2. Literature Review

Poetry occupies an important position in Hong Lou Meng throughout the whole book always. Therefore, many translators pay attention to the analysis of poetry when analyzing Hong Lou Meng. Ma Xiaohong has ever analyzed from ‘the limitation of translation in verdicts in Hong Lou Meng’. She thinks although Yang’s translation is among the best translations of Chinese classic novels, there are still some details with a little bit pity, such as the verdicts of Twelve Beauties in jinling. Those limitations include separation and combination of Chinese characters and harmonics of Chinese characters. Another translator Di Zhenghong analyzes the ‘untranslatability of poems in Hong Lou Meng’. He analyzes it from the perspective of linguistic and cultural untranslatability by taking several translated English poems for examples. Meanwhile, in light of the phenomenon of untranslatability he points out the compensation strategies in translating classic poems in the novel to remedy the lose of translated poems in target language. The scholar Li Zhijian analyzes on ‘the translation of lantern riddles from the schema theory perspective’. Combining with three major difficulties in riddle translation, he intends to preserve the unique style of lantern riddles through solving the three difficulties. I have found few scholars pay attention to the analysis of “An Ode to Faerie”. So in this paper I mainly choose Yang’s and Hawkes’s translations of “An Ode to Faerie” , and make a comprehensive analysis of these two translations.  

3.Translations of “An Ode to Faerie”

Many translators have ever translated it, of whom Yang and Hawkes are the most remarkable ones. So in this paper I will mainly talk about their translations.