On Chinese Translations Of Robert Browning's Poetry

Origin of the Issue: Famous for his form, dramatic monologue, Browning's poetry arouses many readers' interest. His poems provide us objective presentation of life and characters and his interest in outer action is subordinate to an interest in the inner drama of the soul. The poems by him can fall into two categories: the first being some short lyrics or verses, such as Parting at Morning, Meeting at Night, etc. The second category is the poems in the form of dramatic monologue, such as Andre del Sarto and Rabbi Ben Ezra, etc. In his poems in the form of dramatic monologue, the reader is placed in a position where the character and psychological activity of the speaker and the absent listener will be analyzed and uncovered by the inner drama but not by action. Until now, only a limited part of his poems have been translated into Chinese; therefore, no sufficient effort has been made in China either to translate his poetry into Chinese or to carry out researches on his poetry and translated versions, which invites greater further research in this field.Rationale and Methodology: Being difficult to interpret and translate, Robert Browning's poems are criticized for obscurity with ungrammatical omission of connectives, inversion of phrases and clustering of ideas, which cause difficulty in decoding and interpreting the poems. At present, only limited portion of his poems have been translated into Chinese and at home there are only some comments on the characteristics of his poems and the philosophy in his poems, and some research on the analysis of the character of the addressees and speakers have been made. There is nearly no study on the translation of his poems. Therefore, it is really necessary to make some exploration into this field to construct a translation policy or model for interpretation and translation of his poems. In this dissertation, a tentative framework of translation policies for Browning's poems is proposed. After that, the tentative framework is put in tests by means of comparison of the existent versions and the author's version. It has to be stated that this framework is an abstract generality designed prescriptively on the basis of some descriptions, and can not be expected to have the accuracy and validity of rules and principles established in translation circle; thus it can only be taken as a general guide and applied contextually rather than inflexibly.Organization and Conclusion: Starting by introducing the issue in Chapter One, efforts will be made in Chapter Two to introduce the characteristics of and values in Robert Browning's poetry. After that, theories concerning literary and poetry translation are reviewed and at the end of it a summary on adaptability of general criteria for poetry translation to Robert Browning's poetry is made in Chapter Three. A further step is taken in Chapter Four to make comparisons of the several existent versions for Meeting at Night and Parting at Morning in terms of line division, character number per line, feet per line, rhyme scheme and faithfulness in sense. Moreover, in Chapter Five, a hypothesis is advanced for the solution in question and a theoretical framework is constructed. In Chapter Six, the soundness and validity of the framework is tested in its application to the translating of Robert Browning's poem Andrea del Sarto by making a comparison of Sun Da yu and Fei Bai's versions with that of the author. In Chapter Seven, as a conclusion, the findings of the test will be evaluated and both implications and limitations will be pointed out for improvement and further research.