A Study On The Chinese Translations Of Walter Whitman’s Poems From The Perspective Of The System Theory

Walter Whitman is a most influential and outstanding American poet in American canon. His poetry collection Leaves of Grass that he has devoted his whole life time to has won him a great fame at home and abroad. The "free verse" style that he has created plays a significant role in the world’s literature zone and numerous writers and poets composed their literary works by modeling the free verse style after that of Whitman. Whitman and his poems have come to China for nearly one hundred years and it is easy to find that there was a fever of translating Whitman’s works for a while and the translation activities were cooled down for another while. The ups and downs of translating Whitman’s poems are rather puzzling and this paper is intended to explore the reasons for the ups and downs of the translations and also sort out several features of the Chinese translations of Whitman’s works.The system theory has made the translation studies cultural turn, which is popular theory nowadays. The research takes advantages of the system theory to examine the translations of Whitman’s works. The paper first looks into the research background and the significance of this research. Then the literature pertaining to the current translation studies of Whitman’s poems and the application of the system theory in translation studies is investigated to make sure what this research makes in translation studies. After that, the author indulges into the system theory, making a careful illustration of the polysytem theory given by Even-Zohar and the system theory proposed by Hermans. The theory will be applied to analyze the features of the translations of Whitman’s poems in the body of this paper. The following get a full view of the main translations of Whitman’s poems through nearly one century time in China. In the body part, the long time span of the translations of Whitman’s poems is divided into four periods. Each period is a discussion of the main features of the translations of Whitman’s works in the light of the system theory.From the perspective of the system theory, the translations of Whitman’s poems demonstrate some distinct features. During the May Fourth Movement period, the translation system strived for the canonized strata within the literary system. The translations of Whitman’s poems became more and more in quantity and employed the liberal translation strategy, imitating the foreign literary norms and language patterns. They learned from foreign literary forms "free verse" and used the vernacular Chinese language. Also, the majority of the translated poems from Whitman had the theme of "new","revolutionary" and "patriotic". In the1930s and1940s period, the position of the translation system fell to be marginalized within the literary polysystem for the sake of the military conditions. The translations of Whitman’s works used the domestication way and had no much innovation. And they were mostly reflections of the wars and encouragement in severe conditions due to the successive wars. After the establishment of PRC, the translation system maintained the secondary position due to the dominant political ideology. Thus, the number of the translated texts was massively reduced and finally became zero during the Culture Revolution. And the translations had to use the domestication strategy, modeling the canonized literary norms that had already existed in the Chinese literature. In addition, because of the dominant political ideology, the poems to be translated had their theme against feudalist and capitalistic ideology and for the superiority of socialism. With the "Reform and Opening up" policy in1978, the translation system retrieved a central position. The translation of Whitman’s poems came to a climax for there were numerous translations and publications of the full version of Leaves of Grass. And the translated poems from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass tended to be innovative by introducing new and unfamiliar elements.The author finally draws a conclusion that with regards to the translated literary works, the scales of translation activities, translation strategies and the selection of the translated texts are not random but determined by the status of translated literature within the literary canon. The criteria to evaluate the translations of Whitman’s poems do not focus on the meaning equivalence between source texts and target texts any more, but take into account the political ideology or the dominant literary norms by putting translations against the backdrop of the whole literary environment. A good translated text should not only be equivalent to the original text, but also reflect the literary trend that it belongs to.