A Study Of Goldblatt’s Translation Red Sorghum In The Light Of Sociology Of Translation

For a time going back as long as to the years of cold relations between the westernand Communist countries, literary output of China has been thought of beingcontaminated by the social-political manipulation. As the country gradually picked upfrom the economic ruins and ideological predicaments in the1980s, a new era arrivedwhen literary communication was enhanced with the arrival of China’s interconnectedbusiness relations with the western world. What coming near to Howard Goldbaltt, aliterary translator in the American literary field, was a new crop of Chinese writers, whohave increasingly impressed him by experimental forms and personal--often alienatedand violent-visions. Mo Yan’s Honggaoliang Jiazu is one of the literary creation that“stunned” Goldblatt and the world behind him. Goldblatt’s translation of HonggaoliangJiazu turns out to be a great success and is the start of a succession of Englishtranslations of Mo Yan’s literary works that catapult Mo Yan to the limelight of theworld literary stage and finally help him to win the2012Nobel Prize in Literature.This thesis will examine Goldblatt’s translation of Honggaoliang Jiazu utilizingthe conceptional toolworks forged by the French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu anddeveloped by his followers like Giselle Sapiro and Reine Meylaerts. The focus of theresearch will be on Goldblatt’s choice of source text and translation strategies in relationto Bourdieu’s concepts of “field”,“habitus” and “capital”.Examined under Bourdieu’s theoretical lens, the distinctive choices of a translator,in this case Howard Goldblatt, has made in choosing the original text and employing thespecific translation strategies should not be understood as divorced from what thedistinguished life experience had brought him into, Rather those experiences shouldgradually filter into his disposition and be internalized into him, or as Bourdiou wouldsay Goldblatt’s engaging relationship with China and the Chinese language in thetranslation field will “structure” him while being “instructed”, just like what Goldblatthimself once acknowledged: my indebtedness to those factors [referring to his experience with China, the Chinese language and the field of translation] manifestsitself in my passion (some might call it obsession) for translating literary texts—mainly fiction—from Chinese. I simply cannot think of a single thing I’d rather bedoing professionally.A new question that should be asked is to what extent these linguistic or stylisticchoices is related to his habitus and the position he occupied in the translation field ofChinese literature. In fact, the Sociology of translation studies is criticized for beingpreoccupied with extra-textual theorization. To meet the challenges, this thesis will havea detailed textual analysis of Honggaoliang Jiazu in relation to1) the internationalcultural production and American literary production and Goldbatt’s generalized habitus,or habitus of the field,2) Goldblatt’s unique personal trajectory with Chinese cultureand literature and his personal habitus.The main parts of the thesis will be divided into two parts. In the first part, theauthor will follow Johan Heilbron and Gisèle Sapiro’s theorizing of cross-nationalcultural production to firstly investigate how Chinese literary is positioned in ahierarchized international culture field where political, economic and cultural powerrelations are unequally distributed between states and their languages. What followed isa detailed examination of American literary field, where a set of specific agents thatinteract with each other in the production of culture products, in this case the translationof Honggaoliang Jiazu. Then a textual analysis of Honggaoliang Jiazu’s Englishtranslation will be carried out to show how the international cultural production fieldand American literary field have shaped Goldblatt’s generalized habitus or habitus offield and how this is reflected in the features of his translation.In the second part, the present author will revisit the trajectory of HowardGoldblatt, the English translator of Honggaoliang Jiazu, by reviewing his educationbackground, the life-changing events they have experienced and most importantly thosecomments that they had made in the interviews as long as they could in a way expose orunravel how he thought of translation generally or topics specially related toHonggaoliang Jiazu. Then an analysis of Red Sorghum’s textual features in terms of personal habitus will be carried out. The textual aspects chosen for analysis will beclosely related to how Goldblatts said of his own ideas on translation on a number ofoccasions, especially when it comes to translation of Mo Yan’s works or Honggaoliangjiazu. This, the author believes will make the argument more convincing as scrutiny ofthe translated text will speak volumes for Goldblatt’s personal habitus, itself a reflectionof his life trajectory and will be manifested in the stylistic textual features.The findings of the thesis are that Goldblatt has for one thing been “structured” bythe international cultural production field and the American literary field in that he has awillingness to make the translation more readable, lucid, smooth and devoid of anymentions of ideological contents that are distasteful to the Anglo-American readership;For another, owing to his disposition resulting from his long “love affairs” with Chineselanguage and culture, he has been unconsciously “structuring” the filed by defying thenorms of the literary field which is reflected in his tendency to explicate the culturalcontents, retain the rhyme, or even manipulate the sentence structure whenever thecontext allows. It is the present author’s hope that this thesis will bring new insights intowhere Chinese literary works now position in the world literary field and what can bedone to the great causes of “exporting” Chinese literary works to the world.