Abstract
Tang poetry has great poetic and aesthetic value. Based on the theories of cultural self-confidence and selective adaptation, the necessity and rationality of the English translation of Tang poetry will be discussed under the guidance of "Harmony-guided Three-level Criteria of Poetry Translation", and comparative analyses of five English versions of Li Bai’s “Changgan Xing” will be made. The study holds that "Harmony-guided Three-level Criteria of Poetry Translation" not only embodies cultural self-confidence, but also conforms to the spiritual essence of the theory of selective adaptation. It can effectively disseminate Chinese poetry and improve the soft power of Chinese culture.
Highlights
The Moon and Sixpence was written by the renowned British novelist William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) and published in 1919, right after the First World War
Whether and how narrative tense can be transferred from the source text to the target text should be critically factored into the translation process, which bears much on the rhetorical effect of fictions
Three examples regarding “underreading” of the narrator‟s unreliability and two examples regarding the flexible use of narrative tense will be selected and examined from these two aspects in detail, guided by two research questions: (1) At the discourse level, to what extent are the stylistic markers of the two narrative techniques reproduced in the two translated versions?
Summary
The Moon and Sixpence was written by the renowned British novelist William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) and published in 1919, right after the First World War. The story is narrated by the first-person homodiegetic narrator “I”, a biographer, who records the protagonist‟s life via recalling his only a few encounters with him as well as interviewing the persons who once came into contact with him, in an attempt to determine his real nature and unveil his ultimate motivation of the painter dream In this novel, Maugham touches upon the theme of inexplicable human nature and soul searching, an epitome of the postwar social instability as well as the uncertainty of human cognition. In order to effectively interweave these themes with the story plot and characterization, the author ingeniously adopts two distinctive narrative techniques, namely, unreliable narration and a flexible use of narrative tense. He successively translated a wide range of classic works like The Old Man and the Sea, The Great Gatsby and The Little Prince (the only official Chinese version approved by the Foundation Saint-Exupéry of France in 2015), most of which seem to be positively embraced by the younger generation
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