Hong Lou Meng is one of the most important works in Chinese classical novels,and the author,Cao Xueqin,gave his own understanding of the feudal society and his exclamation of the fickleness of the world in the novel.Up to now,the novel and the poems in the novel are still of high artistic value.Qiu Chuang Feng Yu Xi,as one of the most artistic and representative poems in the novel,has been translated into English by many translators.Among the translations,Yang Xianyi’s translation and David Hawkes’translation have the highest artistic achievements.Yang Xianyi is a famous Chinese translator and David Hawkes is a world-renowned sinologist in Britain.Because of their distinct identities,their translation purposes and translation styles are totally different.Guided by German translator Hans Vermeer’s Skopos Theory,this paper investigates the prologues of the translations of Hong Lou Meng and the translators’biographies.The findings indicate the respective translation purposes of Yang Xianyi and David Hawkes and their trade-off choices of translation methods.By means of objectively evaluation of the merits and demerits of the two translation versions of Qiu Chuang Feng Yu Xi,the rationality of existence of the translations in a specific cultural background is explained.It is proved that Skopos Theory is one of the general methods for the English translation of poems in Chinese classical novels.
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