For some Western translators before the twentieth century, domestication was their strategy to translate the classical Chinese poetry into English. But the consequence of this strategy was the sacrifice of the ideogrammatic nature of these poems. The translators in the twentieth century, especially the Imagist poets and translators in the 1930s, overcame the problems of their predecessors by developing their translation theory and practice in ways that are close to those of many contemporary semiotic translators. But both Imagist translators and contemporary semiotic translators have the problem of indifference to the feeling of the original in their translations. This paper attempts to set up an aesthetic-semiotic approach to the translation of the iconicity of classical Chinese poetry on the basis of the examination of both Eastern and Western translation studies.