the above two, indicates that image-G actualization will suffer constraints both from the translator and the original textual structure. The interaction between the translator and the original textual structure makes image-G actualization possible. In conclusion, the image-G based model is proved to be feasible and applicable in the translation of Du's poems. Only when the re-construction at the image-G level is obtained, could a more satisfactory version be obtained.