Lin Yutang’s views on translation and his translated version of Tao Yuanming’s “Ah, homebound I go!”

As a language master both in Chinese and English, Li Yutang enjoys his fame as a world-renowned writer and translator. The greatest contribution in his career as a translator was the popularization of Chinese Confucianism and classics to the western world in an easy and vivid way. In 1932 he published the most famous and systematic article——On Translation in which three criteria for judging translation were put forward, namely, faithfulness, fluency and aesthetic attractiveness, as is evidenced by Lin Yutang's translated version of Tao Yuanming's "Ah, homebound I go!". After reviewing Lin Yutang's views on translation and illustrating the spiritual affinity between Lin Yutang and Tao Yuanming, the article concludes that Lin Yutang's translation of Tao Yuanming's "Ah, homebound I go!"demonstrates some aesthetic attractiveness in three aspects: 1) accuracy vividness; 2) colorful variation of sentence patterns; 3) euphony in rhyme rhythm.