A Comparative Analysis Of The Two English Versions Of He Tang Yue Se From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

He Tang Yue Se is a piece of classic prose in recent times. Zhu Ziqing, its writer, has attracted many readers and translators both in and abroad with his excellent mastery of language. The beauty of language in He Tang Yue Se is worth both the readers’learning and translators’efforts, which is mainly shown in a great deal of use of reduplicated characters, rhetoric devices, parallel structures, and quoted ancient poem and odes, of the concise expression in language, and the cohesive discourse as well as the artistic beauty contained through the language.The development of stylistics is a history of interdisciplinary communication and integration. The establishment of stylistics is the combination of rhetoric and literature. With the development of modern linguistic theory and stylistics itself as an independent subject, stylistics has combined with literary criticism and formed literary stylistics. Literary stylistics probes into the application of language in literature. It makes description and explanation to literary discourses such as poetry, fictions, drama with the help of linguistics. As it can explain the phenomena in literature rationally, it embodies an important trend of the development in modern stylistics. The researches on style by scholars in and abroad are concentrated in the nature and features of style, though from different perspectives and purposes. The common purpose of stylistic research is to discuss and find out how an author shows the stylistic features and conveys meaning as well as beauty with different forms of language.The emphasis of stylistic analysis is to analyze the linguistic features which carry stylistic meaning and aesthetic values, and to explore the author’s pragmatic intention and effects, thus reaching the purpose of appreciation and taste of the language. With stylistic analysis, translators can master better the style of the original and the stylistic values implicated in concrete linguistic forms of the original, and get a better understanding of the source language and help with their translation. Besides, in examining translation, the translator himself/herself or the others can make a stylistic analysis on the translation as well as a comparison to the original, then to see if the translation has reproduced the stylistic characteristics of the original, thus helping in guaranteeing or improving the quality of the translation. Therefore, the author attempts to introduce literary stylistics to the English versions of He Tang Yue Se, and makes a comparative analysis from this perspective.The thesis focuses on two levels of stylistic features:rhythm level and discourse level, which actually involves contents in lexical, syntactical and rhetoric, etc. The thesis chooses He Tang Yue Se as a typical example, and makes a concrete stylistic analysis on its two English versions by Zhu Chunshen and Li Ming respectively from the perspective of literary stylistics, with the aim of concluding the stylistic characteristics of the two versions. The author finds that Zhu’s version adopts a form of prose to render the quoted odes and poems in the source text, and lose the rhythmic beauty of the poem in sound rhythm aspect. In sense rhythm aspect, he has reproduced the rhetoric devices, short sentences and parallel structures adequately and shown the concise beauty of language in He Tang Yue Se. In discourse level, he has a general grasp of the whole structure of He Tang Yue Se. He does not use too much cohesive means obviously, but realize the cohesion and coherence with meanings instead. And the anaphora in the writer’s psychological development has also been properly rendered. Li Ming’s version has adopted a large amount of words with alliteration or assonance as well as poems to render the quoted odes in He Tang Yue Se, thus reserving the musical beauty in this aspect. In sense rhythm, his version has not adequately shown the stylistic characteristics of short sentences, rhetoric devices, and parallel structures, especially in that the language in his version is much wordier than concise. In discourse level, he uses many conjunctives and considers the cohesion between paragraphs, and has reproduced the anaphora in the writer’s psychological developments, but he has made inaccurate translations for certain conjunctives.With the comparative analysis of the examples in the two versions, and the difference found in the extent and effects of conveyance of the original text in the versions, the author holds that this can help us find the factors the translators should pay special attention to in their C-E translation of prose, guide our translation further, and provide some reference to the practice of C-E translation of prose, thus drawing translators’attention to the theory and practice of translation from the perspective of stylistics.