Transmission Of Poetic Meanings In Stephen Owen’s The Poetry Of Du Fu From The Perspective Of Cognitive Poetics

Cognitive poetics,which began in the 1980 s and is mainly based on cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology,is a new discipline combining linguistics and literature.Cognitive poetics has a huge theoretical system and a variety of research methods.Among them,the application of conceptual metaphor theory,figure and ground theory and cognitive schema theory in literary translation has attracted more attention from scholars at home and abroad.With the spread of Sinology,an increasing number of scholars are interested in the study of Chinese poetry.The English version of Stephen Owen’s The Poetry of Du Fu is the most complete translation of Du Fu’s poems.As the most representative group of poems,Qiu Xing Ba Shou are also included in it.Present studies on poetic image and poetic implication in translation of Du Fu’s poetry are more from social,historical and cultural background.They mainly focus on subjective analysis of literal language and lack theoretical basis to some extent.Empirical researches on the transmission mechanism of poetic meaning from the cognitive perspective are limited.By taking Stirred by Autumn in the English version of Stephen Owen’s The Poetry of Du Fu as an example,and through a descriptive study of the cross-cultural transmission of poetic meanings,this thesis aims to examine how conceptual metaphor,figure and ground,and cognitive schema engender poetic meanings so as to describe and explain some regular problems in the practical translation,such as comprehension and interpretation of the original text,processing of the translation situation,and the strategies and methods for transmitting the poetic meaning.It is hoped that the translation of Du Fu’s poetry can be evaluated more scientifically based on a reasonable theory,so as to provide some explanations from the cognitive perspective for the cross-cultural transmission of Du Fu’s poetry in the English world,and provide a modicum of references for the translation and dissemination of Chinese classical poetry.As a literary genre of expressing emotion and aspiration,poetry often brings great challenges to translators due to its complex metaphorical connotation,diverse images and rich cultural factors.The present study shows that a translator can reproduce the original intents through conceptual metaphor,retain the aesthetic image of the source text by means of figure and ground,and enhance the reception of the target readers with the help of cognitive schema to translate the “feeling” and “image”of poetry.The translator firstly need to be faithful to the rhetoric in the source text,and can translate the mapping between the source domain and the target domain in an intelligible way by using structural metaphor,orientational metaphor and ontological metaphor,so as to reproduce the original writer’s intent condensed between the lines.Secondly,the translator need to comprehend the images culturally and aesthetically,and can recreate the beauty of images through foregrounding the figure and creating the figure-ground segregation and recursiveness.Thirdly,the translator should also consider the acceptability of the target readers,and can activate the interest of the target readers and enhance their reception by creating cognitive schema.