A Probe Into Ezra Pounnd’s Mistranslations----an Analysis On The Basis Of Receptional Aesthetic

Ezra Pound is the primary representative in America’s imagist poetry movement in the twentieth century. In the writing of poems, he advocated concrete, vivid and direct images; and also concise poetic language without too much ornament, which were mainly against Victorian poetry with ornate diction and excessive sentimentalism in the late nineteenth century. His most outstanding contribution lies in the great impact he imposed on traditional poetics through the imagist poetry movement, which prepared for British and American modern poetry.When studying Chinese classical poetry, Pound noticed that the pictographic and ideographic characteristics of Chinese writing characters and the concise language of Chinese classical poetry were quite in accordance with the imagism that he advocated, thus in the process of translating Chinese classical poems, he applied his own poetical ideas. Moreover, Pound does not understand Chinese himself, and his translation is based on the intermediary version, namely American Sinologist Fenollosa’s manuscript. Therefore, judged from the translation criterion of faithfulness, Pound’s translation has been criticized by many Chinese scholars. However, the same "unfaithful" translation is given recognition by western scholars for the importance of his translation in the whole history of British and American literature. This recognition is deeply related to the reception of Ezra Pound’s translation of classical Chinese poetry among western readers.From the perspective of receptional aesthetic in modern western literary theories and through a detailed reading of Pound’s translation of Chinese classical poetry, the author of this thesis analyzes word mistranslation, structure mistranslation, culture mistranslation and rhythm mistranslation in Pound’s version of translation, while pointing out the reasons why Pound’s translation is widely accepted in the west. Pound’s translation is actually his re-creation of Chinese classical poetry. At present, much has been accomplished on the study of Pound in the scholastic field and the range of study is continuously widening. But discussion on Pound’s reception and re-creation of Chinese classical poetry as a reader and translator based on the theory of receptional aesthetic is rare; especially study of the mistranslations in his translation is less. Therefore, by the composing of this thesis, the author hopes to make supplement to the research of Ezra Pound and his works to some extent.