Translation Of Cultural Imagery Of Mao Zedong’s Poetry

As we all know, Mao Zedong is not only a distinguished proletarian revolutionary, politician and militarist in Chinese history, but also an outstanding poet. Mao Zedong’s poetry is well-known for its rich artistry and thought. So far, his poetry has been translated with multiple languages with over twenty versions, among which, there are over14English versions. However, with the regard to this literary heritage that has profound influence on the world cultural history, the research on its English translation is relatively weak. Imagery is the inherent concept and word of the ancient China literature and also the specific image in the poetry."Imagery" refers to the artistic state formed through the integration of the author’s subjective emotion and objective physical environment. However, the cultural imagery is just the integration of culture and imagery. Besides, it is the crystallization of the ethnic group culture wisdom; the development of historical geography, custom, ethnic concept, thinking model, etc.; the cultural symbols with rich association and free translation formed through the repeated application of social culture group. Moreover, it has relatively fixed characteristic and unique cultural connotation. Undoubtedly, research on Mao Zedong’s poetry from the viewpoint of cultural imagery is a meaningful subject. Among the numerous translation versions, the author selects three versions as the research object, and discusses the loss of cultural imagery during the translation, with the purpose of making comparison towards the translation of each version from the domestic and foreign translators and their different translation tactics. Furthermore, the author puts forward the principle and strategy of the cultural imagery translation of the poetry through the comparison and research on the translation of different versions of Mao Zedong’s poetry.This paper mainly adopts text analysis and comparative analysis. It is divided into six chapters.Chapter one is the introduction, summarizing the research significance, the current research status of the domestic and foreign academic circles towards Mao Zedong’s poetry and cultural imagery, and puts forward the research purpose and innovation of this paper on the basis of analyzing and referring to the research achievements from the predecessors. At present, the domestic and foreign circles carry out research on Mao Zedong’s poetry mainly from the linguistic approach, cultural approach and literary form approach, while the research on the cultural imagery is relatively few. Besides, a minority of research on the English version still put emphasis on the translation of rhythm of the poetry, so the research on the cultural imagery of Mao Zedong’s poetry is woefully in adequate. This paper makes research on the English-Chinese imagery translation of Mao Zedong’s poetry from the aspect of the cultural factors of translation. Chapter two is literature review, presenting the historical development process and research status of the domestic and foreign English versions of Mao Zedong’s poetry. Chapter three elaborates the significance of cultural imagery, and the loss and distortion of the cultural imagery in the cultural translation, which results from that the reader tend to separate the imagery and culture in the English-Chinese translation due to the western and Chinese cultural difference. In Chapter four, according to the characteristics of cultural imagery in Mao Zedong’s poetry, the author puts emphasis on the transmission approach of the cultural imagery in the poetry translation, and analyzes the translation methods of cultural imagery, their advantages and disadvantages of the three versions from color, literary quotation, and numeral. As for Harper version, Willis Barnstone mainly adopted liberal translation. In order to enable the readers to have a better understanding of the language expression of the poetry, he adopted domestication method. Gu Zhengkun mainly adopted transliteration and notes when dealing with cultural imagery so as to maintain the imagery of the Chinese culture. However, Xu Yuanzhong mainly adopted domestication. In Chapter five, through the comparison and analysis towards the translation of the different versions, this paper puts forward the principles and strategies of the cultural imagery translation of the poetry from semantics level and aesthetic level. The author holds that, the semantic equivalence and aesthetic equivalence should be taken into consideration in the translation of cultural imagery. With the purpose of reaching semantic equivalence, the selection for domestication or foreignization depends on different cultural imagery of the poetry. It is feasible to apply the common expression technique to the translation of cultural imagery, in order to realize the aesthetic equivalence during the work creation. Chapter six is to summarize the whole paper.This paper has made initial research on this subject, due to the limitation of the historic complexity and the understanding divergence of the cultural imagery, and also the limitation of insufficient analysis on the English translation of Mao Zedong’s poetry, the research of this subject still has some deficiencies and needs further in-depth understanding.