A Comparative Study On The Translations Of Li Qingzhao’s Ci-Poetry

Song Ci, also known as Song Lyrics, enjoys great popularity in the Chinese history of literature with its unique charms. Li Qingzhao, with her ci-poems characterized by delicate emotions, refreshed language, graceful diction and abundant cultural connotations, has long been acclaimed as the most outstanding poetess in China, also No.1of the restrained school in the history of Ci writing.Over the past decades, many translators and theorists have made great efforts to translate Li Qingzhao’s ci-poems, and many scholars have done research on the English translation of her works with plentiful achievements. On the other hand, of various theories on poetry translation, the "Three-Beauty" Principle put forward by Xu Yuanchong is one of the most profoundly influential theories. Therefore, it is still of great value to conduct a comparative study and analysis on different translations of Li Qingzhao’s ci-poems based on the "Three-Beauty" Principle.As the No.1translator in poetry rendition from Chinese into English and French, Xu Yuanchong’s translated poems are of high quality with many unsurmountable classical translations. Mao Yumei, a professor and expert in comparative literature, has scholarly attainments in both Chinese and western classical poems. She is quite proficient in poetry translation both from Chinese to English and English to Chinese, scoring a number of achievements especially in the English translation of Chinese classical poetry. This thesis endeavors to compare different versions of the two translators in terms of the beauty in sense, beauty in sound and beauty in form respectively, with Xu Yuanchong’s Three-Beauty" Principle as the theoretical basis. The research finds that, Xu Yuanchong, as the initiator proposing the "Three-Beauty" Principle, does an excellent job in conforming to his own theory, whereas Mao Yumei has her superiority as a female translator, which endows her with a quite different perspective from a male translator, performing also well in terms of the "Three-Beauty". In her book Picking the Best Ci Poems from the Washing Jade, it is easy to find how the superiority of female subjectivity is reflected and how a female translator deals with details by adopting certain skills. The study shows that the two translators differ in their representation of the beauty in sense, beauty in sound and beauty in form.The present study aims at making an in-depth comparative evaluation of Xu Yuanchong’s and Mao Yumei’s translations of Li Qingzhao’s ci-poems from the perspective of Xu Yuanchong’s "Three-Beauty" Principle. It is hoped that the study may shed some fresh insight into the study of the translation of Li Qingzhao’s ci-poems.