Jian Feng’s translation of Emily Dickinson’s poetry: a conceptual study of creative treason in translation

The term ‘creative treason’ supports the very phenomenon of re-creation among translators in translation studies (TS). Whereas traditional theorists advocate the invisible role of translators when translating the source text, the theory of creative treason puts forward the idea that translation is a creative work and provides a new shape and attitude to the source text. This phenomenon is evident in the translated works of Jiang Feng. Therefore, this study examines Jiang Feng’s translation of Emily Dickinson’s poems through the lens of creative treason theory. Jian Feng’s work has been selected because his translations are widely available in China and accessed by readers and TS scholars due to their substantive quality. The key focus of this article is on identifying the elements of the subjectivity of the translator in Emily Dickinson’s translated poems while paying more attention to the concept of creative treason in poetry translation overall. The three kinds of poems proposed by Ezra Pound, such as phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia are also identified while analyzing Feng’s translation. The outcome of the study reveals that Feng’s translations is of a unique style, unfamiliarity in the context of the source text and creative treason.