A Research On The Chinese-English Translation Of Li Bai’s Poetry From The Perspective Of Stylistics

Poetry creation enjoys a profound long history in Chinese culture;as one of the most prominent poets in Tang Dynasty,Li Bai has produced a great number of poems perceived as cherished heritage in Chinese culture.“A man with good virtues is fascinated by mountains and the one with wisdom by water”.Traveling was a prevailing fashion in Tang Dynasty,and Li Bai spend almost half of his lifetime traveling about the country,producing rich number of romantic poems reflecting his affection and inspiration upon traveling.Over the past hundred years,Li Bai’s poems as well as their translation has attracted extensive attention in the community of literature studies and translation studies.Li Bai’s poems have been translated into many foreign languages like English,Japanese,French,and etc.,forming a window for the world to get access to Chinese culture.Poem translation has long been regarded as one of the toughest businesses in circle of translation: one is the difficulty in the acquisition and the reproduction of the style of the original poem;the other is the difficulty in the decoding and representation of the image of the original poem.Stylistics makes the concept of style clearer,which can be applied not only to analyze text features,but also to reveal the stylistic effects of these features.In view of the linguistic differences between the SL and the TL,plus the discrepancy in defining style,many a researcher finds it awkwardly hard to analyze and reproduce the innate style of the original poem.The author selected a series of Li Bai’s poems as well as corresponding popular versions of translation as research subjects,and made a careful examination of the significant styles of the original poems from stylistic perspective.The styles of the original poems were examined and analyzed at phonological,lexical and syntactic level,respectively,in the hope of forming a solid foundation for the reproduction of the original style.In the coming step,this paper adopted the methods of comparative analysis,description and interpretation to study the translation strategies in different Englishversions,and the author used relevant stylistics theory as framework and made an attempt to exploring the possibilities of and approaches to reproducing the original style at phonological,lexical and syntactic level,hoping to exploring certain tactics as well as techniques for the reproduction of Li Bai’s poems,and eventually offering a reference for the translation of Chinese poems.The research shows that in the process of translating Li Bai’s poems into English,the translator should fully explore and analyze the stylistic features of the original poem and adopt the following translation methods: firstly,in the phonology,the translators should conform to the original form,that is,conform to the original rhyme,punctuation and so on;secondly,sentence types and noun phrase structures should be flexibly used in the aspect of syntax,and finally,translators focus on understanding and translating the associative meaning of the words in the original poem,so as to convey the meaning of the words in the original poem and express the artistic conception of the original poem.The present research intends to explore the strategies as well as referential suggestions for the Chinese-English translation of Chinese classical poetry based on a systematic analysis of the stylistics of the original poems,and in a further step,to promote the spreading of Chinese culture to the outside world.