Lin Shu's Translation Of Uncle Tom's Cabin From The Perspective Of Aesthetics Of Reception

Aesthetics of reception produced in the late 1960s, which was based on the phenomenology and hermeneutics aesthetics, has provoked a huge response in the circle of western literary criticism. It emphasizes the function of reader in the theory of literary criticism and shifts the focus of contemporary literary criticism from the writer and works to the relationship between reader and works. Aesthetics of reception holds that literary work has the nature of openness and indeterminacy which are manifested as a blank in literary work. Under the response-inviting structure of literary work, the reader tries to fill the indeterminacy with his imagination to realize the potential aesthetic value of literary work. In the late 1980s aesthetics of reception was passed in to China. National scholars have deeply studied and discussed it in Chinese situation. Zhu Liyuan ever analyzed aesthetics of reception, made revision on its limitation and further expanded this notion. He also proposed the six criticism models about aesthetics of reception in literary criticism. This paper uses theory of reception and Zhu Liyuan's amendments to analyze the Chinese version of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Hei Nu Yu Tian, and to explore the indeterminacy of meaning embedded in the process of translation and its aesthetic representation from the multi-level structure of its system.Lin Shu's translations had ever produced a tremendous social and cultural impact on the society and enlightened a great number of modern writers and translators to embark on their journey of literary creation. The charm of Lin's translations cannot be simply explained with the traditional translation theory, which is preoccupied with the evaluation of the target text based on its degree of faithfulness to the source text. However, the emergence of aesthetics of translation provides literary translation research a new space, especially the translator's function and creation in the process of translation. Literary translation is a part of literature creation, and the indeterminacy of meaning, blank space and negation is the aesthetic and language nature of literary work. As reader of source of text, only by grasping the indeterminacy of meaning in the literary work can the translator get into the artistic realm of source work to interpret its beauty. As author of target text, translator should represent the artistic realm of source work into target text through recreated expression in order to satisfy the reader's aesthetic need. Literary translation is essentially an aesthetics recreation activity which is limited by source text. This recreation is called limited creation. This paper is designed to analyze indeterminacy of meaning in process of translation as to show how the translator reaches the effect of aesthetic representation in Hei Nu Yu Tian Lu.This paper firstly offers a brief description to the development process of Aesthetics of reception, and its spreading and development in China, then discusses the relationship between aesthetics of reception and literary translation. The core of Aesthetics of reception lies in the appealing structure of text. As literary works are rich in gap, fuzziness, polysemy and indeterminacy, it exposes the ultimate open space,and every reader may be aroused to explore and create the open and profound meaning of text according to his own experience, knowledge and imagination. To reconstruct the connection left by indeterminacy and gaps, the readers are required to apply"gestalt"psychology to fill in the indeterminacies and gaps in their own way.Traditional translation theories hold that translation is a monomial process aiming at text-center, ending with the reader-terminal and regarding the translator as a media. However, Aesthetics of reception adheres to the notion that translation is a dialogue-relationship between the literary text and its interpreter, and the meaning of the text is achieved after the fusion of readers'horizon with the horizon of the text during the process, so the meaning of the text is never closed or static but always open-ended and dynamic and indeterminacy exists in both process of understanding and representing. The emphasis of this thesis is laid on the aesthetic representation in multi-layers language system. As the literary works are full of gaps and indeterminacies, a translator is expected to recreate the original appealing structure in his translation. He should recreate the corresponding context and appealing open space in appropriate diction and expressions. In the recreation of the appealing structures in the literary language and textual meaning, a translator should bear the notion of reader's need in mind, by virtue of empathy, which would influence his diction, and make his version a difference. The immediate aim of literary translation is to endow reader with aesthetic enjoyment by enabling him to decode the text through the process of reading. According to Aesthetics of reception, the literary works are created by both the author and the reader. And comparatively speaking, the reader more than plays a crucial part in literary recreation; he is an actual pivot of the whole recreation.According to uncompleted multi-level structure of text, the author uses Aesthetics of reception to analyze Hei Nu Yu Tian Lu, and to explore its artistic feature and aesthetic representation of indeterminacy in translation on the levels of prosodic feature and form, semantic construction, image and artistic conception and psychology. Through this analysis, the author hopes to find why Lin Shu's translation was popular at that time. And this paper can also provide an effective method for the translation of Chinese literature in the light of aesthetics of reception.