On Gary Snyder’s English Translation Of Cold Mountain Poetry From The Perspective Of Intertextuality

The poet Han Shan cannot be regarded as a brilliant ancient Chinese poet because he lived in a far and remote cold mountain and his poems were barely recognized as the masterpiece throughout the history of the Chinese literature. However, it is this very "marginalized" poet who caused great upheaval in both American literary system and culture and was worshiped in particular by the writers, poets and youngsters in the Beat Movement in US in1960under the effort made by BG leaders like Allan Kingsburg, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder. and the24translation of his poems by Snyder, in particular, were canonized in American literature. This attributes greatly to the translation and introduction by Snyder himself as well as to the social and cultural context in those days. This paper intends to analyze Snyders translation of24Cold Mountain Poetry both from the literary and the cultural aspects with the theory of intertextuality to reveal the elements of the Cold Mountain Poetry as well as of the Chinese Classical Poetry that are inherited and adapted in Snyder’s translation and the interplay of Chinese Classical Culture and the Contemporary American Culture through the image of Han Shan that is taken shape by Snyder.With the theory of intertextuality, scholars like Kristeva, Barthes, Riffaterre and so on believed that all texts are have relation with certain other texts which are regarded as their intertexts. It is these intertexts that constitute the intertextual network where intertexts interplay with each other through which the meaning is indicated. When applied this theory in translation studies, scholars have extended the concept of the "text", therefore translation studies have been further developed from the merely research on the relation between the translated text and the source or the target literary text respectively to the ones between the source and the target cultural texts that are embodied in the translated ones.Based on this theory, focus will mainly be in the four elements that constitute the poetry, i.e. the phonetics, the form, the images and the contexts in the second chapter. Comparisons between the original text of the Cold Mountain Poetry and Snyder’s translation will be made to examine what elements Snyder has remained and adapted.The third chapter will elaborate the intertextuality between Snyder’s translation and Contemporary American Poetry in hope of discovering the literary influence that the Cold Mountain Poetry as well as the Chinese Classical Poetry has exerted on the renovation of the Contemporary American Poetry.In the fourth chapter, discussion will mainly be from the cultural texts. Priorities will be given to the formation of the image of Han Shan in his own poetry, of which the image of ancient Chinese literati which embodies the Chinese Traditional Culture will be the major concern. Secondly, the focus will be laid on the adaptation that Snyder has made on this image to conform with the appeals that Americans have owned to the social and cultural reform in the1960s to see how Chinese Traditional Culture and American Culture interplayed with each other through this adapted image to break the yoke of the established inter-text network and facilitated the formation of the new one.By revealing the above two aspects from the perspective of intertextuality, the author hopes to discover the reason why the Cold Mountain Poetry and the poet Han Shan were well accepted by Americans at that time and therefore discover the clues and enlightenment to some extent for the translation and introduction of Chinese Classical Poetry as well as the widespread of Chinese Traditional Culture in the world of today.