Abstract
This article investigates the image of a “chaste wife” recreated in two English translations of ancient Chinese poet Li Po’s Changgan Xing from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Based on three metafunctions of SFL, respectively ideational, interpersonal and textual, the linguistic choices of the poet and translators are measured from the transitivity and text complexity on what the wife does and how she organizes her thoughts; from the mood and modality on how she interacts with her husband, and the theme and rheme on how she unfolds and foregrounds her concerns. Since translating is a process of making choices, the analysis shows that both translations reproduce the first and second level of poetic themes about love in the original poem but lose the third political theme. Besides, Pound tends to follow an imaginative and creative translation, thus recreating a bashful and innocent image of a young “chaste wife” in a direct and explicit way, while Waley aims at literal translation and presents a more courageous and considerate image of a mature “chaste wife” in a relatively complex and implicit way. It is argued that the context of translation, including the translator’s knowledge of the source language, translation strategies and intended readers, plays an important role in the translator’s seemingly unconscious choices of interpreting and presenting poetic themes, thus recreating different images of a same character.
Highlights
Changgan Xing is a classical Chinese poem presenting the monologue of a chaste wife missing her husband and awaiting his return
Drawing on systemic functional linguistics (SFL), the aim of this study is to explore the presentation of poetic themes and the recreation of the image of the “chaste wife” in two English translations of Li Po’s Changgan Xing: Ezra Pound’s The River-merchant’s Wife: a Letter (1915), and Arthur Waley’s Ch’ang-kan (1919)
From the perspective of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), this study investigates the image of a “chaste wife” recreated in two English translations of Li Po’s Changgan Xing, and explores their consequences and takes the contextual factors into consideration for better understanding
Summary
Changgan Xing is a classical Chinese poem presenting the monologue of a chaste wife missing her husband and awaiting his return. Based on these three dimensions of language functions, the following part seeks to demonstrate that SFL approach to analyzing literary translations can make a significant contribution It aims to investigate the linguistic choices in Li Po’s Changgan Xing and its two English versions from the perspective of transitivity in experiential metafunction on what the wife does (doing, thinking, behaving, or saying), the text complexity in logical metafunction on how she gathers and organizes her thoughts, the mood and modality in interpersonal metafunction on how she interacts with her husband, and the theme and rheme in textual metafunction on how she unfolds and foregrounds her concerns, as these strands of meaning are closely related to the image of the wife depicted, giving rise to presenting the poetic themes.
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