Creative Treason—Howard Goldblatt’s Translationof Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out

In the translation process, cultural differences between nations will inevitably cause the collision, distortion and deformation between different languages. Therefore, the French literature sociologist Robert Escarpit put forward the notion "Translation is always a sort of creative treason". Professor Xie Tianzhen could not agree with the opinion more and introduced "creative treason" into China in his article "On Creative Treason in Literary Translation" in1992. Since then, Professor Xie has been introducing and analyzing it in his academic articles and finally gave a systematic and in-depth elaboration in his monograph Medio-translatology published in1999.As a translator, especially a conscientious and responsible translator, he’s sure to pursue subjectively100%fidelity to the original and100%reproduction of the original information in his translated version (Xie,2012:33). However, this is actually impracticable. There must be the disparity between the original and the translated version, which inevitably results in the existence of creative treason in translation.The research of creative treason finds that the differences between the translation and the original text can never be erased. It is concerned with the status, communication, role, impact, influence of the translated text and demonstrates the essence of literary translation. Therefore researcher’s attention is drawn to translator’s unique contribution, the underlying factors which determine the translation strategies in new cultures.Howard Goldblatt, acclaimed as "the acknowledged chief translator of modern and contemporary literature" by Professor Xia Zhiqing, has published English translation of more than50novels and collections of short stories by over30writers from Chinese mainland, Taiwan, and Hang Kong. Mo Yan is one of the most prominent Chinese contemporary novelist and the first Chinese Nobel laureate for more than100years. As one of his most important works, Shengsi pilao was published in2006and has won many international prizes such as the Dream of Red Chamber Award of2008as well as Fukuoka Asian Prize ⅩⅦ in2006and inaugural Newman Prize for Chinese Literature in2009. This novel is a salute to the grand tradition of classic novels in ancient China and is regarded as the one of masterpieces that contributes to Mo Yan’s winning Nobel Prize. The English version translated by Howard Goldblatt came out in2008. Howard Goldblatt’s individualized translation makes Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out win great recognition and appreciation and also qualifies it as an ideal object of the application of creative treason theory. However, till now a few comprehensive and systematic researches have been done on the English version Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out.From the perspective of creative treason, this thesis demonstrates that excellent literary translations cannot go without creative treason. Firstly, the author of this thesis analyzes in detail the creative treason demonstrated in Goldblatt’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out at the linguistic and cultural level and explores the internal and external factors for that. Based on the analysis, this thesis probes into the factors of Goldblatt’s literary translation including his excellent bilingual competence, sense of flexibility and sense of responsibility for target language readers. Then the author reflects on the ideal translator model and effective translating strategies and hopes to bring some implications to the transmission of Chinese literature abroad.