The English Versions Of Ah Q Zheng Zhuan From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

Ah Q Zheng Zhuan is a great literary work rich in academic and research values. As one of the greatest classics in Chinese modern literature, it is distinctive with its connotation and implication and is abundant for various investigations from different perspectives. Surely it is academically significant to research and re-examine the background reflected, the story narrated, the characters depicted, the core of Ah-Qism—"psychological victories", and the reveal of national low quality in Ah Q Zheng Zhuan. Definitely this is such an implicit and provoking work that it has been rendered successively into different languages and enjoys the warm welcome from the readers and high judgment from the academic groups all over the world after its publication. Among its large amount of translations, there are at least seven English versions, which play a great role in the popularity of the immortal work and show its eternal charm to different readers with different perspectives in different times. On the basis of the above facts, the author produces great interest in the English translation of Ah Q Zheng Zhuan, and at the meantime, intends to explore and compare the English versions of this Chinese classic from the perspective of reception aesthetics.In the ever-growing literary research in 20th century, reception aesthetics, or reception theory, as a new and influential paradigm and methodology in literary theories, marks a shift in concern from the author and the work to the text-reader relationship in literary criticism. According to its ideas, readers'reaction is a criterion for judging the quality and value of a literary work. In the process of the production of a literary text, the author should consider the readers'social experience, aesthetic tendency and receptive ability, which constitute the readers'"horizon of expectations". In addition, in a literary text, there are many spots of indeterminacies and blanks which establish a bridge between the creative consciousness of the work and the readers'receptive consciousness. It is these qualities that need the readers to concretize according to their own understanding. Likewise, in the process of translation, the translator, as the reader of the source text and the writer of the target text, must lay great importance to the target reader's reception and reflection to make his own understanding best meet the target readers'"horizon of expectations", and thus achieve the fusion of horizons of the writer, the translator and the readers. In this thesis, the author chooses four English versions of Ah Q Zheng Zhuan, which were rendered respectively by different translators in different time. With the help of those concepts of"horizon of expectations","indeterminacy"and"fusion of horizons"in reception aesthetics, he analyzes some samples from the four versions. The result of this analysis shows that owing to differences of the historical and cultural background, the four translators have different"horizons of expectations"; moreover, the target readers of the four versions also have their individual"horizons of expectations"and degrees of receptivity. In view of the above two aspects, the four translators with their particular properties come to different concretizations in the aesthetic pole for those blanks and indeterminacies in the artistic pole, hence different translations of the original text.By contrastively exploring the four English versions of Ah Q Zheng Zhuan in perspective of reception aesthetics, this thesis only intends to probe the coming and the reception of each version. In the author's view, any profound literary classic with such eternal charm like Ah Q Zheng Zhuan, can stand and deserve as well endless interpretation and investigation. Furthermore, only one version cannot meet different readers'"horizons of expectations"in different periods. Only after reading and interpreting many times through various versions of it, can we gradually get closer and closer to the original meaning of the work and successfully pass on its glorious spirit.