A Comparative Study Of The Two English Translations Of Han Shan’s Poems From The Perspective Of Reception Theory

The recent decades have witnessed the popularity of reception theory in the circle of literary studies. First proposed by Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser from Constance University in the 1960s, reception theory greatly emphasizes the subjective role of readers in the literary study and shifts the focus of literary study from the author and the text to the reader. Since reader’s reception is one of the most important issues the translator is required to confront with in the process of translation, reception theory also throws fresh insight into translation studies. More and more scholars have made attempts to apply it to the study of literary translation.Han Shan is a mysterious monk poet in the Tang Dynasty. His poetry is marked by the use of colloquial language and free form which violate the conventions of the typical Chinese classical poems. As a result, he remained unrecognized as a minor poet in Chinese literary history for more than a thousand years. Unexpectedly, in the 1950s and 1960s, a "Han Shan fever" swept America. Han Shan’s poems enjoyed great popularity among the Beat Generation and Hippies and Han Shan was regarded as their spiritual hero, which can mainly be attributed to the successful translation by American poet Gary Snyder.Actually, long before Gary Snyder’s translation, Arthur Waley, a British sinologist and translator, had already published his translation of 27 Han Shan’s poems in the magazine Evergreen. However, his translation was not well-received by the common British readers, though it attracted the attention of some scholars. Why Snyder’s version was more successfully received than Waley’s version? Few scholars have compared these two translations in detail from the perspective of reception aesthetics to dig out the reasons, although much research has been done on Snyder’s version and the comparison of some versions of Han Shan’s poems from the angles of linguistics and poetics.In view of this, the present thesis attempts to make a detailed study of Snyder’s and Waley’s translations on the basis of reception theory. The author applies those main concepts of reception theory, namely horizon of expectations, fusion of horizons and indeterminacy, to the exploration of the differences between these two versions in terms of these two translators’different reception of the source text namely,different selection of the source text, different strategies, different language styles, different rendering of the culture-loaded terms and the different reception of the target text among readers, and finds that Snyder’s version is better received among the readers for the following reasons: firstly, Snyder’s translation is poetic, novel, unified and full of Zen Buddhist philosophy because of his horizon of expectations, namely his identity as a poet, his rich experience in the wilderness and his interest in Zen Buddhism. Secondly, under the influence of the New Poetry Movement and Imagism, Snyder adopts colloquial language to conform to the language style of the original poems and make the translation close to target readers’ everyday life as well as preserves the syntactic features of the original poems to provide readers with the chance to feel the exotic taste of Chinese language and culture. Finally, Snyder’s rendering of the poems just meets the horizon of expectations of the Beat Generation and Hippies in the 1950s and 1960s who were unsatisfied with American society and western civilization and eager to resort to eastern culture for spiritual comfort. By comparison, Waley’s version is comparatively poorly received in Britain because on the one hand, Waley’s horizon of expectations, namely his academic background and translator’s experience, determines his formal and rigid way of translating which is very different from Han Shan’s simple and colloquial style and on the other hand his translation is beyond the horizon of expectations of the conservative British readers who are not open to eastern culture and don’t admire people who are unrestrained and unconventional like Han Shan.