Abstract

Poetry, a lyrical way to convey one's emotions, has existed for several millennia. Many nationalities are good at expressing themselves through poems. Among them Chinese classic poetry is reputed for its diversity in themes, rhetoric devices, contexts and rhymes. Due to their philosophical insights into time, universe, motherland, landscape and so forth, numerous poets have bridged cultural, linguistic and regional gaps. Their poems were later considered as the treasurable cultural legacies of all the human beings. In order to globalize Chinese classic poetry, its translation has become an inevitable task at present.

Chinese poets are inclined to use hyperboles to express their emotions. For instance, poems of Li Bai and Xin Qiji are featured by their abundant application of hyperboles. In recent years, thanks to the consistent efforts of brilliant translators, Chinese poetry translation becomes burgeoning all over the world. More and more foreign readers are capable of sharing the beauty of Chinese classic poems and understanding the explicit disposition of Chinese people. From the earliest publication of Li Bai's poems translated by Ezra Pond to the current prevailing translation by Xu Yuanchong, some poems of Li Bai even have been translated into hundreds of versions during the past decades.

At present, we might occasionally come across a fascinating appreciation of hyperboles in poems or a general review of how to translate figures of speech of poems into English. However, until now, there are few systematic or practical researches on strategies of translating hyperboles in Chinese classic poems.

As a consequence, to satisfy the request of translation practice, I sum up in this thesis several practical translation strategies, based on collecting plenty of poem translations with hyperboles and analyzing them from perspectives of translation, pragmatics and cross-cultural communication. I shall also put forward the advantages of each strategy and present their application conditions. I hope that the conclusions drawn from this thesis can help the translators a lot in their poetry translation practice.

Key words: Chinese classic poem translation, hyperboles, translation strategies, pragmatics, cross-cultural communication,