Abstract: Literature is the art of language, while voice is the material outer covering, a poem, an essay, a conversation and so on are all sound signals of information conveying and thought communicating.

When it comes to a good poem, it’s cadenced while reading and full-flavored while listening to. That is because it possesses the feature of rhythmic beauty, or we can say prosodic beauty.

As to the poem translation, one person has to be referred to—Professor Xu Yuanchong, who puts forward the theory of “three beauties”, which are respectively ‘Message Beauty, Prosodic Beauty, Image Beauty’. As Xu puts it, poetry translation should focus on the expression of foreign culture from all other aspects and angles and should use various skills and methods to form different cultural and artistic mood because it is easy to understand, spread and exchange various cultures. 

Three beauties are the ontology of poem translation. Prof Xu once said: ‘The three beauties are closely related to each other, only by binding them together appropriately can translators do a good job.’ Also, he points out the importance of the prosodic beauty like that, ‘even if a word can express 90% image beauty and 50% prosodic beauty, it’s inferior to one with 80% of them respectively.’ As can be seen from it, the significance of prosodic beauty has been elevated to an unprecedentedly crucial place.

    Prosodic beauty, also called rhythmic beauty, beauty of phonology, is connected with the dispose of the sound effect in poems, always reflected in the rhymes and several rhetoric(修辞手段). Both the original poems and the translated versions of the poems pay much attention to the prosodic beauty, sometimes translators even weaken the expression of the image or message beauty relatively in order to unfold the prosodic beauty before readers’ eyes. There are many ways of forming rhythmic beauty, such as cadence, rhythm, the double initials (双声)，double vowels(叠韵) and end rhymes and so on.

Prof Xu himself puts emphasis on the show of prosodic beauty in his own translation. In this essay, I’ll mainly analyze the prosodic beauty through Prof Xu’s work, such as translation of The Book of Songs, The Songs of Chu, Selected Poems of LiBai, and make a comparison between Xu’s translation and others’.

Key words: poem translation, rhythmic beauty/prosodic beauty, rhyming, three beauties

CONTENTS

Abstract

摘要

1. Introduction1

2. Literature Review-1

2.1 Literature Reviews

2.2 Explanation of Terminology Jargons

2.3 Brief Introductions of Three Beauty Theory 

2.4 Explanation of the Chinese poem translation

3. Rhythmic Beauty in the Translation of Chinese Poems by Xu 5

3.1 Rhythmic Beauty in Poem Translation

3.2 Xu’s Rhythmic Beauty

3.3 Xu’s Rhythmic Beauty in his Translation of Chinese Poem 

   3.3.1 Xu’s Translation of the Book of Songs 

   3.3.2 Xu’s Translation of the Selected Poems of LiBai

   3.3.3 Xu’s translation Compared with Others’

3.4 Xu’s Rhythmic Beauty adapted into my practice

3.5 Literature Value of Rhythmic Beauty

4. Conclusion-20

Bibliography- 21

Acknowledgements22