A Dialogue Between The "Literary" Translator And The "Anti-literary" Writer

Since the cultural turn of translation studies in the 1980s, more and more scholars have switched their perspectives of research onto the associations of translation with such exterior elements as society, economy and politics. On its heels, terms like "ideology", "patronage", "manipulation" and "rewriting" quickly vault to the key words in modern translation discussions. There is no denying that the proposal of cultural turn has freed translation studies from the conventional linguistic approach and gives itself a new lease of life. This decentralized methodology, however, though broadening its horizon, is in the mean time endangering translation studies as an independent discipline bit by bit and thus making it fall to the subordinate of the cultural and social studies. Meanwhile, with the prevalence of the external studies, poetics is largely overlooked and reduced to a gray area in translation studies. This thesis, with an attempt at shifting the focus of translation studies from the outward perspective back to its internal one, explores the process of literary translation as a dialogue of poetics between the writer and the translator on the premise that translation and poetics are closely connected with each other. It is hoped that the thesis could be a lead-in to more insightful thoughts and comments on poetics, an ontological element in translation studies.The author chooses the celebrated poet, prose writer, literary critic and translator Yu Kwang-chung's translation of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea as the example to illustrate the dialogue between Yu, the literary translator and Hemingway, the anti-literary writer, at both micro and macro levels. The author finds that there are disparities and similarities between Hemingway's and Yu's poetic views. Both of them stress the conciseness of language expression. In terms of sentence structures, Hemingway adopts lots of short sentences with occasional insertion of long sentences. Yu, on the other hand, writes proses by means of poetry and pays much attention to the change of rhythm. Their poetics are roughly the same in spite of different statements. However, Hemingway's language is fairly daily and easy-understanding. On the contrary, Yu employs in his translation a lot of classical Chinese and allusions. Yu's translation is close to Hemingway's style in its terseness and simplicity but alien from its colloquial speech. Generally speaking, Hemingway, a representative of modernism, seeks to unfold the truth of life while Yu, a lyrical poet and prose writer himself, is apt to show romantic features in the Chinese version. In the process of translating The Old Man and the Sea, Yu never stays invisible behind as required by traditional translation convention or overshadows Hemingway as advocated by modern theories concerned translator's subjectivities. Instead, Yu incorporates his literary poetics into Hemingway's anti-literary ones in his translation by means of coexistence of vernacular and classical Chinese, alternation of syntax, harmonization of Impressionist and Chinese landscape paintings as well as perfect mixture of strength and grace. Yu's successful translation of this novella embodies a new look of fusion and harmonization between his literary poetics and Hemingway's anti-literary ones.In the framework of poetic theories, this thesis reveals the dialogic nature of literary translation, gives a detailed contrastive analysis to Ernest Hemingway's and Yu Kwang-chung's poetics as well as their dialogue in the translation process, which, to some extent, bridges the gap between Yu's translation thoughts and his novel translation practice.