| Of the four Chinese classical masterpieces, A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin can be viewed as the nearest to the peak of perfection. The theme is clear and the message is profound and comprehensive. As representative works of the splendid Chinese culture, it is one of the most outstanding books in both Chinese literature and the literature of the world. The Chinese classical novels usually utilize the technique of inserting verses between the lines with an attempt to bring out the theme, to make a summary, to portray the character or to comment on figures or events. Cao Xueqin also uses such a technique in A Dream of Red Mansions, in which more than one hundred poems or verses are created to illustrate the spirit and the features of the characters. Moreover, these verses not only foreshadow the fate or destiny of the characters in the Grand View Garden, but also enrich the theme of the works.With the development of translation study in China, many research papers on the translation of A Dream of Red Mansions have been published, nevertheless, the study on its poetry translation is always the hot point in the research field. It is known to us all that metaphor is a vital component of poetry and poetry is closely related to metaphor. For the translator of poetry, how to achieve an effective transference of poetical metaphor is a key step in translating poems.The traditional metaphor theory always views metaphor as a rhetorical device and thus neglects its cognitive function. However, with the deep-going research and permeation of multiple disciplines into metaphor study, it breaks through the boundary of traditional rhetorical scope. Cognitive linguists begin to view it as human being's important cognitive means and make a systematic study on it, which opens up a new field for metaphor study. To the researchers, metaphor, apart from its rhetorical function, is a way for people to understand the world. Based on the achievements of contemporary metaphor study and combining with Nida's equivalence theory, this thesis is intended to make a comparative analysis on the transference of metaphors in the poems of the translated A Dream of Red Mansions (Yang Xianyi's version and Hawkes' version) to explore the importance of transference of conceptual metaphors in translating poems. On the basis of my comparative study and analysis, some suggestions are put forward for translators of poems to use as reference.The thesis falls into five chapters. Chapter one gives a short account of the research background, purposes and the main content of this thesis.Chapter two briefly reviews the notion of translation equivalence and gives a recapitulative introduction to Nida's equivalence theory, including the concepts of formal and functional equivalence, the conflicts between them, and then points out the contribution of functional equivalence to translation studies in China.Chapter three respectively discusses metaphor and poetry in two parts. Part one displays the development of metaphor theory and Newmark's methods in translating metaphor; in part two, poetry is defined in the first place and then on the basis of careful analysis and study it is confirmed that poems are translatable. Lefevere's strategies on translating poems are also introduced.In Chapter four, some typical characteristics are summarized and classification and functions of metaphors in the poems of A Dream of Red Mansions are also probed into. On the basis of the two translations of A Dream of Red Mansions (one is by Yang Xianyi and the other is by David Hawkes), the last chapter makes a comparative analysis of the transference of metaphors in the poems of the novel.Based on careful and comprehensive comparison, it is concluded that the transference of conceptual metaphors plays an important part in translating poems. Translators should enhance self-cultivation and increase their understanding about the conceptual metaphors in the poems so as to deal with the problem of metaphor transference effectively. |
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