The Manifestation Of Defamiliarization In The Translation Of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry

Emily Dickinson, one of the famous American poetesses in the19th century, is a shining star in the history of American literature history and is also regarded as a literature genius. Dickinson remains unknown all through her life, and has little contact with the outside world. Her poems are known by nobody until thirty years after her death. Her poems are of unique charm in that she never follows the conventions, and she always creates originality and innovation by herself, which can be concluded by using the word "defamiliarization" to describe her features in composing poems. The study on Dickinson in China starts a bit late, and Jiang Feng is the first who translates Dickinson’s poetry in China. The translation of poetry is itself, in a certain sense, a recreation of works. It is a huge challenge for the translator, especially when it comes to translate the poems unique like Dickinson’s. For the features of defamiliarization, Dickinson’s poetry translation is a tough task for the translator.Based on the theory of defamiliarization put forward by Russian formalist Shklovsky in the20th century, this study will take Jiang Feng’s translation version as research object and explore how the translator manifests defamiliarization of Emily Dickinson’s Poems and enable Chinese readers to perceive the beauty of defamiliarization at the levels of lexical, syntactical, rhetorical and stylistic. The author is in the hope to test how the translator, on one hand, manages to manifest defamiliarization of the original poems; and on the other hand, creates defamiliarization in the target poems. The thesis tries to explore the applicability of defamiliarization in guiding the translation of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.Russian formalism advocates that the essence of literature works is its "literariness", and literariness can be manifested through the device of defamiliarization. Defamiliarization refers to the unique and special device that makes familiar things unfamiliar and strange so that it will enable the readers to acquire a fresh aesthetic perception, arouse their interest and curiosity, prolong their length of perception and the difficulty in understanding and get the best aesthetic experience. Defamiliarization can not only be applied in literature writing, but also be applied in literature translation. The trait of defamiliarization in Dickinson’s poetry can mainly be found on lexical, syntactical, rhetorical and stylistic level. Thus, by analyzing the translation version by Jiang Feng, this study aims at, on one hand, exploring how the translator manifests the original defamiliarization of the original poems; and on the other hand, exploring how the translator realizes defamiliarization in his own translation by adopting different translation strategies.