Polyphonic Poetics: Translating Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Abstract

Since the cultural turn of translation studies, the focus of the researches has switched from on the pure language within the text to the influences exerted by exterior elements outside the text, neglecting such interior factors as poetics, the theory about the creation of literature and about the value and the meaning of the works. The research, through the case study of literary translation, Zhao Susu’s Chinese version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, has explored the poetics of the literary translation from polyphonic perspective. It has been found that polyphonic poetics can be mainly classified into two independent and correlated levels, the visible one at the textual level, and the invisible one, at the subjective. In the translation process, as the organizer and the executor, the translator takes both the poetics of the author and that of the target reader into consideration. What’s more, the translator should also pay equal attention to the dominant poetics of the target culture and that of their own. The significance of research on polyphonic poetics not only lies on helping readers better understand foreign languages and cultures, but globally promoting the dialogues and communication in the domain of the education and culture among countries in the new era.