Pearl Buck’s Translation And The Subjectivity Of The Translator:the Case Of All Men Are Brothers

Pearl Sydenstricker Buck is a female writer of Chinese and American dual-cultural backgrounds. She won the Nobel Prize of Literature in1938as the first female winner for her representative work The Good Earth trilogy, and a series of novels describing Chinese life. Born in West Virginia and taken to China as an infant at the turn of the20th century, Pearl Buck lived with her family among the folks in a town in the interior of China. So she was affected by and enthusiastic about Chinese culture and literary classics. From childhood, she received bilingual education in both Chinese and English. In adulthood, she studied the sources and development of early Chinese novels. With her admiration of the Chinese novel, and her passion for introducing it to the West, Pearl Buck spent five years translating the full-length classic novel Shuihu Zhuan into English, retiling it All Men Are Brothers. During the1930s and1940s, All Men Are Brothers evoked strong response from the West. Many scholars and readers who were interested in oriental culture and literature spoke highly of the novel. Because of cultural diffidence, some Chinese scholars disapproved of Pearl Buck’s translation activity, and strongly attacked Pearl Buck for her translation errors. Rarely did any scholar offer comprehensive evaluation from a critical perspective of translation studies. For historical reasons such as the Cold War, All Men Are Brothers was forgotten for decades. Till the1990s, with the revival of Pearl Buck studies, scholars realized that Pearl Buck translation studies is an indispensible part of Pearl Buck studies in terms of coherency and consistency unveiled in her writing and translating activities. As a part of Western literature, Pearl Buck’s Chinese-theme literary works are unique in terms of language style and literary form, which in turn make her translation unique. In the time when domesticated translation was prevailing, Buck’s defamiliarized, ambivalent, and hybridized translation broke the barriers of communication between cultures of unequal status. To verify the hypothesis that the uniqueness of the translation is a result of the translator’s bi-culturization, the thesis adopts a hermeneutic method, attempting to study the internal and external factors that influence the subjectivity of the translator.This thesis firstly provides a biographical introduction to the translator Pearl Buck, including her life and literary achievements, and the rundown of the novel Shuihu Zhuan, as well as its status in the history of Chinese novels. Then, a hermeneutic study of the relationship between Buck’s translation and her missionary, diaspora and dual-cultural identity is conducted. Taking the case of All Men Are Brothers, it makes an in-depth analysis of the subjectivity of the translator confined by the socio-cultural norms. In the part of reflection, the concept of the Third Space is introduced to reveal the historical, cultural and literary value of Pear Buck’s translation—that she opened up a Third Space for Chinese and American cultural dialogue through literary translation by mimicry and hybridization within the postcolonial context.