Iconicity in Yuan Kejia’s English Translations of Xu Zhimo’s Modern Chinese Poetry: A CSAT Perspective
From the perspective of cognitive stylistics in translation studies, this study explores the iconicity in the English versions of Xu Zhimo’s poems Farewell to Cambridge and The Snow translated by Yuan Kejia. Iconicity is defined as the perceptible correspondence between the linguistic form and the action, experience or cognitive process depicted in the text. This study examines quantitative, sequential, and marked iconicity, focusing on how repetition, parallel structures, word order, line breaks, phonological patterning, semantic incongruity, and identity transformation contribute to meaning construction. The results show that Yuan Kejia’s translations preserve substantial formal correspondence, particularly in lexical repetition, parallel structures, and the overall progression of action. Nevertheless, lexical substitution and syntactic reconstruction often change or weaken the effect of interpretation. In some cases, local phonological and rhythmic features partially compensate for these losses. This study argues that poetry translation should not only consider semantic content, but also take into account the inference function of stylistic form, and explains how translation can retain, reconstruct or weaken the relationship between form and meaning.
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