An Excellent Kite Flyer

Howard Goldblatt is an American Scholar and translator who is known by Chinese people with his study of Chinese New Literature, esp his "dig-up" study of Chinese woman writer of that period, Xiong Hong, and also with his translation of modern Chinese novels. He started his translating work since 1970s. During the past three decades, he has translated more than forty novels and numerous short stories of more than thirty well-known Chinese writers in China's mainland, Hong Kong and Tai Wan. Among the research papers on Howard Goldblatt's translations, they either give general statements about his ideas of translation, or study translating under the polycultural envirionment with his translations as analyzed materials, or study the linguistic translating mechanism from the angle of comparative linguistics, or provide evidences for some translation theories. But there are no research papers done from the perspective of literary aesthetics, esp fictional aesthetics. Being contrasted with his great achievemenst as a translator, Howard Goldblatt seems to be quite unknown in the field of translation studies in China. This may have to do with the fact that concentrating on the western translation theories dominates the mainstream in the field of translation studies in China. This dissertation aims to do some research on Howard Goldblatt's translations from the perspective of fictional aesthetics, based on which it hopes to contribute to the art of fictional translation.In consideration of Howard Goldblatt's great achievements in translation that include novels by male and female writers of Mainland China, Tai Wan and Hong Kong from 1930s up to the present, this dissertation selects three representative works and their English versions as research materials. They are Tales of Hulan River by Xiao Hong, a female writer of Mainland China in the 1930s, Red Sorghum by Mo Yan, a male writer of modern Mainland China, and Notes of a desolate man by Chu T'ien-wen, a female writer of modern Tai Wan. Besides, these three novels also repesent three different kinds of first-person novels:emotion-oriented novels, plot-oriented novels, and ideology-oriented novels. Tales of Hulan River is a proselike emotion-oriented novel which does not intend to construct an attractive story. The charaters and stories in it are there to satisfy the author's emotions rather than attract the readers. In the case of Tales of Hulan River, they are there to express a kind of complicated feelings of criticizing the countryfellows's spiritual fatuity and torpidity wrapped in strong emotion of nostalgia. In the novel, the special orangelike structure, the timeless narration, the ways of focalization and the vioces of narration all contribute to the proselike and oral features of the plotless novel. The English version does well in capturing the features of the orangelike structure and the timeless narration, but is a bit poorer in capturing the value covered in the ways of focalization and the vioces of narration.Red Soghum is a typical plot-oriented novel which takes the construction of attractive story and plot as its main task, entailing the examination of its story representation and plot reconfiguration as an important study in the English version. In the twentieth century, writers tend to spacialize their novels which is quite a revolt against the idea that literature is art of time in Lessing's Laocoon. Red Soghum is constructed in a twisted and distorted plot with frequent flashbacks and flashforwards, which exposes the writer's intention of breaking the traditional linear and chronological development of the plot. By means of reorganizing the events, omitting the non-narrating comment and the satellite incidents, the English version comes to be more compact and continous in plot development, which somewhat enhances the linear and chronological narration. Hence a contradiction between the writing notion of the original writer and that of the translator. The rewriting of it caters for the English readers, but at the same time comes on as manipulation of Chinese literature by the mainstream western poetics.Notes of a desolate man is otherwise an ideology-oriented novel which neither mainly expresses emotions like the proselike Tales of Hulan River, nor does it create attactive story like Red Soghum, but provokes ideological meditation in homosexual identity, existential significance of human beings, religion, and the relationship of men and women with the help of a skeloton story. The text is interwoven with heaps of images in a luxrious way of feminine writing that connects the readers'senses with frequent fragmentated phrases and repeated words. The style perfectly conforms the thematic significance in the novel, or even, the style itself constitutes the theme of the novel in a way. It questions the normal position of the compulsory heterosexuality and the masculine patriarchal authority of writing system in its abnormal way of writing. In the novel, there is no classic confusion of focalization and voices, nor construction of story and plot, but a relationship between the narration and the historical context in terms of the postclassical narratology. In the English version, out of a compromise of the traditional narrative rules, the translator somewhat reverses the gender of the narrator by way of non-marked style and narrationization and, as a consequence, manifests the masuline patriarchal authority of writing system.Taking Howard Glodblatt's translating practice as a whole, there shows a clear cline from the source-text orientation to the target-text orientation. At the beginning of his translating, he seemed to care too much about whether he had remained all the information in the original text to an extent that he sometimes even distorted the English text with distinct translationese. Along with time passage, with more and more of his practice and with the climat of translation studies as well. Howard Goldblatt becomes more adept at translating surported by his powerful imagination and solid background in both Chinese and English writing.What's more conspicuous is that Howard pays more attention to the readability of the English versions and even takes shape a rule of simplification that tends to simplify the text as possible, while damaging the original style and features in the least degree at the same time. On the one hand, his rule of simplification shows not only a collision between the original writer's notion of constructing the story and that of the translator, but also the marginalization of Chinese literature in the mainstream western poetics, on the other hand, Howard observes the tradtional narrative rules to make the logic clear and the plot continuous in the story, but is caught in the contradiction of the writer's artistic pursuit and the reader's habits of economic reading, and the contradiction of the text and its historical and cultural context as well.Translation, especially literary translation, is recreation. Taking novels as a genre, the story provides the least recreation capacity for the translator. It's the least requirement of fidelity for fictional translations, but the translator may relate the events so as to extend its fictionality in one way or another. Narrative discourse provides enormous recreation capacity for translation. The different aesthetic philosophy of the west and the east constitutes the different language of the English hypotaxis and the Chinese parataxis, which brings about the fact that in Chinese fictional text, there tends to be more ambiguous discourse that is difficult to tell the character's discourse from the narrator's, leading to polysemous interpretation. In most of the cases, the translator has to ascertain one from many possible interpretations according to the in-text context as well as the out-text context. Improper selections on account of any slight negligence may lead to divergence of the narrating tone that is great enough to cast different feelings on the readers of English versions.Howard Goldblatt holds that translation is a more advanced stage of writing and that translating means rewriting. His rewriting does not mean a reverse from the original but indicate negotiable and compatible adjustment to the original text. Translation is a recreation as well as a restriction that makes it a variation that shares the same isomorphic matrix as the original text. The intertextual relationship between the translated text and the original one is differentiable, just like a kite in the sky, no matter how high it flies, there is the flyer at the other end of the string. Howard Goldblatt is exactly such a kite flyer, flying his kite high in the sky, but always holding tighly his string.