Beauty Of Implicitness And Explicitness In Translation:on Hawkes’s Translation Of Two Poems In Hongloumeng

As the UK’s greatest Sinologist and Redologist, Hawkes was the first one in the world who had translated the whole book of Hongloumeng into English. Being considered by scholars and readers alike as the pinnacle of classical Chinese novels, Hongloumeng comprises very rich and deep meaning, some of which are explicit to the readers while some are implicit to them. With the translation research and practice developing by leaps and bounds, translation aesthetics gradually comes into being, although translation aesthetics, as an independent discipline, is a relatively new subject, translation has been combined with aesthetics for more than a thousand years. The significance the translation aesthetics has for translation is too great to be underestimated, and the translation of implicit information and explicit information also demands the guidance of the translation aesthetics. From the perspective of translation aesthetics, this paper researches into the translation of poems in Hongloumeng, particularly the translation of Linked Verses in Snowy Rushes Retreat and Zang Hua Yin (A Song of Blossoms-burying), done by Hawkes in terms of dealing with the implicitness and explicitness. The outline of this paper is as follows:Chapter One discusses the implicitness and explicitness of the Western and Chinese translation aesthetics respectively. Logical as the Western aesthetic subjects are, they attach much more significance to the explicitness than the implicitness. However, Chinese aesthetic subjects are characterized by implicitness. Implicitness takes a dominant role in Chinese for the following two reasons:firstly, Chinese expressions are more subtle and euphemistic under the impact of the Chinese culture; secondly, the Chinese language is rich in rhetorical devices of which the majority is implicit expression.Chapter Two looks into the implicitness and explicitness of poems in Hongloumeng by citing instances from Linked Verses in Snowy Rushes Retreat and Zang Hua Yin (A Song of Blossoms-burying). Linked Verses in Snowy Rushes Retreat describes snow in such an implicit way that the Chinese character“雪”is only used once from the beginning to the end, whereas Zang Hua Yin (A Song of Blossoms-burying) depicts Lin Daiyu’s sorrowful feelings in so explicit a manner that readers may clearly perceive her sadness while reading it.Chapter Three studies the manifestation and blend of the beauty of implicitness and explicitness in Hawkes’s translation of Linked Verses in Snowy Rushes Retreat and Zang Hua Yin (A Song of Blossoms-burying). There is no denying that the original poems are of three beauties, namely beauty of sound, beauty of form and beauty of sense. Therefore, the transformation of the three beauties of them plays a significant role in the translation. To put it in another way, the success of the translation of Hawkes lies in the flexible transformation of the three beauties in the original poems.Chapter Four focuses on the translation strategies applied in Hawkes’s translation in terms of coping with the implicit and explicit information. Hawkes adopts mainly the following translation strategies, namely, explicitation, implicitation, domestication and foreignization, in his translation of the two poems.In a word, flexible application of translation strategies directly impacts on the beauty and quality of the translation. No matter what translation strategy is applied, Hawkes retains the beauty of the source text provided that the implicitness and explicitness are properly translated; and no matter whether the source text is translated in an explicit way or an implicit way, the target text must be understandable to the target readers.