Abstract：Abstract: During the 1920s and 1930s when prosaic translation of Shakespeare’s plays prevailed in China, such Chinese writer-translators as Deng Yizhe, Xu Zhimo, Sun Dayu and Zhu Weiji, members of the Crescent Moon Group, first translated poetically some excerpts of Shakespearean plays into modern Chinese. Through a descriptive analysis of the Chinese translations in terms of meaning, form and style based on historical-cultural context and supported by the paratexts, this article investigates into how and why the Crescent Moon Group did the first poetic translation of Shakespeare in China. It reveals that this new literary group, with the help of translation, aimed to reconstruct modern Chinese literature by refuting the “romantic” translation strategies prevailing in the literary world since the 1920s and experimenting in the Chinese language with literary genres and poetic forms borrowed from the west. The findings of this study not only reveal the origin of poetic translation of Shakespeare in China, but also the translation culture that the Crescent Moon Group has shaped.
Key words: the Crescent Moon Group; Shakespeare’s plays; poetic translation; reconstruction of new Chinese literature; cultural study
