| Ideorealm, an important and unique concept in classical Chinese, is always viewedas the soul of classical Chinese poetry and the vehicle of its beauty. Therefore, how totranslate classical Chinese poetry successfully, to a great extent, means how to transferthe ideorealm sufficiently as a whole. For years, scholars and translators, both at homeand abroad, have made significant efforts in transferring classical Chinese poetry, so asto present this precious Chinese cultural and literary heritage to the world. Among thesetranslators, some of them not only give their outstanding renditions, but also haveestablished their own valuable opinions on translating ideorealm in classical Chinesepoetry. However, the transference of ideorealm in classical Chinese poetry is a verysignificant subject, yet rather difficult to investigate. The difficulties mainly arise fromthe complexity of the connotations of ideorealm itself. Therefore, most discussions onideorealm version are experience-based and inadequate, lacking in effective theory as aguide in this aspect. The current hypothesis indicates that ideorealm exisits entirely inthe artistic ideorealm typified by a union of feelings with scenes and the images thosescenes trigger, this is based on a cautious examination into the formation of ideorealmboth in China and worldwide. The real spirit of ideorealm is not simply concerning thefusion of feelings with scenes, but more in creating "images beyond images", which canprovide readers with a vast imaginary sphere.This paper conducts a tentative study of English transference of ideorealm inclassical Chinese poetry from a new perspective–aesthetic image-G actualization. Thepurpose is to test the applicability of the theory to the studies of ideorealm transference,and fill in a gap in the previous studies in this field. The author tries to make a tentativestudy of ideorealm transference from the perspective of the theory of image-G, which isproposed by Jiang Qiuxia in her book Aesthetic Progression in Literary Translation:Image-G Actualization. The main points are as follows:(1) image-gestalt is an image inthe gestalt sense, which is a universal property existing in a literary text;(2) literarytranslation involves a process of aesthetic image-G actualization;(3) the internalstructure of any image-G is a kind of scenes-and-frames integration;(4) aesthetically,successful literary translation resides in successful image-G actualization;(5) animage-based literary translation model would consist of: Phase I: source textcomprehension--a mental actualization of image-G; Phase Il: target text creation--averbal actualization of image-G. This paper first clarifies the definition andconnotations of ideorealm in classical Chinese poetry, followed by its characteristics and aesthetic components, and then provides an introduction to the theory of image-Gactualization. After an analysis of the affinity between the theory and Englishtransference of ideorealm, this paper shows that (1) ideorealm is a fuzzy image-G;(2)image actualization is indispensable to poetry translation;(3) as a theory of literarytranslation, the theory of image-G actualization is supposed to be useful to poetrytranslation and ideorealm transference is investigated in the light of the theory ofimage-G actualization focusing on three aspects: a) criticism of ideorealm transference,b) the untranslatability of the beauty of ideorealm, c) translators. And lastly, thelimitations of the theory are also analyzed. The conclusion is that ideorealmtransference in classical Chinese poetry is worth studying, and the theory of image-Gactualization is useful to such a study. |
