Reconstructing the Poet’s Image through Institutional Translation —a Case Study of Rewi Alley’s Translation of Li Bai’s Poems

Speaker

Professor Huijuan Ma (Beijing Foreign Studies University)

Abstract

Rewi Alley was a New Zealand-born political activist, social reformer and a renowned “foreign friend of China”. Deeply interested in the Chinese language and culture, Alley was also a prolific translator of Chinese poetry. His translation of Li Bai’s poems has some unique features in terms of text selection and translation style, which took place in institutional settings. This talk explores some special features of Alley’s translation of Li Bai’s poems, revealing a distinctive type of institutional translation in the Chinese context. Alley in his translation has imprinted Li Bai’s poems with his own strong personal marks, reconstructing Li Bai’s image from a romantic poet into a realistic one, but failing to convey the spirit of the original poems.

About the speaker

Huijuan Ma is a professor in translation studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University(BFSU). She has worked as a teacher in BFSU since 2001, offering translation courses to both graduate and undergraduate students. Her areas of research are translation history, translation teaching, and transcultural rewriting. She has published six monographs and more than seventy papers in major journals of translation studies. Her recent monographs are A Study on Translation Competence from Chinese to English (2013) and Translation of Modern Chinese Literature into English (2020). She is currently the director for the Center for Translation Studies and the chief editor of the peer-reviewed journal Translation Horizons .