Abstract:

The Cassia Tree is an anthology of classical Chinese poetry translated into English jointly by William Carlos Williams in his later years and the Chinese-American writer David Rafael Wang. Based on Transknowletology, The Cassia Tree would rather be knowledge construction and reproduction of Chinese poetry and painting than mere transmutation across languages.Specifically, Williams pictorially fuses his “variable foot” with Chinese poetic-painterly traditions, realizing knowledge transfer through scatter perspective of “American idiom”, generating knowledge proliferation via “emptiness”, and consummating knowledge reconstruction with visualized schema of “temporal-spatial fusion”, thereby universalizing localized Chinese poetic and painterly knowledge. By combining his poetry-writing tendency to “fuse the poetry and painting to make it the same thing” with the translation, Williams effectively establishes the equivalent translation of poetry and painting. Besides, his translation also corresponds with the concepts such as “creative transformation” “knowledge deviance” and “translocal ecology” in Transknowletology. Examining the translation of The Cassia Tree from Transknowletology also offers valuable references for the contemporary international dissemination of Chinese culture.

Key words: The Cassia Tree, William Carlos Williams, Transknowletology