| In the book Michelle Obama: A Life, accounting the major events of Michelle in her first half life and her valuable spirit in dealing with them, the author Peter Slevin has dug into the law of American social development and uncovered the complex historical truth of the promotion of the black American from being slaved to White House. Taking the translation of the first and the fourth chapters of the book as example, the present paper attempts to discuss the issue of how to maintain the two coexisting characteristics of biography literature in translation: historicity and literariness. It adopts Liu Miqing's(1986) theory of Aesthetic Translation, which sees translation as is framed by aesthetic process, aesthetic subject, and aesthetic object. Highlighting the concept of “historical faithfulness” in translating history-related texts, this paper applies Liu's trichotomy of characteristics of non-literature works —authenticity, clarity, simplicity—and lists a series of techniques reproducing historical faithfulness in terms of the three aspects. As to literariness of biography, the paper discusses how the translation reprocduces in target readers similar aesthetic feelings as the source readers from three aspects: audio enjoyment, delicate structure, and deep meanings. |
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