A Study On Clement Allen’s The Book Of Chinese Poetry From The Perspective Of Lefevere’s Poetics Theory

In the late20th century, with the advent of "cultural turn", more and more attentions were paid to the culture-oriented translation and it has been the trend in the translation studies ever since then. Culture studies school holds that translation is no long a pure bilingual transformation but a much more complicated acculturation. Instead of being confined to philology and linguistics, translation studies are put in a broader context of society, culture and history. Andre Lefevere, a representative of culture studies school, puts forward Manipulation Theory in the book Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, which broadens the horizon and offers a new perspective for translation studies. Lefevere points out that translation is a rewriting of an original text and translators are manipulated by three factors, namely, ideology, poetics and patronage in the process of translation. And all rewritings, no matter what their intention is, reflect certain ideology and poetics and tend to manipulate literature to function in a certain society in a specific way.Shijing, the earliest existing anthology of Chinese poems and songs, is universally accepted as the canon of Chinese classic literature. So far there are nine English versions, among which Clement Allen enjoys the least popularity for his arbitrariness in the translation together with his rewriting both in form and content of the original text. This thesis seeks to explore how poetics impacts on his translation strategy from the perspective of Lefevere’s poetics Theory, by making comparisons between the original and the target texts in terms of diction, narrative perspective, lines, stanzas, rhyme scheme, stanza foreword and the artistic device.Rather than on mistakes or distortions made by Clement Allen, this thesis puts emphasis on the objective description of the poetic features of his version and on the analysis of the rationality of his version as a common phenomenon, with the intention to enrich relevant research on Allen’s translation of The Book of Chinese Poetry. It can be found through this study that Allen complies with the dominant poetics in Victorian age in terms of both the choice of the referential system and the translation strategies.