Howard Goldblatt’s English Version Of Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out: A Metonymic Study

Chinese literature is an important medium of broadcasting Chinese culture to the outside world, in whose process its translation is indispensable. In 2012, Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature and became the first writer of Chinese nationality to win that prize. Mo Yan and his works have attracted a lot of attention and at the same time his American translator Howard Goldblatt plays an undeniably important part. In this sense, studies on Goldblatt’s translation of Mo Yan’s novels is of great significance and they will shed light on the general translation practice of Chinese literary works.In the cognitive linguistic view, metonymy is a thinking mode as important as metaphor and it is conceptual in nature. The cognitive basis of metonymy lies in conceptual contiguity and cognitive salience, and it is motivated in use. The cognitive view on metonymy does not see metonymy as a mere figurative device and linguistic substitution but a cognitive device of human conceptualization and thought. Now that metonymy is an important thinking mode for human beings, it can be applied to accounting for translation process and translation strategy.As one of Mo Yan’s representative works, the novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out was translated into English by Goldblatt in 2008 and it is quite popular in English-speaking countries. By employing the qualitative approach, this study explores the explanatory power of conceptual metonymy for Goldblatt’s translation of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out from both the micro-linguistic perspective and macro-cultural perspective. Firstly, it presents a metonymic study of Goldblatt’s translation of Chinese idioms, taboos and speech acts and then explores the role that conceptual metonymy plays in the translation of culture in the novel. Lastly, it concentrates on Goldblatt’s deletion strategy and offers its metonymic analysis.The major findings of this study are as follows: Firstly, Goldblatt’s translation of Chinese idioms, taboos and speech acts is dominated by metonymic thought patterns. Secondly, this study further proves Tymoczko’s(1999) view that conceptual metonymy plays a role of connection and creation in the translation of culture, and it establishes the new connections between the SL element and its TL counterpart and creates new textures. Thirdly, Goldblatt’s bold use of deletion strategy on the one hand reflects the metonymic nature of translation, in Tymoczko’s(1999) terms, i.e. the partiality and limitation of translation and on the other hand, his use of deletion strategy relies on metonymic thought and the target language reader needs to turn to metonymic thought for filling in the narrative gaps. Meanwhile, this study is not only a rewarding attempt to combine conceptual metonymy theory with literary translation but it is also an important complement to translation studies, expanding the cognitive approach to researching translation process and translation strategy.