An Analysis Of The C-E Translation Of The Poems In Hong Lou Meng-A Comparative Study From The Perspective Of Cognitive Poetics

Currently, Sinology is receiving more and more scholarly attention in the west, where an increasing number of researchers show intense interest in studying Chinese literature. Hong Lou Meng is one of the most popular classical Chinese novels through which the western scholars can get more knowledge and better understanding of the history and society of China. Therefore, it is natural for this novel to have been translated by many translators and studied from multiple perspectives. Poems in Hong Lou·Meng, part of the great poems in the Qing Dynasty, are highly acknowledged as "the pearls of artistic crown of language in Hong Lou Meng". The 207 poems, characterized by elaborate metaphors, imagistic fragments, and various cultural elements, pose a great challenge to the translator’s intelligence and wisdom.As a developing theory that has been well applied to the exploration of translation-related issues in the west, the cognitive poetics theory has not come to the notice of Chinese translation field. The present study, integrating the theory and the two English versions (Hawkes’ version and the Yangs’ version) of the poems in Hong Lou Meng, explores in detail the application of cognitive poetics to both the literary translation and the study of the literary translation in terms of retaining the original writer’s intent, reproducing the aesthetic images and arousing the target language reader’s pleasure.The thesis first briefly addresses the significance and challenges of the C-E translation of the poems in Hong Lou Meng, and then reviews the previous studies on it. The following are the elaboration of cognitive poetics with three main elements, namely conceptual metaphor, figure and ground, and cognitive schema, and the brief review of the previous studies on cognitive poetics. The body part deeply explores the application of cognitive poetics to literary translation, classical Chinese poetry translation in particular, and the study of the literary translation with a qualitative analysis of typical translation samples in Hawkes’ version and the Yangs’ version.The thesis concludes that Hawkes’ version shows its advantages in duplicating the aesthetic images and maintaining the target language reader’s pleasure, while the Yangs’version demonstrates the accuracy of transforming the original writer’s intent. Besides, the thesis, within the framework of cognitive poetics, also concludes that touching the "temperament and interest" of the source language text, the great challenge of classical Chinese poetry translation, involves realizing the original writer’s intent by means of conceptual metaphor, realizing the aesthetic images by means of figure and ground, and arousing the target language reader’s pleasure by means of cognitive schema. In principle, the translator first need be faithful to the rhetoric in the source text, and translate the mapping between the source domain and the target domain in an intelligible way, so as to reproduce the original writer’s intent condensed between the lines. Second, the translator need comprehend the images culturally and aesthetically, and thus foregrounding the figure and creating the figure-ground segregation are selected as the strategy. Third, the translator need avoid depriving the target language reader of the pleasure in reading, and the method of constructing cognitive schema is selected to arouse the appreciation of the target language reader. In addition, specific strategies and techniques from Hawkes’version and the Yangs’version, such as recasting words, adding words and restructuring the sentences, are also concluded.