An Analysis Of The "Beauty In Sense" In The Translation Of Poems From The Story Of The Stone Through "San Hua" Theory

Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said: Prose is words in the best order; poetry isthe best words in the best order.(Xu Yuanchong,1) In Chinese literature, the bestwords in the best order represent the most artistic form of language. So the Englishtranslation of this form could be a challenge, yet it is worth our effort of exlporing inthis subject. The translation of Chinese classical poems is a great contribution toChinese culture’s globalization.The representative of Imagism poets Ezra Pound held that Chinese classicalpoems were deeply rooted in images to the degree that each character consists acomplete image. As for the appreciation of Chinese classical poems and proses, agrasp and comprehension of the images in poems is the initial step. The imagesconstitute the artistic mood in a poem where the poet’s subjective emotions interactwith objective surroundings. Chinese scholar Yuan Xingpei has expressed the ideathat the mood surpasses the image yet comes from image. The mood, an abstractconcept, and the image, a concrete conception, make up the beauty of a poem, whichrefers to the beauty of sense of a poem. As we can see, the images and the artisticmood are the key factors in displaying the sense of beauty of the original poem. Anypoem that embodies the sense of beauty has its own spirit, the value of its existence. In the subject of pursuing the beauty of poems in translation, Professor XuYuanchong has very insightful perspectives. Based on years of experiences intranslation practice and, the succession and creation of predecessors’ translationtheories, Professor Xu established his own system of translation theory: the principleof generalizaiton, equalization and particularization, as the methodology; theprinciple of beauty of sense, sound and form, as the ontology; and the theory ofcomprehension, appreciation and admiration, as the teleology. Professor Xu putforward that “the beauty of sense” comes first among the three. In a poem the imageand the artistic mood should be the core elements of “the beauty ofsense”.Oftentimes the sense,sound and form in a poem are intertwined in a way thatthe sense comes out of the sound, or the form brings out the sense.(FengQinghua,82),as we can see the dominant character in poetry.This thesis is going to explore, in the translation, how to fully display theoriginal sense of beauty in English, by means of the principle of generalizaiton,equalization and particularization.The redological poems in China are popular for their rich and diversifiedimages, such as the ones that describe Lin Daiyu:“Maiden’s bower”,“peachblossoms”,“the faded red”,“the willow fluff”“autumn wind”, which all reflect hersad, lonely, aloof and proud character. In that process of translation the principle ofgeneralizaiton, equalization and particularization is well used in rendering theoriginal images, in order to recreate a similar character in English as much aspossible. After the study of the relation between “the principle of generalizaiton,equalization and particularization” and “the sense of beauty”, we can learn how totransfer the poetic beauty from Chinese, a parataxis language to English, a hypotaxislanguage.