Aesthetic Representation Of Lin Yijin’s Versions Of A Farewell To Arms

Ernest Hemingway, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in1953and Nobel Prize forLiterature in1954, is honored as the spiritual monument of America. As arepresentative of the Lost Generation, he is famous for the code heroes he creates, hisiceberg theory and his concise writing style. His representative novels include TheOld Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom theBell Tolls and so on. Among them, A Farewell to Arms is one of his earliest novelsthat have been introduced into China and receives a warm welcome among Chinesereaders.Scholars at home and abroad have done much research on this novel, mostlyfocusing on its writing technique, theme, characters, yet its translation studies are farand few. Even less are the studies on the translation versions from the perspective oftranslation aesthetics, which approaches translation issues from the perspective ofaesthetics. The translated work, as the creative product of the translator, on the onehand, represents the characteristics of the original work, on the other hand, reflectsthe translator’s creative ability.Up to now there are many Chinese versions of this novel. Lin Yijin is among theearliest translators that have translated A Farewell to Arms into Chinese. His versionsstand out and survive the others. His scrupulousness pushes him to make severalimprovements on his previous versions. Comparing his different versions, we canfind that there are the following major amendments: people’s names, place names,food names are changed to cater to the modern reader’s reading habit; the mixture ofclassical Chinese and vernacular Chinese is changed into fluent vernacular Chinese;improper or mistaken expressions are corrected; and the style is better preserved andso on.It can be seen that these amendments are mainly made from the consideration ofaesthetics. In the light of this, the thesis attempts to study this work from theperspective of translation aesthetics based on Lin Yijin’s first and last versions:1981’s Zhandi Chunmeng (战地春梦)(which is thought to be translated in the1930s), and2006’s Yongbiele, Wuqi (永别了，武器)(which is thought to be translated in thelate1980s).This thesis explores the aesthetic representation of Lin Yijin’s Chinese versionsof A Farewell to Arms from three aspects: the representation of Hemingway’s specialwriting style, Lin Yijin’s creative translation and the comparison of two versions.After detailed analysis of the two versions, the thesis finds that with a fullunderstanding of the original work and a solid foundation of literary appreciation, LinYijin produces wonderful translations of A Farewell to Arms, which are plain, concise,and exact. His versions, especially the last version of A Farewell to Arms, give us agood example of aesthetic representation of literary translation.This thesis uses ample examples to prove the explanatory power of translationaesthetics in literature translation. Through the comparison and analysis of theaesthetic values of the original novel and the translated versions, we discover that LinYijin’s latest version represents the aesthetic elements of the original text very well.This thesis provides a new perspective to the Chinese versions of A Farewell toArms. Through applying aesthetic theories to translation practice study, we prove thattranslation aesthetics is a practical theory in evaluating target text’s aesthetic values.Not only can translation aesthetics theories guide translation practice, they can alsoserve as a standard of translation evaluation, which will be of great help to translationcriticism and translation practice.