This article deals with the causes of the difficulty in translating Chinese classical poetry from Gadamer s philosophical hermeneutic approach,pointing out that such hermeneutic concepts and principles as prejudice,temporal distance,fusion of the horizons,and the model of conversation rev.

Traditional hermeneutics upholds the elimination of prejudice to achieve absolute understanding of text meaning while philosophical hermeneutics views prejudice as an unsurpassable ontological context that makes understanding possible.