Restrictive Narration In The Travels Of Lao Can And Its Transference In English

The Travels of Lao Can is one of the ten great classical novels in written vernacular Chinese,credited with high social and artistic value,one of which is its innovation of traditional narrative modes(the omniscient narration influenced by the records of history and biography).The innovation has found expression in the application of restrictive narration,which shows the features of modern narration.Restrictive narration refers to the limitation of the narrator as a narrative mediacy.Restrictive narration can be mainly found in the narrative situation narrated in internal point of view and external point of view.The former means that narrator gives up his own point of view and perceives event from the eyes of character,and then narrative point of view and narrative voice belong to different subjects;the latter refers to the objective showing of character’s state as well as narrative situation while not going into the inner world of character.The thesis focuses on the restrictive narration in The Travels of Lao Can and its transference in English.The study,combined with relative theories of narratology,starts with an analysis of internal point of view and external point of view,followed by an analysis of the focalizer,the focalized,narrative voice,inner world of character,and the way a event is showed.Next comes to the comparisons among translations and source text to figure out how restrictive narration is transferred in translations and then the discussion of their gains and losses of narrative effects.Finally the thesis makes efforts to find out the reasons.The study finds: in The Travels of Lao Can,internal point of view is mainly applied to describe singing events and landscapes which are seen by focal character Lao Can,and external point of view is mainly applied to disclose the dark officialdom.Lin Yutang strengthens the internal point of view in his translation,for example he uses free direct speech to strengthen the feelings of character,which is meaningful in building the image of character.Through deleting some linguistic forms which indicates the external description of character’s action,Lin also adds some modern features to its internal point of view.The other two translators,influenced by the linguistic convention of source text,weaken the effect of restrictive narration.Shadick evenchanges some parts of the internal point of view in source text to traditional story-telling formulas in which narrator talks to readers directly,reinforcing the presence of narrator-the narrative mediacy,which stands in the way of building character`s image.On the other hand,there seems to be little trouble for translators in transferring external point of view.However,sometimes translator may attach enough importance to the subtext behind the narrative mode,and sometimes translator may interpose his own judgments in the objective narration,which influences the transference of external point of view,impeding the transference of thematic meaning-the criticism of dark officialdom.