Innovation in Language Learning

The May 4^th New Culture Movement can be regarded as the symbol of the beginning of Chinese Modernity, in which the poetry translation plays an important role in the construction of new Chinese literature. The major translators in this period (i.e. The revolutionary writers and translators of New Culture of China) showed great revolutionary change in translation, in which they began to take the “literature revolution” and “reflection of the real life” as the major themes, and the language more Europeanized and modernized, discoursing the orthodoxy of classic Chinese in a great degree, by virtue of this course the subjectivity and creativity of the translators were highlighted sufficiently. And the poetry translation could be the typical case.

Ancient China was known as Poetry Kingdom, even in the May 4^th period when the translation of foreign novels and dramas was in a large scale, poetry still had an unshakable status. What’s more, the poetry translation in this period took an extremely significant position in the history of Chinese poetry translation, which gave great impetus to the formation of New Chinese Poetry and even new Chinese literature in the special historical context. In this period, there were mainly three schools of poetry translation: free vernacular poetry translation, new metrical vernacular poetry translation, and archaic classical Chinese poetry translation, among which the first played the biggest role. Regarding the themes, the translators positively introduced those foreign poems expressing democracy and freedom, as for the style, they took the strategy of foreignization, imitated the source language, adopted vernacular, broke traditional rhythm, and showed the musical beauty of poetry by means of new rhythm, so as to introduce new revolutionary ideas and literature styles, and help to construct modern Chinese literary classics. As a brilliant pearl of the introduced foreign poems in this period, Walt Whitman’s translated poetry shined sharply here.

Walt Whitman, Father of American Poetry, set the trend of free verse in America. His Leaves of Grass, the magnum opus, advocating localization and the creation principle of national spirit, shining with the light of democracy and freedom, appealed to and highlighted by a succession of famous Chinese writers and translators in the May 4^th Period who were eager to seek new ways to waken the public and save the nation by means of new literature. Therefore the translation of Whitman’s could serve as a typical case in the research of the construction of Modern Chinese classics by poetry translation in the May 4^th Period.