An Investigation into Translation of Poetry from the Perspective the Beauty of Form

Poetry is regarded as the highest form of thought expression in any country’s language and contains copious cultural images. Therefore, poetry translation plays a very important role in cultural communication. Translating a poem is much more difficult than translating any other type of literary work because it is difficult for the target language to maintain both the form and the content of the original text during translation. Mr. Xu Yuanchong, a famous translator in China, put forward the translation theory of “Three Beauties” – the beauty of form, sound and image. Mu Dan was a great poet in the history of modern Chinese poetry and he had also made great achievements in poetry translation. This paper starts with the beauty in form of Mu Dan’s Chinese-English poetry and analyzes how Mu Dan used Chinese poetry to show the beauty of form in English poetry in his translated works. It also analyzes how to maintain the precise meaning of English poetry without losing the beauty of form in English poetry when translating it into Chinese.