A Comparative Study on Chinese Translations of Allan Poe's Poem The Raven From the Perspective of Three Beauties Theory

Edgar Allan Poe, a renowned American Romantic writer and poet, is particularly famous for his uniquely eerie gothic novels. His poetry also possesses an aesthetic significance.However, research on his poetry within China primarily focuses on the literary aspects, with little attention given to translation studies. This paper, therefore, views Poe’s poetry from the perspective of Xu Yuanchong’s Three Beauties Theory and compares two Chinese versions of Poe’s famous poem The Raven translated by Huang Long and Cao Minglun respectively at the levels of beauty in sense, sound, and form. It is found that both versions were translated in vernacular Chinese but embodied the stylistic characteristics of their respective eras. Huang Long’s version presents classical flavor through domestication, whereas Cao Minglun’s translation utilizes more terms with Western characteristics to reproduce the flavor of the original work. Overall, both translations successfully reproduce the aesthetic of the poem in sense, sound, and form.

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