A Literary Stylistic Approach To Neo-historical Fiction Translation

In recent years, a great number of studies have been conducted in relation to theapplication of literary stylistics to fiction translation since its justifiability has beenverified by practical analyses of stylisticians. However, few of them have been guidedby real proficiency in this field. As a result, such studies become the representatives ofsuperficiality and fallaciousness which are meaningless and misleading. Besides, theobject of their investigations seems to lie exclusively within the scope of traditionalrealism fiction. In such case newly developed types like stream-of-consciousness,magic realism and neo-historical fiction, etc., all embodied with more manipulation oflanguage by the author to achieve certain effects, have been bluntly ignored. To fill inthe gap within this domain and thereby bringing studies of fiction translation up todate, the present paper attempts to explore the translation of Mo Yan’s neo-historicalnovel Hong Gao Liang Jia Zu on the basis of sufficient understanding of literarystylistics.Literary stylistics, an inter-discipline between literary criticism and modernlinguistics, is marked by the application of linguistic methods to the interpretation ofliterary texts and thus sheds light on the evaluation of literary translation as well assharpening translator’s awareness of thematic meanings conveyed through linguisticdevices.Given the important status of Mo Yan and his works in contemporary Chineseliterature, the present study will be of great significance in that the stylistic analyses,based on the comparison between the original work and its English version, will fullyreveal the author’s particular manipulation of language as well as the translator’sweaknesses and successes in stylistic reproduction so that the translator’s sensitivitycan be sharpened and thematic losses of the original avoided.