Abstract: Through the analysis of the advantage and disadvantage of four English versions of the ancient poem River-Snow (Jiang xue) in the recreation and reorganization of the image-gestalt, a conclusion can be drawn that the recreation of the origin image-gestalt is more important in literary translation than the faithfulness of each linguistic element. The coherence and unity of the text should not be overlooked in the process of translation nor in translation criticism.

Key words: image-gestalt, theancientpoemRiver-Snow, literarytranslation