On The Two Chinese Versions Of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

Before the 1980s, studies on literary translation and critics of literary translationwere mainly confined to general and impressionistic comment or an intuitive analysis.With the development of linguistics and literary theories, literary stylistics, based onlinguistics and literary criticism, has developed into a new discipline, which attachesimportance to conveying and expressing the thematic meaning and aesthetic valuegenerated by the author’s linguistic choices of words. Literary stylistics, like a bridge,makes literary studies from subjective to objective.Poetry, fiction, drama and prose are the major literary genres literary stylisticsinvolved. As far as fiction is concerned, the efforts to apply literary stylistics to thestudy of fictional translation are far from enough. However, in traditional fictionaltranslation, much attention has been paid to conveying the content of the original, butthe linguistic forms are ignored, on which the author relies to convey the thematic andaesthetic meaning. It is literary stylistics that focuses on expressing the thematic andaesthetic value by the author’s choice of words. That is why literary stylistics ischosen as the perspective in this thesis to analyze the Chinese versions of TheAdventures of Huckleberry Finn.As he representative novel of American famous humorous writer Mark Twain,The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has produced great influence since itspublication. T.S.Eliot once said,“Mark Twain wrote a book that was much greaterthan he thought.”“…we come to see Huck…as one of the permanent symbolicfigures of fiction; not unworthy to take a place of‘Ulysses’,‘Faust’,‘Don Quixote’,‘Don Juan’,‘Hamlet’…”. What is more, in the preface of Green Hills of Africa,Ernest Hemingway says,“all modern American literature comes from one book byMark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”It’s the best book we’ve had.”The novel hasbeen widely studied as home and abroad. Studies are concentrated on racialdiscrimination, initiation story, etc. Until now there have been more than 65 Chineseversions among which are 39 completed translated ones and other versions. In thisthesis, two of them were chosen for the comparative study. One is translated byZhang Yousong, and the other one is translated by the scholar named Cheng Shi asno study has been made on comparing two versions. With regard to Zhang Yousongand Cheng Shi’s versions, differences in treatment of Mark Twain’s linguistic choiceof words could be traced. When the translator takes the original linguistic form into consideration, the thematic and aesthetic meaning of the original can be conveyed.While the translator neglects the author’s linguistic choice of words, it may impairthe thematic and aesthetic meaning of the original. Therefore, this thesis will try tocontrast the two Chinese versions from the perspective of literary stylistics, toexamine whether the stylistic features of the original are retained or not in theirChinese versions, so as to explore the significance of literary stylistics towardsfictional translation.This thesis will take Leech and Short’s Style in Fiction, a representative work inthe field of literary stylistics, as its theoretical foundation. Connecting the stylisticfeatures of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and its two Chinese versions, thispaper will conduct its analysis from the following aspects: lexical category,grammatical category, phonological and graphological category, figures of speech andpoint of view. On the whole, this paper will attempt to prove whether literary stylisticsis a useful tool or not in assessing fictional translation.