An Inter-textual Approach To Howard Goldblatt’s Translation

Being influenced by the trend of post-structuralism, in the end of1960s Julia Kristeva, the famous Frenchlinguistic professor and symbolist, firstly put forward the concept of intertextuality by incorporatingM.M.Bakhtin’s dialogism and Saussure’s linguistic theories based on semiotics. As soon as the concept wasbrought forth, it caused a wide attention in the field of literary theory, the influence of which was soon spreadinto many research fields, including translatology, philosophy, art, linguistics, sociology and culture, etc. Thoseadvocates of intertextuality theory think of any object in the world as a text, and any context, no matter what it is,political, economical, social, psychological, historical or theological, can be seen as inter-texts. According tothese thoughts, translation is radically not only a process of transformation from one language to another, butalso a process of decoding and recoding those inter-textual relationships.Mo Yan, the recent winner of Nobel Prize for literature in the history of Chinese literature, has alreadyattracted people’s attentions in the western world since1988. His works such as, Red Sorghum, Big Breasts&Wide Hips, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, The Garlic Ballads, The Republic of Wine and Frogs, areespecially popular in the western world and are awarded dozens of international prize for literature. HowardGoldblatt is the only English translator for Mo Yan’s works. His achievements in translation also attracted a lotof people’s attentions. Being a famous American literary translator with a great passion for Chinese Languageand culture, Howard Goldblatt has introduced more than20writers from both Taiwan and the main land ofChina and almost50works to the western world. He has a good quality and a great amount of C-E translation,which got a good reputation home and abroad. John Updike, one of American famous writers, call HowardGoldblatt the “midwife”(Fu Ge,2008) of Chinese contemporary literature in the western world, whichobviously has been acknowledged by many domestic scholars. Gu Bin, a German sinologist, says that Mo Yan’swinning of the Nobel Prize for literature got great benefits from Howard Goldblatt’s translation. Mo Yan himselfalso highly valued Howard Goldblatt’s translation. He once said:“without his (Howard Goldblatt) excellenttranslation, my works would be translated by others, but there would never be so successful”(Shao Lu,2010).This thesis mainly consists of two parts. Firstly, the author did a review on intertextuality theory, andfocused its most attentions on the relationships between intertextuality and translation to discuss the instructiveeffects that intertextuality theory has on translation; secondly, the author takes Life and Death Are Wearing Meout translated by Howard Goldblatt as a case study, and aims to analyze practically the interaction thatinter-textual relationships are decoded and recoded in translation from perspectives of lexical level, syntactical level, rhetorical level and cultural level. Furthermore, the author tries to analyze the key factors for HowardGoldblatt’s success in translation. This thesis has got findings such as, intertextuality theory is instructive andeffective in literary translation, Goldblatt’s successful translation on one hand is due to his mastery of the twodifferent linguistic cultures and on the other hand is due to his successful decoding and recoding inter-textualrelationships in his translation, Goldblatt’s successful translation will provide an inspiration for future C-Etranslation.