Translation Of Chinese Classical Opera From The Perspective Of Hermeneutics

Tang Xianzu, the outstanding playwright in Ming Dynasty in ancient China, is called "Oriental Shakespeare". His masterpiece The Peony Pavilion characterized by beautiful and poetic language, touching tune and a tale of extreme love beyond life and death, has become the monumental work in the history of ancient Chinese opera. As a splendid pearl in Chinese culture, The Peony Pavilion which has been translated into English and spread to western countries has caused a great sensation. There are three famous versions translated by Cyril Birch, Wang Rongpei and Zhang Guangqian.The "cultural turn" in the western translation research in the 1970s took translation into the field of cultural research and enhanced the research in the field of language and culture. The characteristics of hermeneutics have been gradually highlighted and hermeneutics has become the hot issue in translation research. Based on the four hermeneutic translation stages put forward by George Steiner, this thesis tries to analyze the translation characteristics of The Peony Pavilion rendered by Wang Rongpei.In the first chapter, the author mainly introduces the research objective, significance, research methodology and the outline of the research. The second chapter analyzes the study on The Peony Pavilion and the research of hermeneutics at home and abroad. The definition and the development of hermeneutics are illustrated in chapter three. After the brief introduction to The Peony Pavilion and its original author, this thesis elaborates the four hermeneutic translation stages represented in the version respectively with a plenty of examples. Major findings and inevitable limitations have been listed in the chapter five.Steiner holds that any translation activity starts from an initiative "trust" of the original work, which originates from the translator’s approval of the significance and the particular purpose of original.The author of this thesis analyses that Wang Rongpei trusts The Peony Pavilion and considers that it can be translated through evaluation of cognition, translator’s translation quality and translator’s translation purpose.The second stage, aggression, is the infiltration and extraction of the translator. This thesis analyses and proves how translator’s active infiltration plays an important role in translation and how it influences the version.The third stage is incorporation and the stage of expression. The inclination of words for rendering the original can be interpreted through examples.Owing to the aggression and incorporation of the translator, some information of the original may be lost, thus compensation is indispensable and positive. Wang Rongpei used rhyme of poems in order to maintain the original flavor and meaning, making up for the lost caused by the language differences between English and Chinese in the process of translation.This thesis hopes to discuss the feasibility of the usage of hermeneutics in Chinese classical opera after the analysis of The Peony Pavilion on the basis of four hermeneutic translation stages, and make a little contribution to the translation research.