Abstract and Key Words

Abstract: This essay is aimed to make a tentative study on the three volumes of Selected Modern Chinese Essays translated by Zhang Peiji on the basis of the aesthetic theory proposed by Liu Miqing. From the perspectives of aesthetic subject, aesthetic object and aesthetic representation, the author of this thesis tries to conduct a relatively comprehensive study on how the translator represent the aesthetic value of the original text from different aspects, such as formal aesthetic system and non-formal aesthetic system. This thesis offers a relatively new angle, namely the aesthetic angle, to the study of Selected Modern Chinese Essays. It is hoped that this thesis will shed some light on the theoretical study and the practical work of the translation of the modern Chinese essays.

Key words: Modern Chinese essays; translation aesthetics; Zhang Peiji; Liu Miqing; Selected Modern Chinese Essays

摘要：本文利用刘宓庆教授提出的翻译美学理论，对张培基教授翻译的《英译中国现代散文》（三辑）进行分析和研究。笔者将根据刘宓庆翻译美学理论中的美学主体、美学客体、美学再现的角度，对张译本中的散文进行一个较为全面的探讨，即分析张译的散文如何再现汉语散文的美学价值，为散文的翻译实践和美学的理论结合提供一定的借鉴和参考。

关键词：中国现代散文；翻译美学；张培基；刘宓庆；《英译中国现代散文》

1.    Introduction
1.1 Research Background
Essay is an important literary genre, which together with poetry, fiction and drama enjoys great popularity and wide acceptance in history. Ever since ancient times, essays have been playing a crucial part in the literary history both at home and abroad. However, the reality is that prose translation seems to be left far behind; much attention has been paid to the translation of other literary genres.
Modern Chinese essay refers to the essays after the “May Fourth Movement” or after the introduction of vernacular Chinese, during which period a multitude of essay writers emerged with a variety of excellent essays. Much researches and studies have been conducted on the translation of Chinese modern essays. For example, in 1995, Liu Miqing gets his book Introduction to Aesthetic Translation published, establishing the framework for modern translation aesthetics. Liu Shicong puts forth that the most important factor in translating Chinese essay is how to retain the “lingering charm” of the source text. Yang Yamin proposes the translatability of the style of the modern Chinese essays and how the original style of the essays in Selected Modern Chinese Essays is reproduced by Zhang Peiji. In spite of this, systematic and comprehensive research on Chinese modern essays is far from enough and further exploration in this field is needed, not to mention the study of the Chinese modern essays from the perspective of the translation aesthetics. Therefore, the study on the translation of Chinese essays is lagging behind that of other literary genres.