| Ezra Pound is widely considered as one of the most influential poets in the 20 th century;as one of the leading figures of Imagism,he has made enormous contributions to Modernist poetry.As a Modernist poet and translator,he translated a large number of Chinese poems in his time.One of his most famous works is Cathay,a collection of fourteen Chinese poems,which successfully brought the classical Chinese poetry into western literature world.However,as a poet who knew little Chinese,Pound translated these Chinese poems by referring to an orientalist Fenollosa’s notes and he indeed made quite a lot of adaptations in his versions,which has consistently aroused hot scholarly debates over whether Pound’s versions are translations or not and also kindles the author’s interest in studying the translatability of poetry.Modernism may offer us a clue for the translatability of poetry in Cathay.One of the central assumptions of the Modernist vision is that the past and present exist in a disconnect that in cultural terms there is an incompatibility between past and present and that,accordingly,past traditions of thinking and writing should be discouraged in favour of producing something new,more in keeping with the times.This is art that is revolutionary rather than evolutionary,and novelty is explicitly encouraged so that there is always not only a tension between the traditional and the new,but also a focus on the determining features of the present moment--what we might call presentism(Johnston,2017).Pound’s translations reflect his view as a presentist--in other words,what poem is now is more important than what the poem might or might not have been in a past that is irredeemably lost to us.This thesis examines the translatability of poetry in terms of two aspects--meaning and form,by analyzing the translation of images,the place name literary quotations,the form of poems in Ezra Pound’s Cathay.It intends to answer the following research questions: 1)How is the translatability of meaning of poetry achieved in Pound’s Cathay? 2)How is the translatability of form of poetry achieved in Pound’s Cathay? 3)What are the strengths and weaknesses of using Modernism to illustrate the translatability of poetry?Pound’s versions in Cathay demonstrate that poetry is translatable in terms of meaning that could be achieved by translating images,place names and literal quotations.Images in Cathay were translated through preservation of image,replacement of image and omission of image.He tended to firstly break up the poem into pieces of the meaning or images and then to reorganize them according to his own understanding so as to make it work in English verses,thus there is always a sign of Chinese poetry lingering in his translations.Besides,he mainly adopted four ways to deal with the place name including transliteration,free translation,literal translation and omission.As for literary quotations,Pound provided the sense of these quotations with English readers without listing out the historical and cultural stories behind.In addition,Pound indeed attempted to keep the similar usage of duplicated adjectives or to list out images so as to maintain certain equivalence in form.Pound’s versions can be evaluated under the scope of modernism that what the poet translator seeks is to make the translation a new poem in its own right,rather than a replica of the original one.The evaluation of the poet’s version should not be determined by linguistic gains or loss,but by its potential or real impacts on the social or cultural conditions in the receiving culture.Each translation only brings out a specific aspect of the poem and the poem in the original is never fully recreated,what translation can do is to offer multiple versions to rejuvenate the culture constantly.However,Modernist poets might be too target--oriented to balance the weight of the source text.It still awaits further examination on whether Modernism could be used to interpret the translability of poetry. |
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