A Study On The Two English Versions Of Shijing From The Perspective Of Philosophical Hermeneutics

Shijing is the first anthology of poetry of China and one of the Chinese cultural classics.The artistic techniques of Shijing represent the artistic tradition of Chinese classical poetry,which have a great influence on the linguistic forms,genres and structures of Chinese literary works.The translation of Shijing firstly appeared in Europe in the eighteenth century and the English translation of Shijing has possessed a history of more than 100 years so far.Currently,some studies concerning the translation of Shijing have been conducted.Unfortunately,the studies from the perspective of Hermeneutics,especially from that of Philosophical Hermeneutics are rarely seen.Hermeneutics is a discipline focusing on understanding and interpretation.It originated from the interpretation and translation of the Bible.On the basis of the joint efforts of many distinguished scholars like Schleiermacher,Dilthey and Heidegger,Hans-Georg Gadamer eventually developed Hermeneutics into the systematic Philosophical Hermeneutics.Different from traditional Hermeneutics,which requires an objective obedience to the original intention of texts,Philosophical Hermeneutics believes that interpreters can never wholly reproduce the meanings of the original texts owing to cultural,social,historical as well as other factors and that interpreters have their subjectivity to some degree in the process of their interpretation.Translation is essentially linked with Hermeneutics since any type of translation will surely make an interpretation of a source text.The introduction of Philosophical Hermeneutics into the translation field has shaken the supremacy of authors and broken through the pursuit of “standard” translation of traditional translation theories,which brings a new research perspective to translation studies.This thesis is going to conduct a study of two different English versions of Shijing from the perspective of Philosophical Hermeneutics.The two English versions the thesis adopts are James Legge’s unrhymed version in 1871 and Xu Yuanchong’s rhymed version in 1993.James Legge,whose English version of Shijing was considered as a milestone in the translation history of Shijing,was the first person to completely translate Shijing into English in the West and Xu Yuanchong the first to wholly translate Shijing into English in China.Consequently,the study of the two versions is of vital significance.The objective of this thesis lies not in comparing the differences in the translation strategies and styles of the two versions,or in evaluating the quality of them,but in making an in-depth analysis of the two from the view of the three key principles of Philosophical Hermeneutics,namely,“Historicity of Understanding”,“Fusion of Horizons” as well as “Effective History”.This thesis attempts to reveal the underlying reasons for the emergence of different translated versions of Shijing in different times and under different cultural and historical conditions,and further explore the significance of Philosophical Hermeneutics to the translation study of Shijing and to other translation studies as well.