The Study Of English Translations Of Mo Yan’s Novels From The Rhetoric Perspective

Mo Yan having been conferred with the 2012 Nobel Literature Award significantly facilitates the great national cause of Chinese Literature Stepping Out.The translation studies of Mo Yan’s novels have sparked the enthusiasm in the research arena and become a notable school.Utilizing the help of scientific visualization statistical tool,we can notice that the current translation studies of Mo Yan’s novels are inclined to be centered around propositions including the translation thoughts,translation methods,translation strategies,translator’s subjectivity,translator’s habitus,translation and rewriting,translation and ideology.They tend to discuss more about the “outside the texts” cultural or social factors which may impose influence upon the translation process,while neglecting a more thorough research into the “inside the texts” resources.The translation studies of Mo Yan’s novels are calling for more spaces for theoretical discussion and elaboration.This research employs the Rhetoric in the Broad sense----a Chinese local rhetoric theory----as the general theoretical framework,with the aids of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories,to probe into the systematic rhetoric features of Mo Yan’s novels.The texts of six Mo Yan’s novels have been utilized as the research subjects.The rhetoric skills,rhetoric poetics and rhetoric philosophy in the original texts and their translations have been analyzed in detail.Not only a variety of translation methods of different rhetoric devices have been expounded,but the cognitive requirements of rhetoric construction in the original texts for the readers and translators have also been taken into consideration.The author selects simile,synesthesia and unconventional sentences to discuss Mo Yan’s rhetoric skills.It is found that the noumena of the similes present a tendency related to being carnal,natural,spiritualized and animalized,while the similes’ vehicles generally show the features of defamiliarizaiton,gamification,animalization and vulgarization.The translator Howard Goldblatt mainly adopts the foreignization strategy,partly aided by the domestication strategy.The synesthesia rhetoric skill in Mo Yan’s novels embraces three-dimensional properties including rhetorical,cognitive and philosophical aspects,and perfectly reflects the research results of a large-scale synesthesia survey in literatures conducted by Ullman.Goldblatt’s translation of synesthesia realizes the synesthesia homogeny with the original texts,and displays the aesthetic synesthesia in the philosophical dimension.The unconventional sentences in Mo Yan’s novel mainly include hyper-long and hyper-short sentences,whose translations are mainly abiding by the foreignization strategy.The rhetoric poetics of Mo Yan’s novel are expounded from the three aspects of heteroglossia,playful parody and folk poetics(including the Mao-Qiang Opera narration and the simulated story-telling context construction).Heteroglossia is a key concept in Bakhtin’s theories to describe the diversified and pluralistic society.Mo Yan’s novels abound in the heteroglossia feature,a hybridity of discourses of the Cultural Revolution,verbal abusive language,idioms,proverbs,imitations of ancient poems,etc.Together they produce a burlesque and humorous textual effect,and degrade the political implications and solemnity of political discourses,meanwhile whose comprehension poses a great demand and challenge for the readers’ social experiences and language memory.The interactive relationship between the author,the translator and the readers of target language determines the successful comprehension of the rhetoric language of heteroglossia.Playful parody is another dominating discourse strategy in Mo Yan’s novels.It is a “game-play” textual construction with an ironic intention of the author,playfully imitating the noble discourses and placing them in a rather absurd context.It is a reflection of gamification and carnivalism spirit of the author in the narration.The discussion of parody rhetoric can be divided into five layers including words,phrases,sentences,style and discourse.It is found that the generation,translation and reception of parodies involve a series of complex psychological and cognitive construction,deconstruction and re-construction.The parody texts would experience transformations twice in the process between the original texts and the mental texts of translations’ readers.Translators digest the original texts first,then the readers of the translations do the digestion for the second time.Due to the discrepancies in the cultural and mental space,the translators and readers of the translations may utterly discard the original parody elements,or supplement with new elements.Therefore,whether the construction of parody texts and its translation is successfully completed or not,translators are not the only ones to blame.The parody texts call strongly for the linguistic and literary memories of the translations’ readers.Hence,the intertextuality,heteroglossia and gamification properties of parodies can also be regarded as the causes for the untranslability of Mo Yan’s novels.The folk poetics of Mo Yan’s novels can be elaborated from the Mao-Qiang Opera narrative construction and the simulated story-telling context construction.The presence of heterogenicity in Mo Yan’s language can prove his self-consciousness and creativity in his literature production,but it is also leading to the obstacles of readers’ reception in the foreign countries owing to their different expectations in literature reading.Lastly,irony has been discussed to probe into Mo Yan’s rhetorical philosophy.Irony includes discourse irony,narrative irony and general irony,while the narrative irony can be discussed from the aspects of parody,structure of texts,manner of language and point of view.In the translation,Goldblatt may neglect some ironic intention of the author,and intensify the criticism upon the social reality and human nature through the strategy of rewriting the ending chapters.The ironic distance can be greatly shortened if the translator adopts the rewriting strategy or deleting the unreliable narrative meta-discourse texts.This research is a tentative study of the English translations of Mo Yan’s novels,deeply digging into the textual resources.At the same time,it is also an exploitation of Chinese local rhetorical theories----the Rhetoric in the Broad Sense,and hopefully this research can promote the interdisciplinary research paradigm between the translation studies and the Rhetoric,Narratology,Literature and Art,with the possibility of offering a new perspective for the translator’s criticism and evaluation of effects of translations of Chinese contemporary literatures.