Searching For Home: The Gadfly's Textual Travel In China

Travel is an important way for human culture dissemination. Travel refers to the boundary-crossing activity of human beings from one place to another. Abstractly, translation can be viewed as a kind of experience and trans-lingual and cross-cultural dialogue. The definition suggests that translation is analogous with travel, for it not only presents the spatial displacement, but also itself has become a place for dialogues of parties such as readers, translators and writers. In this sense, translation can be considered as a textual travel from one cultural circumstance to another. Eric Leed simply divided travel into departure, passage and arrival. In order to display theories'complex process of entering a new environment, Edward Said elaborately depicted Traveling Theory. And this paper thinks that the complex process is also useful to describe the textual travel. Different from the theory endowed with subjectivity, textual travel is pushed by a series of powers which come from the expectation of receiving culture including the expectation of readers (society) and translators. At the meantime, the travel is not a simple activity, the subjects of which need to transverse the impure and open field of activities in nature. (马海良42) So the textual travel owns the historical and contextual horizon just like that of traveling theory. That is, the changing social and cultural environment will influence the translated texts. And the changes of the text in their travel can be regarded as response to these influences.Voynich's The Gadfly has undergone 13 textual travels from English to Chinese, except for abbreviated version, illustrated version and adapted version. Based on Leed's three travel stages and the elaboration of complex traveling process of theory, this paper studies five Chinese versions, namely, Li Liangmin's , Si Ren's , Gu Xuman's, Qing Xuexian's and Li Pengen's versions by summarizing characteristics of different versions in various social and cultural environments and literary policies in order to generalize different translation strategies and conclude that constant restarted textual travels of this novel lead to the shifting process from the ideological power monologue to multiple dialogues of various forces.