Literary Localization Of Gary Snyder’s Translation Of Classical Chinese Poetry

Gary Snyder is an important poet and social activist who still stays active in American poetic circles and environmental protection field, and a promoter in cultural communication between China and America as well. But the cultural communication is definitely beyond’receiving’or’giving’, the relation between Snyder and Chinese culture is mutually influenced. In that special historical context, based on the features and demands of American native culture, and the translator’s life experience or personal understanding, Snyder fully displayed his subjectivity and strengthened his subjective identity to filter and accept Chinese culture selectively and creatively, thus making Chinese culture transform in western cultural domain. Meanwhile, Snyder has been deeply influenced by Chinese classical poems, which facilitated his establishment of holistic ecological consciousness, the local adaptation of Zen Buddhism and the enhancement of place-attachment. In light of his native culture, Snyder imitated creative skills, poetic themes or allusions of Chinese classical poems, to form his own unique cognitive pattern and artistic style, which helped make the culture of another country better at serving his real needs. Snyder’s translation of Han-Shan poems brought far-reaching influences on American in the1950s and1960s, being canonized in American literature. Due to the translation, Han Shan became a spiritual idol for Beat Generation and Hippies. The translation of another17Tang poems in his later period failed to be a canon as Han-Shan poems. But after a set of discourse variations, they also successfully accomplished the literary localization in America. Based on the literary tradition of American literature, and the ways of thinking and cultural rules of literary theory, the literary localization was mainly manifested in the translator’s transformation of Chinese poems to localization, which made the cultural rules and discourse of source-language country basically be assimilated by receiving countries. Thus the transmitted culture of China became a part of American literature and culture.In order to meet the requirements of the translator himself and prospective readers, Snyder’s translation is not completely faithful to the original, but embodies more characteristics of native American culture, with obvious traces of rewriting. In view of this, the present thesis, with the literary localization theory in comparative literature as the basis, and Snyder’s translation of classical Chinese poetry as the object of study, attempts to deeply examine the influences of the time and geopolitical factors, social ideology and dominant poetics, and the translator’s subjectivity on the Snyder’s translation, from the initial text-choice, process of text-production and the accomplishment of the translation. Meanwhile, the thesis also interprets how Snyder cleverly integrates the native culture of America into translation, and the systematic process of how the literary localization of Snyder’s translation has been achieved in America.