On Interaction Between Cao Yu's Translation And Writing Of Drama

Cao Yu, "the Shakespeare of China", is often regarded as one of China's most important dramatists in modern history. During his glorious life, he translated and wrote a large number of dramas well received by Chinese people. His drama Thunderstorm is known as the hallmark of maturity of Chinese dramatic art. It is largely through the efforts of Cao Yu's translation and writing that the modern Chinese drama secured its position in Chinese literature in the 20th century. Why could Cao Yu's translation and plays exert such far-reaching influence? A lot of academic researches have been done on this phenomenon, which has played an important role in our understanding the concept and characteristic of Cao Yu's writing. However, the research on the interaction of Cao Yu's drama writing and translation is very limited. Therefore, it is significant to make research on this interaction for studying Cao Yu's writing poetics and translating poetics.From the perspective of poetics, this thesis attempts to analyze the interaction between Cao Yu's drama and translation. This analysis shows that Cao Yu's early literary writing affected his drama translation, which made impact on his drama writing. Unfortunately, this important point is overlooked in today's most related studies which have been focused on Cao Yu's best original drama rather than his drama translation.According to Lefevere, the poetics in translation consists of two components:one is an inventory of literary devices, genres, motifs, prototypical characters and situations, and symbols; the other is a concept of what the role of literature is, or should be, in the social system as a whole. In other words, the poetics consists of two components- the functional component from the macro level and the inventory component from the micro level.For this reason, this thesis makes analysis on the role of poetics in translation and literary writing from the macro and micro level respectively. To be specific, at the micro level, this thesis takes Cao's version of Romeo and Juliet for an example, and discusses the influence of his writing Sunrise on this drama translation from the aspects of genre and language, as well as the influence of this drama translation on his writing of Family from the aspects of motif and plot. From this analysis, we can conclude that there is a close interaction between Cao Yu's drama translation and writing, without which, Cao Yu couldn't have achieved such a great success in both drama translation and literary writing.