A Study On Howard Goldblatt’s The Republic Of Wine From The Perspective Of Lefevere’s Poetics Theory

Andre Lefevere, the most eloquent spokesman for the manipulation theory, holds that translation activities do not occur in a vacum, and that issues in translation can not be simply resolved in the level of linguistics. In addition to language factors, be simply resovled in the level of linguistics. In addition to language factors, translation is also related to the mainstream social ideology, poetics as well as the historical and cultural context of target language. Lefevere’s manipulation theory draws extensive attention of Chinese scholars. It has proved powerful in explaining some phenomena in translation, such as retranslation and deletion, and in revealing the myriad facets of manipulative factors behind such phenomena.Drawing from the insights of Lefevere’s theory concerning poetics and using the English translated text The Republic of Wine as case studies, this thesis seeks to explore the way verbal and nonverbal factors shape the production of the translated text and the choice of Howard Goldblatt’s translation strategies. The concept of poetics in Lefevere consists of two parts:one is an inventory of literary devices, genres, motifs, prototypical characters and situations, and symbols; the other is what the role of literature is, or should be, in the social system as well. In Howard Goldblatt’s translation, poetic manipulation is reflected in the rewriting strategies of letters and writings in classical style format, character creation, symbol, exaggeration and narrative manners, including the strategies of ellipsis, simplification, replacement, paraphrasing, sentence adjustment, amplification and annotation. Moreover, Howard Goldblatt hopes to introduce Chinese culture to western readers by his translation and to improve the readability of the translation text to meet a reading public situated in postmodern poetics.This thesis argues that the successful bridging of the two languages, or the way a translation is well accepted by the target language readers, owes much to the fact that it is well conformed to the receptor poetics. The manipulation theory can strongly explain Howard Goldblatt’s translation activities, and, in offering a fresh understanding of Goldblatt’s text, this thesis will, hopefully, shed lights on the on-going studies on the translation of literary texts.