Li Yu’s poetry is of great importance in the history of classical Chinese poetry. He inherits the tradition of flowery school in Tang dynasty and reflects artistic conceptions through concrete and sensory personalized images. This is in an important step to forward the verse creation and expands the expression field of poetry. Therefore, this thesis chooses Li Yu’s poetry as an example. 

However, poetry translation is different from the translation of other genres because of its artistry and subtlety. What’s more, perse geographical conditions and cultural customs make a gigantic difference between Chinese and English. Therefore, the work of translating Chinese poetry into English has never be facile. 

The primary goal of translating classical Chinese poetry into English is to dismiss language barriers in English readers’ reading process when they are engage in Chinese works. Thus, what translators need to do firstly is to find out the target readers of classical Chinese poetry. Obviously, people in English speaking countries are the target readers. More and more translators and scholars devote themselves to translating classical Chinese poetry and have made great achievements, but many people forget the main goal of translation, ignoring the reception of readers. However, Reception Aesthetics has conquered this point. 

The application of Reception Aesthetics to the translation of classical Chinese poetry provides a new perspective for the translation. Attaching great importance to the target readers, this thesis will focus on the reception of target readers. 

2. Literature Review

In this part, relevant literature is presented. To begin with, the basic features of poetry translation are illustrated. Classical Chinese poetry could be pided into different kinds according to different basis of classification. Li Yu’s poetry plays an important role in classical Chinese poetry. At the same time, Reception Aesthetics is of great importance in this part.  

2.1 An Overview on Translation of Chinese Classical Poetry

Poetry, a special form of literature always bearing beauty in sound, form and sense. The translation of poetry has become a vital part in translation studies. 

To some degree, poetry translation is equal to a kind of literary creation by translators. Translators need to devotes particular care to faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance in the process of translation, which is proposed by Yan Fu, a famous Chinese translator. This principle is also well applied in poetry translation.  

However, the translatability of poetry has been a controversial issue in translation field.  Some people hold the view that poetry is translatable while others do not.  Liu Zhongde, among many other scholars, believes that it is possible, though quite difficult to translate poetry successfully. He gives two reasons for his argument. To begin with, among man, there are a lot of thing in common. That is to say, all human beings share the same mind to some extent given by nature. Poetry is a reflection of human being’s mind and thus it is translatable. Poetry written by famous poets, are always translated into several languages around the world, and many of them are of extra fine quality. 文献综述

Other scholars hold the opposite view. Several reasons give birth to their standpoint. First of all, the artistic conception is a kind of abstract art form which is difficult to translate, expressing the poetry’s soul and essence. Then it comes to the form of poetry. To be exact, form of poetry including its internal rhythm and external forms. Because of the perse language of source texts and target texts, it is uneasy to complete this task. Last but not the least, the unique meaning of particular words or phrases in poetry make translation activities harder because of the cultural barriers between source language and target language(Zhuo Zhenying,2003:5).