A Study Of The Confucian Poet Constructed In Stephen Owen’s English Translation Of Du Fu’s Poetry

In recent decades,under the backdrop of China carrying out the strategy of introducing Chinese culture to the outside world,more and more Chinese classics which carry traditional Chinese values and beliefs have been translated into foreign languages by Chinese and foreign scholars and made their way into the world.These translations have drawn much attention from scholars at home and abroad.Classical literary works are an important part of Chinese classics,and in the history of classical Chinese poetry,the Tang poetry represents its peak.Du Fu is one of the most outstanding poets of the Tang Dynasty.Generally speaking,his poems reflect the changing social and political features of the Tang Dynasty from prosperity to decline.Under influence of Confucianism since his early age,he created a large number of poems imbued with strong Confucianism color,and thus he was honored as “Poetry Sage.” At present,the English translation of Du’s poems has made remarkable achievements,calling for scholarly efforts to conduct academic studies.As an outstanding Sinologist in the West,Stephen Owen has devoted himself to studying and translating Tang poetry for many years.The Poetry of Du Fu is one of his translations of Chinese classics of poetry,which took him eight years to finish it as the first English version of Du’s complete poetry for academic purposes.This translated work represents Owen’s fresh achievements in his study and translation of classical Chinese poetry.By studying Owen’s The Poetry of Du Fu,we can know to some extent how Western readers understand Du and his poetry as well as classical Chinese literature,especially classical Chinese poetry.This study,informed theoretically by Wang Hongyin’s modern interpretation of Yan Fu’s trio of translation criteria,takes Vol.II of The Poetry of Du Fu as its focus object and tries to answer the following key questions:What is the personal character of Du Fu as a Confucian poet as recognized by Owen?How is the image of Du Fu as a Confucian poet constructed by Owen in his translation of Du Fu’s poetry? How to assess Owen’s construction of Du Fu as a Confucian poet in his translation of Du Fu’s poetry?The findings of this study are the following.Firstly,Owen speaks highly of Du Fu and subscribes to his status as “Poetry Sage.” According to his understanding,Du is a poet who worried about his country and people,and dared to argue for his friends,who once gave up his office because of its lower position and heavy work.Meanwhile he was apt to make up to those as high-ranking officials among his friends and productive of a style in his poems concerning those friends with his emotion subject to their statuses and positions for the purpose of gaining some help from them.Owen’s such understanding of Du in the para-text in front of the text proper is quite different from his understanding of him as a Confucian poet in his early work The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T’ang.Secondly,in The Poetry of Du Fu,Owen tends to construct Du’s Confucian poet by means of reproducing the basic conceptual meaning of the original poems and offering annotations to make denotative supplementation to an adequate extent.In his translation,the image of Du constructed is a Confucian poet with such traits of character as being concerned about his country,opposed wars,and cried and worked hard for the people of his country,which gives salience to the image as being truly upright and sincere,heartily compassionate towards his countrymen,and brave to defend his wronged friends and convey his dissatisfaction with reality.Thirdly,Owen’s constructed image of Du as a Confucian poet has both similarities with and differences from the Confucian image of Du in the para-text before the text proper of The Poetry of Du Fu,and it is basically in line with the Confucian image of Du in the Chinese history of literature.Meanwhile,as this study indicates,the para-text attached to the translated poems play a crucial part in helping readers comprehend Du as a Confucian poet.From the perspective of Wang’s modern interpretation of Yan’s trio,Owen’s English translation of Du’s poems considerably meets the requirements of being faithful and communicable.As for elegance,in his translation of Du’s poems,Owen’s sound treatment is a rhymeless verse style and he pays more attention to the beauty in form and meaning in most cases.On the whole,his translation is characterized by the content outweighing the form in this regard.