Multifaceted Harmonization In Yu Guangzhong’s Self-translation Of His Poems In The Night Watchman

A prolific writer and celebrated scholar at home and abroad, Yu Guangzhong haswritten and translated a great number of works in his lifetime. He once made amoderate description of his literary career that he creates poetry with the right hand,prose with the left, and translation as a by-product between his right and left hand.Nevertheless, Yu Guangzhong will never fail to rank as a master in translation by itsscale and quality. Although Yu Guangzhong has been much studied by many scholarsfrom different perspectives, few scholars have noticed his dual identity as a poet andtranslator, let alone his special identity as a self-translator.This thesis attempts to address Yu Guangzhong’s less studied activity as aself-translator with a focus on his most distinctive translation works, The NightWatchman, to investigate how Yu’s poetic standpoint and literary agenda imposeinfluences on his selection of the source texts and choice of translation strategiesin the hope of adding some new academic results to the construction of YuGuangzhong’s study and also arousing more attention to the phenomenon ofself-translation.The author discovers that multifaceted harmonization is Yu Guangzhong’saesthetic and translation pursuit. Yu’s multifaceted harmonization aesthetics alsoshapes his selection of the source texts and choice of translation strategies whentranslating his own poems in The Night Watchman. As the most distinctive collectionamong Yu’s works, The Night Watchman includes Yu Guangzhong’s eighty-fiveself-translated poems in the past sixty years. From the perspective of source textselection, we find that “homeland complex” and “Taiwan sentiments” are the twoprominent themes Yu selected for translating. Yu Guangzhong selects a great manypoems related to his love and feelings for China mainland and Taiwan Island, whichare twenty-three and eleven respectively, covering more than one third of the totalnumber of poems in the collection. This selective tendency indicates that thepoet-translator has a strong desire to lay equal stress on his “nostalgic poem” and“local poem” and extend his national feelings and local concerns through translation.In terms of Yu’s translation strategies when self-translating, he mainly adoptsforeignization supplemented by domestication in dealing with the images andallusions. He mediates and makes adaptation and fusion between the Chinese andwestern cultures by using literal translation, free translation and annotation to facilitate the readers’ understanding and imagination. When it comes to thereconstruction of musicality, Yu does not rigidly adhere to the original poem form butmixes the English “singing’’ tactics with the Chinese “singing’’ tactics to match theflows of thoughts and emotions in the poems. He sometimes pursues the rhyme andrhythm of the original and sometimes makes innovations by using alliteration,consonance, internal rhyme, repetition or other rhymes which do not exist in theoriginal to create a sense of musical effect, thus allowing the readers to appreciate themusical beauty of his poems in the coexistence of eastern and western meter andrhyme. In short, Yu Guangzhong flexibly employs domestication and foreignization inthe process of self-translation. His translation strategy is the result of theharmonization of the Chinese and western horizons, making the target text and thesource text different and independent with certain degrees of similarity and certainoverlapping parts.