A Study On The Translation Of Louise Glück’s Poetry From The Perspective Of Poetic Iconicity

Louise Elizabeth Glück(1943--),an American modern poet,was awarded Nobel Prize in Literature“for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal" in 2020.Glück’s poetry transforms the personal experience into poetic art,a reference to the real world,including the inner world of humankind.Thus,her poetry has the inner characteristic of iconicity.From the perspective of imagic iconicity,diagrammatic iconicity and metaphorical iconicity,this study selects Glück’s poetry collection Poems:1962-2012 and the Chinese translations An Alloy ofMoonlight,Until the World Reflects the Deepest Needs of the Soul,and The Wild Iris as the research object.Assisted by contrastive method and text close reading,this thesis probes into the presentation of iconicity in Gluck’s poetry and the representation of iconicity in its Chinese translations,in order to discuss the indepth relation of "name/form" and“nature/meaning" in poetry translation.It is found that iconicity in Glück’s poetry is remarkable,and the iconicity feature is well preserved in its Chinese translations.Metaphorical iconicity has the highest degree of representation,followed by imagic and diagrammatic iconicity respectively.The translator used onomatopoeic words,phonetic features,radicals,repetition,chiasmus,parallelism and other methods to transplant the poetic iconicity feature of the original.As for the device that cannot be represented,the translator chose to replace it with a new one and for the worst situation,the iconic expression was damaged as a compromise,resulting in the loss of poetic effect.Through comparison,the carrier and means of the iconicity in the original text and the translation are different,but overall,the translated poems retain iconicity to a large extent,making an indelible contribution to the spread of Glück’ s poetry in China.