Poetics And The Readers' Reception Of Literary Translation

This essay attempts to investigate the possible relationships between poetics and the reception of translated literature among target readers, through case studies of three short story translation anthologies which were published successively in the first two decades of twentieth century China.The three anthologies, namely, A Collection of Foreign Fictions by Zhou Shuren and Zhou Zuoren, A Collection of Short Stories by Renowned European and American Writers by Zhou Shoujuan, and A Collection of Short Stories (Vol.1) by Hu Shi, excelled their contemporaries for their pioneering efforts in combining foreign works from different countries into one book, and for their superior literary taste. However, the responses of their target readers differed greatly, with the first one practically neglected and the other two well-received. Though there were undoubtedly numerous factors leading to this result, the approach this essay chooses to resolve this "puzzle" is "poetics", in the framework of Lefevere's poetfcs theory in translation.On account of the richness of a poetics, a complete and thorough investigation would be too ideal to be true. Thus three of its elements - theme, genre and language are selected to enable this research. By comparing the translator and the readers' poetical views concerning the three elements, this essay seeks to reveal how the difference or resemblance of the two parties' poetics possibly effects the reception of translated literatures and leads to the receiving results of the three anthologies.