The Poetic Value Of "Strangeness" In Literary Translation

Since the concepts of "foreignization" and "domestication" were explicitly advanced by Venuti in 1995, it seems that the support of foreignization, as a preferable translation strategy, has won a landslide victory in theory. Yet in the field of translation practice Venuti's ideas have been largely rejected or ignored. Translators still tend to smother or strangle protruding strangeness to please readers in the target language in the domain of literary translation.This paper attempts to explore the potential poetic value of "strangeness" which occurs in literary translation in the light of Victor Shklovsky notion of 'defamiliarization', a seminal concept in literary criticism. In other words, it endeavors to defend the adoption of 'foreignization' as a translation strategy by exploring its positive poetic implications.The concept of 'defamiliarization' further explores the question about how art does to and for life: art is to enable us to see things afresh and restore our sensation for life by its difficult form. To achieve a better understanding of this notion, the author also examines it in relation to the connected ideas of Aristotle's, S.T. Coleridge, and P.B. Shelley in poetics.After giving an account and some analysis of Venuti's theory of domestication and foreignization, the author compares Venuti's 'foreignness' with Shklovsky's 'strangeness', arguing that despite the obvious differences between them, there is still close connection between them.Before setting out to seek the justification for the retaining of strangeness in literary translation by the concept of 'defamiliarization', the author categorizes the possible strangeness which occurs in ST on the basis of its sources: language's innate arbitrariness, the ST author's deviation from norms, and different literary norms.It can be concluded that the apparent "strangeness" in literature is usually a source of beauty or excellence, instead of the symptom of some illness. Behind it, there might be the efforts of writers, who are endowed with more sensitivity and compelled by eager desire to present something creatively and to get out the exact...