| Pale Fire is one of Nabokov’s most celebrated works.Its most bizarre structure of a feigned scholarly nonfiction defies that of any literary tradition.The long poem also entitled Pale Fire is an essential section of this novel and is considered by many scholars and literary critics to be an outstanding literary work in its own right.However,limited research has been conducted on this poem and its translation.From the perspective of Xu Yuanchong’s "Three Beauties Theory",this thesis sets out to analyze the translatability of the poem Pale Fire by carrying out a case study of Mei Shaowu’s translation.The research focuses on exploring the factors that affect the translatability of the poem and evaluating Mei’s coping strategies.The thesis has two major findings.First,under the criteria of the "Three Beauties Theory",the factors that affect the translatability of Pale Fire mainly originate from Nabokov’s personal writing style,the unique sound devices of English poetry,and the linguistic,phonological,and syntactic differences between Chinese and English.Second,Mei’s coping strategies mainly include liberal translation,transliteration,literal translation,amplification,adjustments of word order and sentence breaks,and the application of neologisms,four-character structures,and tone patterns.These techniques reproduce beauty in sense,beauty in sound,and beauty in form in varying degrees.In most cases regarding achieving beauty in sense and beauty in sound,many implicit meanings and musical effects of the original text are lost in the translation;whereas regarding achieving beauty in form,the techniques succeed at keeping the lines neat in most cases and rendering the stanza length the same as the original poem. |
