The Ideological and Poetological Rewriting of the Shijing: Three 21st-Century English Translations in the Anglophone World

The thesis examines three 21st-century English translations of the Shijing 詩經 (Classic of Poetry): David Hinton (2008), Ha Poong Kim (2016), and Geoffrey Sampson (2020). Building on André Lefevere’s (1992a) framework of rewriting, the study incorporates Marius S. Ostrowski’s (2024) “ideological hybridity” and Bai Liping’s (2018) differentiation between literary poetics and translation poetics to enable a more nuanced and critical examination of how translators’ individual ideologies and poetics shape their rewritings of the Shijing in the contemporary Anglophone world. Through close textual analysis of these three translations of the Shijing combined with paratextual and contextual examination of the translators’ socio-cultural, intellectual backgrounds, this thesis situates their translation choices within broader ideological and poetological frameworks, exploring how each negotiates the interplay between individual ideological commitments, poetic priorities, and prevailing norms in the target culture. Hinton’s translation of the Shijing reflects an eco-cosmological worldview; Kim’s version foregrounds aesthetic and ethnographic concerns; and Sampson’s translation embodies elements of British traditional conservatism and far-right ideological positions. Alongside ideology, the study also evaluates poetics across four dimensions: on the one hand, dominant literary poetics and translation poetics in the target culture, and on the other, the translator’s individual literary poetics and translation poetics. This framework clarifies how Hinton, as an American poet-scholar-translator, renders the Shijing in structured free verse, using four stresses per line to echo the original metre and employing a richly poetic idiom. Kim, a Korean-born American scholar, adopts a more reserved and scholarly approach, presenting the poems in unstructured free verse with a limited range of poetic devices. Sampson, a British linguist, opts for a prose-like free verse characterised by long, grammatically complete sentences, plain modern British vocabulary, and a consistent effort to supply reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciations.
This thesis sheds light on the contemporary understanding of the earliest Chinese poetry collection in the English-speaking world in two main respects. First, as the first systematic comparative analysis of 21st-century English Shijing translations, it expands the corpus of Shijing translation research. Second, it offers a detailed, multi-dimensional examination of translators’ individual ideologies and poetics, illuminating how divergent rewritings of the Shijing emerge through distinct and at times conflicting interactions among various ideological and poetic elements.