The Portrait Of Tung-fang Shuo In Courtier And Commoner In Ancient China By Burton Watson

Stylistics is a discipline mediating between linguistics and literary criticism. Literary stylistics is concerned with linguistic choices which are thematically or artistically motivated. Narratological criticism focuses on the study of narrative structure of literary works and how the author expresses and reinforces the thematic meaning through the choices of structural techniques.Comprehensive picture of the level of presentation in narrative requires both stylistic and narratological investigations. Narratologists are typically concerned with structural techniques that often go beyond language, while stylistics usually focuses on verbal choices. Stylistics and narratology each has only a limited coverage of "craft of writing." The complementary relation between the two fields makes it necessary and desirable for stylistics to draw on narratology or the other way round.Literature is "verbal art" and author's manipulation of linguistic and structural forms functions not as an end in itself but rather as means for various thematic effects. In translation theory, no matter what term is adopted as a criterion to make translation studies, "fidelity" has been the goal all translators pursuing for. "Fidelity lies in being devoted to the original author's intention" and author's intention involves not only "paraphrasable material content". Referential meaning interacting with expressive value gives rise to the total meaning of the work, i.e. the author's intention and stylistic value as well as narratological value together form the expressive value. Adequate translation includes expressive identity as well as referential equivalence. This indicates the necessity of applying stylistic and narratology into translation studies."Adequacy of translation" is adopted in this paper as a criterion, defined as a practice of representing the original author's intention in another language faithfully. At the level of presentation, this concept emphasizes whether the translator has conveyed the stylistic and narratological value of the original rather than whether the translation has preserved identical linguistic and structural forms.Adopting stylistic and narratological models and methods, this thesis is intended to make a critical study of the Biography of Tung-fang Shuo by Pan Ku's and Watson, from six main aspects: phonological level, lexical level, syntactic level, speech and thought presentation, point of view and polyphony. This classification is the result of a combined consideration of the features of the original text and the translation. The analysis focuses on how Pan Ku reinforces thematic and aesthetic meaning through verbal choices and structural techniques; whether Watson captures author's thematic design or artistic manipulation and whether he conveys the expressive value of the original and thus produces adequate translation.Through detailed analysis, this paper comes to a conclusion: the success of Watson's translation lies in the fact that he properly grasps the expressive value generated by verbal choices and structural techniques of the source text conveys the thematic meaning and aesthetic significance of the source text, making Tung-fang Shuo's image as vivid as the original.