Poetics Approach To Literary Translation

The thesis attempts to explore the nature of literary translation by reading 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' by Milan Kundera and its two Chinese translations.Although Kundera's works has stirred academia's blood since their entry into China in the late 1980s, the defective translations and the deficient translation study impedes the literary study of his works seriously. The most prominent feature in the critical climate is the unscientific "content and form" approach to his novels.In view of the "primitive" approach, the thesis proposes to start from the time-honored "content and form" dichotomy to seek a scientific theoretical framework for reading the novel. After reviewing the related documents by Nida &Taber, Gutt and Hatim & Mason, etc., the thesis points out the absurdity of opposing "content" to "form", paving the way for introducing Henri Meschonnic's poetics translation theory.In order to explain Meschonnic's theory systematically, the thesis recalls the origin and development of poetics beforehand, especially the Russian formalism poetics which directly gives birth to the foundation of poetics translation theory. As the result of the literature review of both "content and form" debate and poetics' history, the thesis picks out the flaw in Nida's translation theory—making "content" and "form" opposite. It is Nida's binary opposition that constitutes the irrational methodology for evaluating translations—to see whether a translation is faithful to source text or not.On the basis of prior argumentation, Meschonnic primarily makes three explanations of poetics translation theory: "the ownership of translation theory", "what is translating" and "the criticism of Nida's 'dynamic equivalence'". By...