A Study Of Li Wenjun’s Chinese Translation Of The Sound And The Fury From The Perspective Of Narratological Theory

The Sound and The Fury is the first mature work of Faulkner’s, to which he devoted most effort and loved the best among his all works. The title of the book comes from a line of the famous Macbeth of Shakespeare’s,"Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". As the most influential and powerful novel in Yoknapatawpha saga, Faulkner’s ideological orientation and solid writing skills unfolded thoroughly for the first time in The Sound and The Fury, which was rewarded and respected widely as a representative of the southern literature and enjoyed great popularity as a contemporary literary classic. In1930s Chinese scholars began to introduce and critique Faulkner and his works, but translation of his works and relevant researches in the true sense started in1980s. Later on several Chinese versions of Faulkner’s works were published and the research in Faulkner was greatly improved at the same time.Faulkner was well-known for his use of successive indirect long sentences with extremely complicated structures and exquisite vocabulary chosen after thorough consideration. In The Sound and The Fury, the historical change in the southern America was truly presented through the description of the disintegration and decline of an old-fashioned family. In regard to narrative method, Faulkner abandoned the traditional way but adopted multi-perspective narrative in the first three chapters of this novel by making the three main characters who are also brothers Benjy, Quentin and Jason tell their stories on their own, and in the fourth chapter transferred to omniscient perspective narrative by making Dilsey, also a main character, finish the rest of the story. Besides, the reversal and intersection of time and space as well as the technique of stream of consciousness turned a simple story into a complex and bewildering one. These techniques are necessary for describing specific characters and make the life description in the novel more realistic.Narratology is a new kind of theory improved by Structuralism in the sixties of the20th century and can be regarded as the new orientation of contemporary literary theory as it possesses great theoretical potential. It is a study of the essence, form and function of narration, and it includes researches on narration, narrative speech, narrative action, narrative point of view and some other aspects, basically within the range of narrative literary works. Novel is the central object of study of narratology:as on plot level, theorists focus on the structure of the incident and character; and as on discourse level, the relationship between narrator and story, time arrangement, the perspective to observe the story and so on are the major focuses. The choice of narrative type in a novel can show the creative intention and aesthetic expectation of the author. Therefore, in novel translation, the translator should not only convey the original content but also reflect the aesthetic effects embodied from the style and structure of the original work. A translation that includes only the basic information but misses the structure of language of the author cannot be regarded successful.Li Wenjun is famous for introducing and translating Faulkner and his works. He has translated with admiring courage and insistency four of Faulkner’s works:The Sound and The Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying and Go Down, Moses, which are considered as the most difficult to understand but the most representative works of Faulkner’s. Moreover, he also published a critical biography and picture collection of Faulkner and compiled Collected Essays on Faulkner and so on.By comparing Li Wenjun’s translation with the original work of Faulkner’s, the author has reached the conclusion that the translation is equivalent to the original on aspects of narrative point of view, narrative speech and narrative time, and it faithfully and vividly presents the original style and aesthetic value and achieves the same reading effect. At the present stage there haven’t been enough researches or papers on translation criticism in the framework of the narratological theory. Therefore, by analyzing the Chinese version of The Sound and The Fury from the aspect of narratology, the author of the present paper hopes to arouse more attention to translation of Faulkner’s works.