Study Of Emotion Metaphor Translation In Li Yu’s Poetry From The Cognitive Perspective

Metaphor is a common phenomenon which exists in people’s daily communication.The study of metaphor underwent a very long history.In the early years,the metaphor study only focused on its rhetorical function.And with the conceptual metaphor theory proposed,the metaphor study turned into the cognitive field.Human emotion is an abstract concept which can be expressed by language.There are abundant emotion metaphors in people’s daily communication.With the increasing enrichment of people’s emotional cognitive experience,the images used to metaphorize emotion tend to be diversified.In Chinese poetry writing,the poets are good at expressing their emotions with the concrete things.So,there are plenty of emotion metaphor expressions which enjoy a high research value.In order to explore the generative process of the emotion metaphor in Li Yu’s poetry and the translation effect,this study selects Complete Collection of Li Yu’s Poetry as the corpus and analyzes the emotion metaphor translation in Li Yu’s poetry from the perspective of cognition.There are 17 intact poems,53 intact Ci poems and 12 residual poetic sentences.Qualitative research and quantitative research are employed in this study.201 sentences containing emotion metaphor are collected.Based on the gist of the poetry and the interpretation of the scholars,the emotion metaphors in Li Yu’s poetry could be classified into sorrow metaphor,missing metaphor,happiness metaphor and loneliness metaphor.As an outstanding poet,Li Yu was good at expressing his emotions with things.More than 25 images were counted in his works.Based on Chen Zhi’e’s classification,the emotion metaphor in Li Yu’s poetry are divided into 5 types,namely the emotion metaphor of natural sceneries and phenomenon,the emotion metaphor of plant,the emotion metaphor of animal,the emotion metaphor of man-made things and the emotion metaphor of human body and action.Combined with the creation background of Li Yu’s poetry,the generative process of the emotion metaphor in Li Yu’s poetry is explored and the translation effect of Zhu Manhua’s translation is discussed.As the study results shows,the frequency of the sorrow metaphor in Li Yu’s poetry ranks the first,and the missing metaphor ranks the second,then the happiness metaphor is in the sequence,and the loneliness metaphor is the last one.Among those images,the negative images are employed to express sorrow,missing and loneliness.The image of sorrow metaphor includes residual sun,chaotic mountains,coldness,falling flowers and withering trees,crazy oriole and noisy cicadas,broken jewelries,tears and gray hair etc.The image used in missing metaphor contains moons,mountains,maple leaves,memorial blossoms,wild goose,fish,sense and dream.Moon,autumn,lonely oriole and little courtyard are involved in the loneliness metaphor.However,the positive images are applied to express happiness including water,warmth,blooming flowers,lovebirds,wine,dream and cured disease etc.People have the similar emotional cognitive experience.So,Manfield Zhu tried his best to preserve the original image while translating the emotion metaphor.Due to the different social and cultural factors between China and the western world,people will have their own emotional cognitive experience.In some cases,Manfield Zhu made some changes in translating the emotion metaphor.He would change the original images or add some explanations.In that way,the emotions in Li Yu’s poetry could be understood.The study of emotion metaphor translation in poetry would be expanded to promote the exchange of traditional culture.