A Study Of Three Aesthetic Features Of Lolita In Its Chinese Translations

Lolita, as a masterpiece of Vladimir Nabokov, the famous American Russian writer, plays an important role in the history of modern literature, and its language with Baroque features makes it a poetic novel. Furthermore, the novel also bears some postmodernistic features which offer the reader an aesthetic appreciation of black humorous jocosity and overlapping multi-meaning. There are 18 Chinese versions of Lolita since 1964, among which the later ones are already semantically accurate. However, the poetic, jocose and overlapping features, especially the later two, remain insufficiently interpreted. Besides, the comparative study of translated texts of Lolita is rare. Therefore, the thesis is to make a study between the original and the translated texts, and discuss how to reconstruct the three aesthetic features in translation.This thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter I discusses the translation of poetic features which represented by the foregrounded images, the musical harmony of words and the alternation of rhythms. Chapter II discusses the translation of black humorous jocosity that the author uses the following methods to represent: the ironic words and rhetoric, the ironic tone of narration and the parody of classic texts. Chapter III discusses the translation of overlapping multi-meaning features. With the principle of "bending things together", the author invented new words by combining existing words, made overabundant use of conjunctions and the method of collage, which show us the postmodernistic language characteristics of the novel.In conclusion, the translator of such a novel should pay attention to the following aspects: the reproduction of images, the repetition of sentence structures, the choice of diction for reproduction of a poetic novel; the representations of the postmodernistic forms, such as the overabundant use of conjunctions, the mimic of a classic style, for the reproduction of the aesthetic features of jocosity and overlapping meanings. When one could not translate both the form and the aesthetic features, priority should be given to the later, and methods such as making notes should be applied so as to compensate for the loss of the forms.