A Comparative Study Of Two English Versions Of Mao Tse-tung's Poems In The View Of Reception Aesthetics

The poems written by Mao Tse-tung are well known to Chinese people mainly due to two reasons.One is that he was an erudite and talented poet;the other is that he was the first distinguished leader of the People's Republic of China.As "to enhance the national cultural soft power" was put forward,the importance of Chinese culture "going out" is becoming increasingly important.Mao Tse-tung's poems are an indispensable part of Chinese culture,so it is of great importance to study the translations of them.This thesis carries out a contrastive study on two English versions of Mao Tse-tung's poems based on response-inviting structure in reception aesthetics in order to explore how to reach a high fit simultaneously being between "poetic" and "understandable" during translation.Poetry is a unique literary genre,which combines "sound","form",and "meaning" into one.Translators should completely understand the original poem first,namely the author's writing techniques,styles,emotion,ideological purports and other such characteristics,and they should,according to the needs and aesthetics level of the target readers,translate the original poem selectively so as to enable the target readers to have the same aesthetics experience and appreciation as the original readers as much as possible.The response-inviting structure is a special characteristic in literary works,especially in poems which provide a circuitous interaction between readers and text,or "a dialogue".Therefore during translation,the way response inviting-structures in poems are dealt with will influence target language readers' appreciation experience to a great degree.According to the response-inviting structure in reception aesthetics,this thesis chooses ten of Mao Tse-tung's poems to design a questionnaire around.The author then asked respondents who are native English speakers or who regard English as a second language but possess almost the same proficiency as native speakers to fill in the questionnaires.There are two English versions chosen in this paper,one was translated by Qian Zhongshu,Yuan Shuipai,et al.in 1976,and the other was translated by Willis Barnstone and Ko Ching-po in 1972.The former is regarded as the official translation,while the latter had a great influence on Western academic circles at that time.The majority of respondents are international students from six Universities in Changsha,which are Hunan Normal University,Changsha University of Science&Technology,Central South University,Xiang Ya School of Medicine,and Hunan Academy of Chinese Medicine.In the main body of this paper,the author conducts a detailed contrastive analysis between the two translations to explore the response inviting-structures from four levels which are prosody,semantic meaning,figures of speech,and image and artistic conception.Then according to respondents' choices and reasons,further discussion will be done.From the questionnaires,the reasons for choosing the version in 1976 are mainly due to "being more poetic" and "having a deeper meaning",while the reasons for choosing the version in 1972 are mainly "the use of simple words" and "being easy to understand".Through analysis,a reader's language proficiency has an influence on his or her artistic ability to some extent:the higher the language proficiency,the stronger the artistic ability,and vice versa;when target readers are not familiar with the specific writing background and techniques,unfolding the response-inviting structure in the poems properly contributes to the readers' reception for the poems.