On The Reproduction Of Five-xiang Beauties In Classical Chinese Poetry’s Translation

As the first collection of poems in Chinese history,Shi Jing is a typical representative of traditional Chinese culture,playing an important role in the history of literary development and process of cultural communication.Its English versions would also provide a window through which Westerners could better understand and appreciate traditional Chinese culture.The English translation of Shi Jing has a long history of more than 200 years,but research on its English translation is much later,for only about 30 years.The English translation of Shi Jing needs to be studied in depth under a comprehensive and suitable theory.The appreciation of a poem is the first step to translate it.Gu Zhengkun(2003)proposes“The Five-Xiang Beauties Theory”as an evaluating system of classical Chinese poetry based on the special traits of Chinese characters(being graphic,meaningful,phonetic),including Shi(视)Xiang Beauty,Yin Xiang Beauty,Yi Xiang Beauty,Shi(事)Xiang Beauty and Wei Xiang Beauty.Shi(视)Xiang Beauty consists of Shi(视)Xiang Beauty in Sense(inner one)and Shi(视)Xiang Beauty in Form(outer one)as well;Yin Xiang Beauty refers to the rhythm,the rhyme,“Single Yuan”(一元)&“Multi Yuan”(多元)and the structural identicalness between sound and meaning;Yi Xiang Beauty covers Micro-Yi Xiang and Macro-Yi Xiang.It mainly indicates the influences of single character or the whole meaning and connotation of the poem on readers’mind that could bring them a kind of aesthetic feeling or effect;Shi(事)Xiang Beauty refers to allusions,plots,and textual structures in a poem that could arouse affections on readers’mind;Wei Xiang Beauty is the integrated Beauty of a poem after fusion of the so-called Shi(视)Xiang Beauty,Yin Xiang Beauty,Yi Xiang Beauty or Shi(事)Xiang Beauty.It also means the style of a poem that could bring readers comprehensive aesthetic feeling.The evaluation criteria of Five-Xiang Beauties are closely related to the seeing,tasting and other sensory experiences of aesthetic subjects.How to fully reproduce the beauty of the original poem so as to stimulate the readers’sensory experiences has become an important standard forjudging the translation of Shi Jing.Five-Xiang Beauties are not only five angles to appreciate classical Chinese poems,but also five criteria for detecting the English translation of Chinese poetry.Taking Gu Zhengkun’s “The Five-Xiang Beauties Theory” as the theoretical framework,this paper selects some examples from Wang Rongpei & Ren Xiuhua’s The Book of Poetry and then studies the successful reproduction of Shi(视)Xiang Beauty,Yin Xiang Beauty,Yi Xiang Beauty,Shi(事)Xiang Beauty and Wei Xiang Beauty in them by means of qualitative study in order to summarize the corresponding poetic translation methods,skills,rhetorical devices and other compensations means used in Wang & Ren’s version.It is found that in order to reproduce Five-Xiang Beauties of Shi Jing,Wang & Ren greatly consider the reader’s acceptance,mainly choose translation method of free translation,take translation skills of inversion,repetition and useful rhetorical devices such as personification,simile and so on.This paper is an attempt to apply the “The Five-Xiang Beauties Theory” to the evaluation of Shi Jing’s translation,which is expected to broaden its research perspective and is likely to enrich the relevant studies on English translation of Shi Jing so as to provide certain insight into later poetry’s translation.