A Comparative Study Of The Two Chinese Versions Of Walden From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

"Literary stylistics" specifically refers to the stylistic school which aims to interpret the thematic meaning and aesthetic value of literary texts. Functioning as a bridge between linguistics and literary criticism, literary stylistics focuses on exploring how the writer expresses and reinforces the thematic significance and aesthetic effects through linguistic choices. Thus it is a comparatively objective and scientific approach in literary criticism. Literary stylistics enables the literary research to move from subjectivity to objectivity, representing an important tool for translation criticism.Application of literary stylistics to translation practice can help the translators enhance their awareness of stylistics and appreciate stylistic features so that they could obtain a better understanding of the thematic significance and aesthetic function represented by linguistic forms. As a result, by emphasizing the interaction between linguistic forms and content, they are able to avoid stylistic losses in translation to the largest extent. Meanwhile, applying literary stylistics to translation criticism will help translation critics and researchers identify various deceptive equivalences and make criticism more objective. So it is of great significance for translation criticism and translation studies.Published in1854, Walden is the representative work of Thoreau, a celebrated American writer in the19th century. It is also a masterpiece in American literary history, embodying Thoreau’s philosophical thinking to the fullest. Renowned English Writer George Eliot once acclaimed it as "the most undisputable work in American literature and a long-standing extraordinary soul bible". The earliest absolute Chinese translation of Walden was delivered by Xu Chi in1949and then gained enduring popularity. From then on, new Chinese translations have kept emerging, and especially since2003, new versions have come out one after another. So far, there have been36Chinese versions in total, among which Xu’s version is the earliest and Li Jihong’s version the latest. The former one is retranslated by Xu Chi in1982based on his first translation in1949, reprinted by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in2009. It is through Xu’s version that Walden has become familiar to Chinese readers; the other is rendered by Li Jihong, published by Tianjin People’s Publishing House in July,2013, who claimed his version is the best ever over the past159years, thus arousing huge response and controversy.At present, although there are some researches on Walden’s Chinese translation, most of them mainly focus on comparing different Chinese versions from the perspective of a certain translation theory. On the other hand, though some research has been done on Walden’s Chinese translation from the perspective of stylistics, in view of the huge response and controversy caused by the Li’s version and especially the64-year gap between Li’s and Xu’s version, the author attempts to conduct an in-depth stylistic analysis and comparison of the two versions at lexical, syntactic, rhetorical and graphological level and from the perspective of literary stylistics. And the thesis intends to analyze their different stylistic effects combining the two translators’respective historical backgrounds and life experiences to explore the causes of different linguistic features and therefore, to evaluate them objectively. It is hoped that the present research can offer some fresh insight into the study of Walden’s translation as well as of literary translation criticism.