Translated Abstract
Ezra Pound was the most influential and innovative poet in the Western literary world of the 20th century. His poetry and poetics not only broke through the traditional literature and advanced the resurrection of the western poetics, but also greatly impacted the development of the Oriental modernism literature which is widely different from the Western. Pound made endless efforts all his life to advocate, propagandize and experiment novel approaches and principles for poetic creation. He showed unprecedented enthusiasm and made huge contributions to Imagism and later Vorticism movements. Cathay, published in 1915, was the very product of Imagism movement. His versions in Cathay were mostly anti-traditional, innovative and filled with abundant images and imaginations. This anthology only includes 19 Chinese archaic poems, mainly of Sinologist, Fenollosa’s Japanese-mediated notes about Li Po’s and several other Chinese poets, but is considered one of the baldest and most innovative translations by Pound, who actually had no any knowledge of Chinese language and poetic characteristics. The success of Cathay, to a large extent， resulted from the unique and essential qualities, and the Imagistic characteristics of Chinese poems. Pound made thoughtful cultural de-construction and transference of the original poems. His versions unexpectedly cope with the imagistic and aesthetic qualities of the Chinese poems, though evident defects, deficiencies, omission, erroneous and twisted translations are seen in his versions which later received much condemnation from many of the critics. This thesis aims to study the diverse translation strategies Pound attempted on the translation of the images in the 19 original Chinese poems such as deciphering-translation, holistic-deconstruction, content-deviation, mimetic substitution and foreignizing translation, and further to analyze the poetic effects and the aesthetic significance achieved through these strategies by contrasting the original and translated poems. Cathay, on the second hand, has revealed the transferability and syncretism between the West and East from linguistic, cultural, aesthetic and socio-psychological perspectives. In this way, it will be helpful for readers to have a justified and impartial acknowledgement and appreciation to Pound and his versions, as well as provide a new perspective for poetry translation criticism.
Corresponding authors email
