A Study Of English Translations Of Sansan —A Poetic Perspective

This thesis, with a purpose to explain rewriting in literary translation, analyzes the literary works from the perspective of poetics of translation. The work the author chooses is Shen Congwen’s Sansan. Shen Congwen (1902-1988) is widely regarded as one of great authors of modern Chinese literature. According to his writing experience, the novels and the figures about the country in West Hunan take up an important position. Among these novels, Sansan is a typical one which the author is fond of because the language is well-turned to shape the figure’s character and the skillful application of rhetorical devices is successful to present the heroine’s image. With the improvement of cross-cultural communication, Shen Congwen’s 44 works have been translated into 70 English texts in different periods and 29 translators at home and abroad are involved. Among Chinese scholars who have translated Shen Congwen and his novels, Gladys Yang enjoys a good reputation. Although Gladys Yang’s version uses an enormous amount of rewriting in her translation, it is obvious for readers to feel fluent and elegant between lines. Jeffrey Kinkley, as a foreign scholar, tends to extend the original styles and features of the source text to his readers. There are differences between two translators due to their different poetics of translation.Based on Andre Lefevere’s rewriting theory, the thesis conducts a comparative study on Gladys Yang’s and Jeffrey Kinkley’s versions of Sansan in order to explore poetics of translation that brings about similarities and dissimilarities about the target texts. Two parts constitute his poetics:in terms of the inventory component, many factors, like literary devices, genres, motifs, etc. often place restrictions on poetics; in terms of the functional component, social systems could exert a great influence on poetics. Based on these two parts, it further studies how different poetics of translators influence the application of the language and the expression of cultural elements in the translational works.In this thesis, the author compares two English translations of Sansan to study literary translation from a poetic perspective, which is a new angle. Besides, the point of innovation of the thesis is the combination of defamiliarization and poetics, that is, the defamiliarization of the form of literary translation is illustrated under the influence of poetics of translation. Poetological manipulation of the sentence level and the narrative way is explicated in Chapter Four and the formal defamiliarization of literary translation achieves a rather reasonable explanation. Another innovative point is that the author applies Nida’s cultural categorizations into the analysis of literary translation. The tables shown in Chapter Five make readers clear to understand its structure. The whole thesis is explained more completely and specifically.