Constructing The Gadfly

The Gadfly was written by Irish authoress Ethel Lilian Voynich ~1and published in England in the year of 1897. Though this novel is seldom mentioned in England, it becomes a revolutionary canon in China, enjoying the equal popularity of those socialist works like How the Steel Was Tempered, The Story of Zoya and Shura, The Young Guard, Notes from the Gallows, shortly after it was translated and published in the early fifties of the twentieth century. Mainly drawing upon Louis Althusser's theory on ideology and Andre Lefevere's translation theory, the present thesis tries to illustrate the ideological manipulation of literary translation with a case study of translating The Gadfly in China in the 1950s.It is indicated from the analyses that by virtue of all-invasive influence of the Soviet revolutionary novels, especially How the Steel Was Tempered, and the ideologically prescriptive literary creation prevailing in the China during the fifties, ie. the portrayal of revolutionary heroes, The Gadfly from the West had been positioned as a novel of revolutionary heroism, and therefore, enlisted in the then agenda of the construction of socialist culture before it was officially translated into Chinese. This can be first manifested in the translator's selection of this novel to translate and its intention behind. In addition, such an agenda imposed on this work also determined the ways its translation was presented, interpreted and used. Different rewriters "transformed" the original by the criterion of ideology and the poetics of socialist realism, which is in turn subject to the former. Out of the alertness of the bourgeois nature of the original, the publisher made a large number of deletions in the translation manuscript and turned to the literary criticism institution to ensure the "correct" reading of the published version. Lastly, it is worth mentioning the ideological manipulation in the adapted Soviet film The Gadfly dubbed into Chinese, which was shown in the cinemas throughout China. The combination of these collective forces created a canon of The Gadfly in China during the 1950s, which fullyachieved the given purpose, ie. exerting the function of revolutionary and patriotic education among the Chinese young reader, thereby consolidating the new socialist regime.In all, this thesis intends to reveal the intention of the target society to use the translation of The Gadfly in the construction of socialist culture desired in the fifties, and it is hoped that this case study can deepen our understanding of the social relevance of literary translation, especially of the complex relationship between literary translation and ideology.