On "Soul Mountain" French Version Accepted In Europe

In the end of2000, Gao Xingjian, a French Chinese, won the Nobel Prize inLiterature by the full-length novel of Soul Mountain. For the Chinese literary circle,the Nobel Prize in Literature, a never outdated topic, is not only an irresistibleattraction, but also a huge challenge. However, when the author who is unfamiliarby the Chinese readers turned out in the world through such honor, Chinese peoplebegan to focus on him and his work. This paper aims to explain why the Frenchversion of Soul Mountain can make such a success in France and why it can win thehighest honor in the world literary from the perspective of culture reception andliterature--an aesthetic reception theory proposed by Jauss, a German literary critic.In the preface, the novel emphasizes on analyzing the author and its writtenbackground,"Soul Mountain is a fantastic and peculiar literary masterpiece", and thenbriefly describes the relationship between No l Dutrait, the translator, and the FrenchVersion of Soul Mountain for a world-class Asian literature requiring a world-classtranslation.The first part of this paper focus on elaborating theories related to ReceptionAesthetic and summarizing its influences on literary translation. The second part letsknow the creation of Soul Mountain and introduces the author Gao Xingjian and No lDutrait. The third part, which is the most important part, emphasizes on analyzingwhy the French Version of Soul Mountain got such a success in France and reasons towin the awards. And the final part concludes that it is the French Version of SoulMountain, which both "tailors" and "surpasses" the literary aesthetic of westernreaders that makes the Swedish Academy favored.The creation of this paper is to use perspectives both from literature andtranslation to analyze the novel and try to describe the "fantastic and peculiar" of theFrench version of Soul Mountain. How the translator can make the western readersaccept the Chinese local culture (such as unknown custom in Southwest China) is alsothe emphasis of this paper.