A Study On Howard Goldblatt's Translation The Garlic Ballads: A Literary Stylistics Perspective

Mo Yan won the 2012 Nobel Prize of literature on 11 th October, 2012, which triggered out discussions on such topics as literary writing, the theme in Mo Yan's novels, the illumination of Mo Yan's winning prize on Chinese literary, and Chinese literature “Going-global” strategy, etc.There is no doubt that the unique writing style and the profound meaning in novels are the guarantee of Mo Yan's winning of Nobel Prize of literature. However, the translations of Mo Yan's novel do not get more attention and have not been studied much. The most popular version is the English translation by Howard Goldblatt.In fact, Mo Yan's novels are famous for the imaginative description; and Howard Goldblatt is known for his translation, especially for his successful representation of the aesthetic value of the source text. This paper tries to talk about stylistic representation in literary translation from the perspective of literary stylistics.This paper chooses The Garlic Ballads as case study from a literary-stylistics perspective in terms of iconicity, focalization and speech/thought representation by adopting the comparative model and the descriptive model. It concludes that Howard Goldblatt's translation represents the stylistic features of the source text by the choice of exact words, the arrangements of sentence sequence and the adequate focalization and speech/thought mode, thus successfully transmitting the aesthetic value and conveying the literary significance of the source text to a large extent.