Rewriting And Combining

Su Tong,writer of Chinese contemporary literature,mostly wrote poems during his initial writing phase,and focus on novels afterwards.In 2009,one of his novels,He An,was published,and it was regarded by the author as the most satisfying work so far.One year later,the English version named The Boat to Redemption,translated by Howard Goldblatt,sinologist and also a famous translator of Chinese contemporary literature,was released.Interestingly enough,the title of the English novel was not literally translated as “The Riverbank”(English of “He An”),but “The Boat to Redemption”,which was rather religion-related.Based on such divergence,this study focus on the text comparison between the original Chinese version and the English,and tries to summarize the differences that had been rewritten.Theories such as poetics of novel and the notion of “poetics” proposed by Lefevere etc.were adopted in the study to demonstrate the reasons of such “rewriting”.In the end,how the English version was accepted in the market of western literature would be analyzed,and the study would try to draw some conclusions on the spread of Chinese literature in western world.There are altogether four chapters.The introduction part contains the origin of study,theoretical framework and the research question,literature review and lastly,research methods and values.Chapter One would be introducing the poetics of both Su Tong and Howard Goldblatt,which serve as the research background of the text analysis in the latter paragraphs.Chapter Two is the main part of the whole study.In this chapter,those “rewritten” parts in the English novel would be divided into three categories—characters,plot,and the others,each category with the corresponding reasons analysis,and the translator’s strategies would also be explained.Chapter Three analyzes the acceptance of The Boat to Redemption based on the literary environment of translated literature in America.The last chapter is conclusion,and a few limitations of the study were also put forward.The study has discovered that The Boat to Redemption is actually consisted of many poetic adaptations.Some minor characters have been cut,and the inner words of the hero have been apparently increased.The climax of the whole story was rewritten;thus,the theme of “redemption” became visible.Last but not least,the translator had adapted the orders of some chapters.Through these rewritings,the literature images of the original novel and the translated version also vary.Nevertheless,many of the elements of Chinese culture had maintained in the translated version,through which the two different cultures had been successfully delivered and combined.The Boat to Redemption is a work of both “rewriting” and “combination”,and that is perhaps the reason why it could be accepted and appreciated in the western world.