Reproduction Of The Artistic Conception In The Translation Of Classical Chinese Poetry

Poetry is the originator of literature and the root of arts. There is no other nation whoseliterature does not stem from poetry. Poets express their abundant feelings in accordance to therequirements of rhyme and with concise language and rich imagination. The poetry is also asignificant part of Chinese literature. Chinese Classical Poets combined their subjective feelingsand the objects they perceived harmoniously, creating an abstract poetic space which is called“artistic conception”. Artistic conception in classical Chinese poetry is an important category ofChinese literature and aesthetics. Scholars at home and abroad have made wide and profoundstudies on it, yet the previous interpretation and translation of the artistic conception in classicalChinese poetry is mainly from rhetorical, aesthetic or the socio-cultural perspectives. Fewstudies have been made to explore the interaction between the poets’ creation psychology andthe poetry from the perspective of internal procession in writing a poem.Cognitive linguistics holds that language is the product of human cognitive activities, andthe figure-ground alignment principle is one of the important cognition tools or mechanisms.Thus, such theory is usually used to interpret the cognitive mechanism of language and offersan explanation to explore the poets’ creation psychology and helps readers appreciate theartistic conception in Chinese classical poems better. Translation is a process of transferring theinformation loaded in the source language text to target language readers and reproducing theartistic conception expressed in the source language text in the target language text in order tomake the readers of the target language have the same feelings as the source language readers.Therefore, as an important cognitive mechanism of language, the figure-ground theory appliedto direct the translation practice of poetry makes, to some extent, possible the reproduction ofartistic conception of classical Chinese poetry in the target language text.Based on the figure-ground theory of cognitive linguistics, the thesis first gives a survey ofthe application of the figure-ground alignment to language and poetry; then, it discusses thepresence of this theory in the expressions of images, spatiotemporal structures, ellipsis,metonymy and Xingji in classical Chinese poetry, and how the theory helps to produce theartistic conception in these five aspects; lastly, the thesis tries to conclude some practicaltranslation strategies for instructing translation practice.According to the present study, the thesis holds that the figure-ground theory, which isbased on the prominence view and attention view, is powerful in explaining the artisticconception of classical Chinese poetry. In order to create a certain artistic conception andachieve the aesthetic intention, the poets usually highlight different images according to thecontrastive principle, harmonic principle, clarity principle, associative principle and unity in diversity principle of aesthetics. In order to reproduce the artistic conception, the translator maychoose from several strategies in the translating process such as using the identicalfigure-ground relationship, using the reversed figure-ground relationship, adding a new figureor ground, or omitting the figure or ground in the target language.The present study provides a new perspective to the artistic conception study of classicalChinese poetry and further testifies the positive role that the figure-ground theory plays inanalyzing the artistic conception of poetry and in instructing the translation of artisticconception.