A Stylistic Comparative Approach To The Four Chinese Versions Of Dylan Thomas' "Fern Hill"

“Fern Hill” is one of the masterpieces of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas,which boosts superb stylistic skills and aesthetic function of language.The present study analyzes four published Chinese versions of the poem from the perspectives of phonology,vocabulary and syntax in the light of literary stylistics,and evaluates their gains and losses in reproducing the linguistic,thematic and aesthetic value of the original poem.It attempts to answer the following two research questions: 1.How to reproduce the foregrounding features(functional stylistic deviation)and poetic function of the original poem? 2.How to compensate for the semantic loss in the process of translation?The study finds that each version has its own advantages and disadvantages.Wang Ye and Shui Qin's version(1989)is characterized by its closeness to the original poem.Translators apply defamiliarized expressions to represent the defamiliarization and foregrounding features of the original poem.The disadvantage is that the conservative translation method makes it difficult to reproduce the rich meaning contained in the original poem completely.The success of Hai An,Fu Hao and Lu Meng's version(2002)lies in the bold interpretation of the lexical and syntactic structure of the original poem,which compensates for the semantic loss during translation.The disadvantage lies in the occasional inaccuracy of the translators' interpretation of the original poem.Wei Bai's version(2014) tends to combine the subject and predicate which are separated by enjambment into one or two sentences.The disadvantage is that the translator's syntactic adjustment sometimes affects the internal logic of the original poem and fails to compensate for the semantic loss.Besides,this version makes few breakthrough as for semantic loss.In Hai An's version(2015),the translator has made subtle adjustments in the respect of tense,modality,plural nouns and punctuation to further close the gap between the translation and original poem.However,in terms of the translation of rhetoric,imagery and metaphor,the contribution of this version is very limited.This research points out that translators could adopt a two-step approach when dealing with poems with foregrounding features.First,follow the rhythmic pattern of the original poem,and stick to its syntactic and lexical collocations to reproduce its defamiliarization effect,which is conducive to presenting the linguistic style of the original poem.However,the conservative method could always present only one aspect of the original poem's linguistic style but lose its rich substance.Second,break and restructure,that is,breaking out of the sound pattern of the original poem and the basic meaning of vocabulary,re-organize the syntactic structure,and refine the rhetoric,image and metaphor of the original poem in order to compensate for the semantic loss and reproduce the charm of the poem.