【作者】 吴珺如；

【导师】 冯庆华；

【作者基本信息】 上海外国语大学 ， 英语语言文学， 2009， 博士

【摘要】 中国是一个以诗闻名的国度。在中国传统文化中,诗歌享有极高的地位,非任何其他艺术形式可比。历代伟大诗人的盛名历经万代而不衰,其杰作至今仍广为传唱。在新文化运动之前,诗歌属于基础教育的一部分,在某些朝代甚至成为皇帝招贤纳士的一种选拔手段,因此历代骚人墨客多身兼朝廷要职,名仕官宦亦喜作诗词歌赋,为后人留下了浩如烟海的宝贵诗歌遗产。词,作为中国古典诗歌的一种主要形式,在其中占有很大的比重,可与诗并称诗坛双峰。词原本是隋唐间兴起的一种伴随当时流行音乐供歌妓舞女在宴会或其他娱乐场合演唱的歌辞。唐代社会经济繁荣,娱乐业发展迅速,音乐歌舞盛行一时,由西域传入中原的燕乐因其新鲜活泼、富于变化尤为时人所好。当时主要由教坊乐工为燕乐曲调作辞,通过演唱广为流传。在其发展过程中,逐渐形成一个显著的特点,即严格按照乐曲的要求来制作歌辞,包括依乐章结构分片,依曲拍为句,依乐声高下用字,依曲调风格押韵,其文字形成一种句子长短不齐而有定格的形式。这种格式称作词牌,有固定名称,如《浣溪沙》、《蝶恋花》、《西江月》等。中唐之后文人开始效仿填词,词也便逐渐确立了它在中国诗歌中的地位,发展至宋而成一代之胜。词体与诗体在题材内容上的区别在于各司其职,“诗言志而词娱情”。诗在题材上比较偏重政治主题,以国家兴亡、民生疾苦、胸怀抱负、宦海沉浮等为主要内容,抒发的主要是社会性的群体所共有的情感;而词在题材内容上的一个显著特色,就是以描写艳情闺怨、相思离别、伤春悲秋为主,抒发的大多是作者私人内心的真实情感。因此而形成了诗刚词柔、诗庄词媚的总体风格差异。词体与诗体在形式上的差异简言之主要在于诗(主要指近体诗)形式整齐、句式划一(每行五言或七言),格律句法相对固定,押韵格式要求一韵到底,一般隔行押韵;而词有词牌,多数分片,句式长短不齐,格律句法与押韵格式依词牌变化,可以换韵或押邻韵。对于中国古典诗词而言,意境是其灵魂,有意境则自成高格,无意境则味同嚼蜡。因此,翻译中国古典诗词的重中之重便是意境的再现或重构。意境是富有中国特色的文艺美学概念,用以形容诗歌如水中月、镜中花般空灵虚幻的美感特质,也正因为其难以描述、无法定性而使得很多学者持诗歌不可译论。然而,通过梳理中国历代诗学评论,我们可以发现意境有其确定内涵,其主要审美特征可以概括为以下七个方面,即虚实相生、境生象外、物我齐一、意与境浑、真实自然、因小见大、心领神会。虚实相生即虚与实的统一,境生象外即境与象的关系,物我齐一即主客体的统一,意与境浑即情与景的交融,真实自然即表与里的一致,因小见大即个性与共性的统一,心领神会即创造与再创造的统一。词之意境由于词体之特殊性,在上述诸特征之外还具有幽微要眇和言长意远两个审美特征。词境之幽微主要应归因于其双重语境。文人士大夫在作闺阁绣榻之词时可以有所托喻也可于无意识间流露自己的内心情感,无论何种情况均不能直言,而须有所凭借而婉曲达之。如刘克庄评刘叔安词所云,“借花卉以发骚人墨客之豪,托闺怨以寓放臣逐子之感”。清常州词派的张惠言因此而提出词体的比兴寄托说,并在《词选》中论述词体之隐幽曰:“意内而言外谓之词。其缘情造端,兴于微言,以相感动。极命风谣里巷男女哀乐,以道贤人君子幽约怨悱不能自言之情,低回要眇以喻其致。”词境之要眇在内容上主要是因为题材的选择,因其原本为酒筵歌席上用以助兴的歌词,内容自然多为伤春怨别的男女之情,即使有所托喻,表面也难以摆脱闺阁儿女之情。这种偏狭的题材容易导致意象的阴柔和词藻的绮艳,自然呈现要眇之姿。词境的这一特色在形式上主要是因为其固定的词牌格律、独特的词汇用语以及勾勒铺叙的艺术手法。词之字面多来源于唐李贺、李商隐等人的诗句,其词藻偏向于绮艳婉媚,而对于艺术性的刻意讲求则节制了情感的恣意宣泄,一旦情感表达的目的弱化,所形成的审美特征就倾向于委婉曲折、精雕细琢。这二者互相作用共同构建了词境之要眇。词境之言长意远指的是词辞微旨远、“言有尽而意无穷”的特征。与诗直白的表达方式不同,词以婉曲著称,如中国画中的留白一般,给读者留下广阔的想象空间,读来余音缭绕、韵味无穷。词境之言长意远特征的形成与词中密集的意象、富有象征意义的语汇以及词中所用典故有关。意象的多义性以及意象组合的模糊性,蕴涵多层语义的象征语码与典故所阐发的多重语境空间结合在一起共同营建了词境富有言外之意、弦外之音的艺术特征。这种语义的模糊美对读者形成一种召唤结构,有待读者结合自己的经历发挥想象去填充空白、确定意义,可以保留多种解读可能,不必强求理解一致。正如常州词派周济所言,“读其篇者,临渊窥鱼,意为鲂鲤,中宵惊电,罔识东西。”(《介存斋论词杂著》)同派谭献更进一步提倡:“作者之用心未必然,而读者之用心何必不然。”(《复堂词录序》)词境主要由音、意两方面构成。词之音韵美主要表现在词之协乐特质(包括音调的调配、词牌押韵格式、宫调风格、词之内在节奏等方面)和语音修辞上。词境在意方面分为点和面两个层次,点即词之字面词藻,面即意象意蕴。词之用语极讲究炼字,注重字面词藻的华丽典雅与点睛之词的选择,十分有助于阐发词境。意象是意境赖以生成的基础,意境由意象构成,但其关系远胜房子与砖头的关系,因为单个意象经过词人的精心选择与安排所取得的艺术效果远远超过单个意象的艺术效果的叠加。由于汉英两种语言的异质性特征,在语言表层表现为语音系统、文字系统和句法系统等结构形式和分布形式,在语言中层表现为特定语言的表现法,比如重意合还是重形合,在语言深层表现为思维方式、思维特征和思维风格(刘宓庆,1996:372-373),词之翻译面临诸多障碍,意境的重构尤为困难。然而,译者无退路,惟有知难而上,尽量在可能情况下生产出最佳译文。在不影响语义表达的前提下完全再现原文的格律和音韵特征显然是不现实的,译者可以以译意为主,摆脱形式的桎梏,用自由体来翻译词体,然而鉴于声音效果对诗歌的重要性,译者应尽可能在译文中保持原文的音韵风貌,比较可行的一种方法是凭借汉语音节和英语重音在节奏方面的类似效果,使每行的译文重音数和原文的音节数大体相当来模仿原文的节奏感,并考虑语音与情感的对应效果,尽量用译语中的语音修辞手法来弥补原文音韵美的遗失。对于意义翻译而言,最为重要的就是意象的重构。由于汉英两种语言在思维方式、思维特征和思维风格方面的不同以及两个民族在审美心理和文化传统方面的差异,意象的翻译实非易事,尤其是由重委婉含蓄的中国传统审美心理所导致的意象的多义性和意象组合的模糊性以及在数千年的诗歌传统中形成的富有象征意义的文化语码和典故意象,堪称词之意象重构道路上的拦路虎。了解了词之意象翻译的障碍之后,译者可以选择适当的翻译策略来应对不同类型的意象的翻译,以使原文意象在译文中得到忠实自然的再现。大意象的翻译由于更加侧重整体意象的再现,因此重点在于对全词的情感基调、意象内涵等方面的准确把握,尤其是语篇意义上的视角切换、语气情态风格以及双重语境的再现。小意象根据其表现方式可分为描述型意象、比喻型意象、象征型意象以及典故型意象,在翻译中应根据各自的特征而区别对待。在具体翻译中结合影响其策略选择的翻译目的与译文目标读者群这两个主要因素,以译文效果为终极目标,倾向于以直译为主,若原文意象在译语中对应缺失可以考虑直译加文内阐释或文外注解。意义再现的另一个方面就是词藻的翻译,译者需要具备对语言的敏感度和对诗意的悟性,以及对译语词汇的字面意义、联想意义、情感色彩以及语体风格的整体把握。经过了对词之意境的分解剖析并提出了相应的翻译对策之后,词之意境在译文中的最终重构效果必须经由译语读者的进一步检验方可定论,因此,笔者在词境之审美特征及其审美构成的基础上设计了一份包含对于词境重构而言最为基本但又最为关键的十个问题的调查问卷,并选择了三首经典词作及其富有代表性的几个英译版本,由译语读者分别进行评估检验。结果证明,这种检验手段是行之有效且真实可靠的。本文是笔者于博士期间所做的一项针对词之意境重构的尝试性研究,在此过程中注意到本课题的诸多方面还有待细致深入的探讨,如原作音韵效果的再现、译文中人称、格、数、时态等对于叙述视角、时间视角和空间视角的意义、意象的组合形式及其翻译、词作翻译中的意象新奇性对等等。由于时间限制这些方面在本论文中仅作简要介绍分析,有待将来进一步深化完善。由于作者自身知识面的局限,文中疏漏错误在所难免,敬请诸位方家斧正。更多还原

【Abstract】 China is a country known for its poetry. In traditional Chinese culture, poetry held such a high position that it was unrivaled by any other single talent, ability, or practical accomplishment which would bring prestige, affluence, and even political power. The great poets were admired for their talent in poetry and their masterpieces have survived their periods and remained alive on people’s lips ever since they were written. Poetry composed a significant part of traditional education, which explains the phenomena that almost all the statesmen and officials composed poems, and our readers today are left with a legacy of such a huge anthology of poetry through all the ages. Among the classical Chinese poetry, ci poem (tz’u poem or lyric song), a second poetic form which developed during the Tang dynasty and prospered in the Sung dynasty, constitutes a high proportion and stands in the history of poetry as a rival of shi poem (regulated verse).Ci poem originated from the entertainment songs written for the courtesans or singers to perform at banquets or for the embellishment of a social occasion in the Tang dynasty. The entertainment quarter of the Tang capital Chang’an witnessed the popularization of melodies and musical instruments from Central Asia. First the workers of music studios (教坊乐工) composed new words in Chinese to fit these melodies, and later some members of the literati followed suit. Each ci poem had to be fitted into an existing tune pattern bearing such titles as Butterflies Adore Flowers (蝶恋花), Moon on the West River (西江月), Prelude to Water Melody (西江月), Silk-Washing Stream (浣溪沙), etc. Hence there was a correlation between ci poem and music. This explains why ci poem was described as a musical literary genre expressed with voice and accompanied by musical instruments (啭之歌喉、被诸管弦的音乐文学) (Hunag, 2001: Prelude). The first ci anthology by known authors, most of whom literati, the Hua-chien Chi (Among the Flowers) was compiled by Zhao Chongzuo in the tenth century.The most important reason why ci poem prospered in the Sung dynasty as a reaction to the shih tradition and developed into a full-fledged poetic genre mainly lies in the life attitude calling for freedom and individuality prevailing in Sung dynasty. Since Sung verses in the shih form are manifestly different from Tang poetry in that the former appeal more to human intellect than to emotions, the poet’s individuality is often blurred by the form and wit. Besides, the shih form of Chinese poetry has a long established tradition of“expressing intention or aspiration”(yen chih言志), which limits its function as an outlet of private emotions and individuality. Or in other words, the shih form in the Sung dynasty has become more a vehicle for ideology than an expression of self, while the ci form is mainly composed to express the poet’s delicate personal feelings, such as the sorrow of departure from beloved ones, the joy of reunion, the grief over the passing spring and the fading youth, the regret at disappearance of beautiful things, the melancholy over the coming of autumn and old age. Thus, it has formed the convention that shi poem is for expressing aspiration and ci poem is for delivering emotions (诗言志,词娱情).Ci poem is different from shih poem in form as well as in content. Shih poem has a fixed form with a clear-cut regular verse-line scheme (either five or seven characters to each line) and one of the fixed prosodic patterns. Unlike shih poem, ci poem is made up of irregular verse lines, ranging from two or three words (in rare cases, even only one word) to nine words or even ten to the line. With its form determined by a specific tune, ci poem often consists of an arranged mixture of lines of various lengths (hence this form is also called long-and-short lines长短句) and is featured by a fixed rhyming scheme and a regulated prosodic pattern.Yi-jing, which in a narrow sense, is a typical and unique aesthetic concept in Chinese art and literature, especially common as a poetic term, is used to refer to the very essence of poetry and what makes poetry untranslatable. Due to its intangible and indescribable qualities, Yi-jing is often compared to the flavor of flowers, most of which will be lost during the process of translation, or“the realm of the wordless and visionary”(Dante), which can be visualized in mind but not expressed in word. This dissertation does not try to give a clearly termed definition of it for fear that it might leave out more when trying to include everything essential. Since it is a concept developed through the history of changing poetic criticism, so the best way to define Yi-jing is to describe its critical artistic characteristics and let the readers figure out its essence by themselves.According to the poetic criticism in more than one thousand years’history, the artistic characteristics of Yi-jing can be summarized in seven aspects, namely, the mutual enhancement of the virtual and the real (虚实相生), the formation of Yi-jing beyond the imagery (境生象外), the unity of subjects and objects (物我齐一), the fusion of feeling and scenery (意与境浑), the naturalness and truthfulness (真实自然), the embodiment of commonness in uniqueness (因小见大), appealing for perception and interpretation (心领神会). Besides the above mentioned seven characteristics, there are another two major ones specific to the Yi-jing of ci poem: one is being subtle and exquisite (幽微要眇), the other is being implicit and open for interpretation (言长意远).The subtlety of ci poem is mainly contributed to its conventional double context. Since the members of literati took up composing ci poem, they used it as a means to express their personal and private feelings and emotions. Most of them had great ambition to advice the emperor on state administration or to lead the army to fight for the country, but few of them realized their dreams, and a large majority was filled with a mindful of grievances. To make it worse, the real feelings were not supposed to be revealed directly; therefore, they tend to express it in the guise of women’s voice. Writing in women’s voice, a common practice in classical Chinese poetry, became more pronounced in ci poem, partly because the female guise allowed men to express more tender emotions or personal feelings that might conflict with their official images as statesmen and administrators. Writing with borrowed voice also allowed poets to explore the experience of others, such as the female entertainers who sang and danced, the courtesans who provided intimate services for them, the beloved ladies who loved them, the lonely women waiting for their lover or husband, or the young beautiful girls who grieved over the fading flowers. At certain times it was conventional to use women’s voice, and love poetry, to express a broad range of male desires, even political sentiments as well, such as frustration over lack of recognition for their accomplishments by their superiors. Chang Hui-yen (张惠言), who started the Ch’ang-chou School of Ci Criticism (常州词派) with his Anthology of Song-Lyrics (《词选》), justified allegorical interpretation by examples such as Wen T’ing-yun’s ci poems. This proves that the poets who wrote ci poems for singing girls in order to take pleasure in the voice of a forlorn beauty could also turn impersonation into an allegory of their own experience in political life. Due to its allegorical interpretation or double context, ci poem is featured with subtlety.The exquisiteness of ci poem lies in both its content and form. As mentioned above, ci poems were originally composed for the singing girls to perform on the banquet, the content usually focused on women’s sentiments, love, loneliness, melancholy, grief, etc. ? ?Though they may have double context or political reference, the surface layer of the theme is still about love or boudoir repining. The relatively narrow and feministic theme tints ci poem with a colour of delicacy. Besides, the fixed tune, the particular vocabulary, together with elaborating techniques help form the exquisiteness of ci poem. The fixed tune which prescribes the rhyming scheme and the flow of tonal movement and the elaborate composition techniques which intend to develop the theme in an artistic way refrain the poets from draining off their emotions, and the particular vocabulary inherited from those Tang poets with a delicate writing style like Li Ho, Li Shangyin helps enhance the exquisiteness of ci poem.The implicitness and openness to interpretation compose another feature of the Yi-jing of ci poem, which means that ci poem, though short in form, would awaken long reverberations in the reader’s soul, as Su Shih once said,“The words stop, but the sense goes on to infinity”(言有尽而意无穷).“We might call the art one of eloquent or pregnant silence. What is said matters much less than what is left unsaid and only adumbrates what cannot be said. It springs from the same root as the subtle flair of leaving spaces beautifully empty in Chinese painting and Chinese gardening.”(Qian, 2005: 287) The formation of implicitness involves three factors: the imagery, the symbolic vocabulary, and the allusions. The imagery refers to the images which are used to denote verbal expressions that evoke mental pictures or physical sensations. The multifacetedness of images and the readers’individualized perception of the images work together to constitute the semantic ambiguity of ci poem. Besides, the poets were supposed to use no diction which had no origin in the earlier poems (无一字无出处), and thus they gradually formed a relatively fixed vocabulary for ci poem composition. The highly repetitive vocabulary which could be traced back to a variety of poems either of earlier dynasties or of the same period might endow some of the words with a symbolic meaning. The plural possibilities of back reference and conventional symbolic meaning of certain vocabulary are another factor that caused the implicitness and openness to interpretation of ci poem. The third factor is the employment of allusion in ci poems. Many poems quote or allude to earlier poems or historical figures. This tradition became especially pronounced in the Southern Sung dynasty. As Julie Landau (1997: Introduction to Symbols and Allusions) says,“The literate in China were, however, for millennia, a homogeneous group. They studied the same classics, memorized the same poems, led similar lives. In this context, a few words could do anything from play cleverly with a well-known image to evoke another situation that, by contrast or comparison, might add a new dimension to the poem.”The situations evoked or the context referred back to were another factor which contributed to the multiple layers of interpretation of ci poems. Chou Chi, another major theorist of the Ch’ang-chou School, valued ci poems more highly in proportion to their openness to the reader’s subjective response.“The reader of such a poem is like a man standing on the edge of a pool admiring the fish, who wonders whether it is a bream or a carp; or like someone exposed to a lightning flash in the dark, unable to tell whether it came from the east or the west.”(读其篇者,临渊窥鱼,意为鲂鲤,中宵惊电,罔识东西。) (《介存斋论词杂著》).The Yi-jing of ci poem consists of two essential elements: sound and meaning. The sound effects are mainly achieved through tonal arrangement, rhyming scheme, style of the tune, internal rhythm, and phonetic rhetorical devices, the combination of which will produce some sound pattern that is suitable to convey a certain emotion or feeling, and thus help form the Yi-jing aimed by the poets. The beauty of meaning lies in both imagery and diction. The imagery is an indispensible part of Yi-jing in the sense that we can say Yi-jing is composed by imagery, but their relationship is far more complicated than that of a house and bricks because the Yi-jing produced by the combination of images extends far beyond the simple amount of the individual effect of separate images. Coincidentally, this fits well with one of the key concepts of Gestalt psychology originated in Germany in the 1920s, which states that the sense of whole is not the simple sum of all of its individual sensations; neither is it a separate sense which is isolated from its individual sensations. As Blocker once said, if you put a lemon beside an apple, the information they convey is no longer a lemon and an apple, but fruits. (Arnheim, 1998: 636) This implies that the images deliberately chosen and arranged will result in an interconversion and magically cause some chemical change among them, which will produce some indescribable but expected artistic effects—Yi-jing. Of course, the perception, selection, and combination of the images, to a great extent, depend on the composer’s talent and sensitivity as a poet.The diction of ci poem is another critical factor related to meaning which contributes to the formation of Yi-jing. As Geoffrey Leech (1981: 9-23) has summarized,“meaning”in ? ?the wider sense may embrace conceptual sense, connotative sense, social sense, affective sense, reflected sense, collocative sense, and thematic sense. To ci poems, the conceptual sense, connotative sense, affective sense, reflected sense and thematic sense of the diction are especially important in expressing their Yi-jing.Due to the great differences between Chinese and English in language such as phonetics, semantics, and syntax, and in culture such as aesthetic psychology, imagery perception, symbolic reference, and historical allusion, the translation of classical ci poem is no easy task and the reconstruction of Yi-jing in the translation is an even more challenging job. However, no matter how hard it is, the translator has no way to retreat. The only choice is to produce a text in the target language as close to the original as possible. Because of the large gap between the two languages’phonetic system, it is near impossible to keep the original rhyming scheme and flow of tonal movement in the translation. If we try to use a similar prosodic pattern in English to correspond to the original one, we will have to sacrifice a part of the meaning which might be more crucial to the Yi-jing of the original text, and hence affect the reconstruction of the Yi-jing in the translation. After weighing the pros and cons, we had better choose to remain faithful to the meaning than to the prosodic form. Therefore, the free verse is recommended for translating the classical ci poem to avoid possible damage to the meaning, but at the same time the translator should try all means to retain the inner rhythm of the original text in the hope of conveying similar emotions to the target reader. It is also advisable to use other phonetic rhetorical devices in English to make up for the loss of sound effect produced by the original text.As for the translation of meaning, the most important part is the transference of imagery for images are the base which the Yi-jing of ci poem derives from. However, the rendering of images proves to be an arduous and complicated task due to several hard-to-remove obstacles. The largest one is caused by the cultural barriers, manifested in different perception of imagery, especially in its symbolic reference and historical allusion. The second is shaped by the ambiguity of imagery as a result of the multifacetedness and the fuzzy arrangement patterns of the images. The obstacle lies in the difficulty in exactly interpreting the images and pinning down the narrative perspective, temporal perspective, and spatial perspective. The main task of the translators’is to challenge the obstacles and reproduce the images employed in the original text to reconstruct its Yi-jing. Technically, the translator can tackle the images in ci poems by labeling them large image or small image. When dealing with the large image, the translator needs to pay more attention to the changing of perspective (point of view), the imitation of mood and tone, and the representation of double context in the layer of text. Chinese is a ideographic language emphasizing parataxis, while English is a phonographic language emphasizing hypotaxis; the former pays more attention to the coherence of the meaning, but the latter the cohesion of the form. Thanks to the elasticity of the syntax of Chinese, ci poem enjoys great freedom in expression by omitting the subject, tense, or linking words such as conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs. It can ambiguously express one thing but refer to another, or juxtapose two persons’activities or two events happening in two different places without even giving a clue of it. The ambiguity in expression is a major source of aesthetic experience, but it remains an obstacle in translation for English requires a clear statement of the subject, tense, and linking words; otherwise, the lines may sound awkward and imperceptible. When the ambiguities are clarified in the translation, the beauty brought by it also disappears.The small images in ci poems, according to their means of expression, can be classified into four major types, namely, the descriptive images, the metaphorical images, the symbolic images, and the allusive images. The descriptive images refer to those images that compose the current scenery without any metaphorical, symbolic, or allusive meaning. The metaphorical images refer to those images containing metaphors; the symbolic images are those with symbolic meaning, and the allusive images are those expressed by means of allusions. The specific rendering techniques vary according to different types of images. For most of the descriptive images, so long as the images are universally common in human life, the translator can use literal translation to transfer the images of the original into the target text without losing any semantic beauty. If the descriptive images contain something unique in the source culture, the translator should add annotation (footnotes or endnotes) to explain what it is and it would be better if with illustrations, which is helpful in introducing the source culture and adding exotic flavor to the target text.The metaphorical images fall into three categories: the metaphorical images comparing forms, the metaphorical images comparing qualities, and the metaphorical images containing cultural elements. Most of the first category needs no special treatment, but if the target language lacks the equivalent of the original vehicle, the translator has to decide whether to use some substitute in the target language to replace it, to add explanatory information, or attach an annotation or illustration to explain what the original vehicle looks like. Only if the original vehicle has a significant role in the original text, usually the translator would tend to use substitution. Substitution means finding another image which conveys a similar meaning and produces a similar effect on the readers of the target language as the original image does in the source language. The second category is similar to the first one. If the similarity between the vehicle and tenor is universally perceptible, the translator can use literal translation. Otherwise, the translator has to rely on explanatory information or annotations. As to those containing cultural elements, annotation is a necessity to reproduce the metaphorical image in the target text for the target reader needs to be equipped with everything which makes for facility of reading and intelligent appreciation.The symbolic image is a product of China’s thousands’years of poetic tradition. An image may first appear in a poet’s work by accident, but the image was so successfully created and fitted into the poetic context that some other poet borrowed its allegorical meaning in his own poem. When this process was repeated by the same or different poets of the same time or different dynasties, the allegorical meaning became the symbolic meaning of the image and the image itself became what Lotman termed“Cultural Code”. Because of different poetic traditions and cultural perceptions, the chances that the English readers notice the symbolic images and identify their symbolic meaning are slight, so the translator has to provide supplementary information to make up for the cultural implications missed during the process of translation. Much similar to supplementation, annotation is sometimes supplied to explain the cultural significance of a more complex nature.Due to the vast discrepancies between the two languages and cultures, it is almost impossible to find any equivalent of the allusive images in the original text. Therefore, the translator has to find a way to make up for the aesthetic effects brought by the original context of the allusion and the ambiguity in meaning which have been lost in the process of translation. Literal translation, literal translation plus supplementation, and literal translation aided by annotation all can be good choices under suitable circumstances. Most of the allusive images composed by quotations can be rendered directly, whereas the choice of rendering techniques of those containing historical figures or events depends largely on their context. If the context has already provided adequate information to help the readers comprehend the allusive image, literal translation is the best choice. If the context fails to provide sufficient information but the implied meaning of the allusive image is simple and easy to understand, literal translation plus supplementation can be a good choice. If the allusive image is ambiguous in meaning or the implied meaning is too complicated to decode and there is not enough information to help the readers figure out the meaning, the translator can adopt literal translation aided by annotation.Although the choice of translation strategy can be greatly influenced by the type and status of the original text, the skopos (purpose) of translation, the target readers, the comparative position of the original culture to the target culture, and the translator himself (herself) and some other elements, the method based on literal translation, either supplemented by explanation or aided by annotation, is strongly recommended when there is no equivalent in the target language to correspond to the one in the original text for the following reasons. First, it encourages the communication between two widely different cultures. Second, it reproduces the inherent cultural meaning and“das Bedeutende”(意蕴) of the original. Third, it increases the exotic flavor of the target text, which might result in arousing the target readers’interest.During the process of translation, the translator has to take another issue into consideration, which is the equivalence of novelty of images. Even if the original images are“faithfully”rendered into the target text, the effect they exert on the original readers can be quite different from that on the target readers due to the discrepancy in novelty of the images in two different languages and cultures. To prevent the possible loss of aesthetic effects, the translator should retain the defamiliarization devices in the original text or invent new ones to keep the sense of novelty of the original ones if the expressions already exist in the second language or are a part of the accustomed or clichéd expressions.The reconstruction effects of Yi-jing in the translation of ci poems need to be testified and evaluated, so a questionnaire including most fundamental but critical questions based on the aesthetic features and composition of ci poem’s Yi-jing is designed to check the target readers’response to the translation of the original ci poems, which proves to be an effective and reliable device. It shows that the contemporary English readers tend to favour the classical Chinese ci poem being rendered into free verse English poem with its tune title translated in meaning and those which can lively reflect the internal rhythm, vividly transfer the images, and faithfully convey the connotative meanings of the dictions of the original ci poems are considered successful translations. The English readers who answered the questionnaire also show a preference on annotated translation when there is no equivalent in English.This is a mere tentative study on the reconstruction of the Yi-jing of ci poem in translation conducted in the period of my doctoral research, and during this process I have noticed some aspects of this topic such as the reproduction of sound effect, the significance of the specification of tense, case, number, person related to the narrative perspective, temporal perspective, and spatial perspective, the combination patterns of images, and the equivalence of novelty of images need to be further studied, which are only mentioned or briefly discussed in this dissertation for time pressure and which will be the major directions of my future study. What I dream about is to discover a best way to reconstruct the Yi-jing of ci poem in translation and present its charm to the target readers as it does to the original ones, though it might for a long time remains a dream.更多还原