Selected E-C Translation Of A Calculus At Heaven And A Critical Commentary

This project is executed on the basis of the translation of A Calculus at Heaven excerpted from The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer by Norman Mailer, a famous American novelist, who won the Pulitzer Prizes twice for The Armies of the Night (1965) and The Executioner’s Song (1979). The novel, A Calculus at Heaven, centers on five characters:Bowen Hiliard, Father Meary, Dalucci, Wexler and Rice, and depicts their experiences and feelings in the war. Norman Mailer applies in the telling of the story a narrative technique which is called "Time Machine" by mixing reminiscences of the past with accounts of the present.The report falls into two parts. Part one is composed of the original text excerpted from A Calculus at Heaven and its translation. Part two is divided into five sections. Section one contains a general introduction to the project’s background, aims and significance. Section two consists of an introduction to the author and the excerpted text. Section three gives the reason about the selection of the book by the translator and accounts for the execution of the translation. The fourth section lists some typical problems encountered by the translator in the execution of the project and the solutions the translator has come up with in handling these problems on the basis of translation strategies and theories that the translator has learned in her post-graduate education, especially E.A.Nida’s theory about Functional Equivalence as well as translation skills like word-choosing at the lexical level; recasting and division at the syntactic level; and amplification at the textual level.Considering the fact that Norman Mailer as one of the most important contemporary writers in the English-speaking world has failed to arouse enough attention by some Chinese readers as a result of the lack of efforts on the part of translators to translate his works, the present project is significant in its attempt to bridge this gap. Thus, it is hoped that the project may contribute to promoting understanding of contemporary American literature by Chinese readers.