Reconstructing the poet’s image through institutional translation—a case study of Rewi Alley’s translation of Li Bai’s Poems

Abstract

ABSTRACT Rewi Alley was a New Zealand-born political activist, social reformer, and a renowned “foreign friend of China”, who devoted almost his entire life to China. Deeply interested in the Chinese language and culture, Alley was also a prolific translator of Chinese poetry. Although the great Chinese poet Li Bai’s poems have been translated into English by influential western translators such as Ezra Pound and Author Waley, Alley’s translation of Li Bai’s poems has some unique features in terms of text selection and translation style, which took place in an institutional setting. This study adopts an institutional approach to examine Alley’s translation of Li Bai’s poems and explores its unique features to reveal a distinctive type of institutional translation in the Chinese context. Through historical context analysis, textual analysis, and para-textual analysis of Alley’s translation, it shows that Alley in his translation has imprinted Li Bai’s poems with his own strong personal marks, reconstructing Li Bai’s image from a romantic poet into a realistic one, but failing to convey the spirit of the original poems by adopting his unconventional style of line-breaks. Alley’s translation of Li Bai’s poems was influenced by both personal and institutional ideologies and poetics, and his translation was to serve the goal of the Chinese government institution where he worked.