A Study On Howard Goldblatt's My Life As Emperor From The Perspective Of Lefevere's Poetics Theory

My Life as Emperor,published in 1995,is a neo-historical novel written by Su Tong,a famous contemporary Chinese writer.It has attracted so many readers and scholars in China for its characteristics of Chinese classic style of writing,excellent writing skills and avant-garde arts.The masterpiece has been translated to America by famous sinologist and translator Howard Goldblatt in 2005,and has become a great book to know Chinese society and history for Americans.This thesis is a case study on Howard Goldblatt's English translation of My Life as Emperor in light of Lefervre's theory of poetics of translation.Lefervere divides poetics into two parts:one consists of the inventory of devises,motifs,genres,situations and prototypical characters;another refers to the concept of what the role of literature plays,or should play,in the targeted social system as a whole.The poetics will be influenced by translator's social environment and ideology.In light of this poetics translation theory,this thesis analyzes Howard's translation of My Life as Emperor from two perspectives:to discuss how Howard rewrites the characters,literary devices,cultural situations and language features in his translation;and how his English translation was influenced by western literature environment.So the influence made by poetics for the translation can be revealed from the discussion.Having a comparative analysis between the original novel and its translation,this thesis makes the following conclusions.The Howard's manipulation in poetics is revealed in the rewriting of characters,Chinese culture-loaded words or expressions,estrangement language and literary devices in the translation,and he uses various translation strategies,such as simplification,replacement,explanation and adding words.In the macro-level,the translator uses the translation strategy of combining domestication and foreignization in consideration of the marginalized role of Chinese literature in western culture.He tries to maintain the literary features of original text on the basis of translation's readability and popularity.In addition,the analysis of translation will give a case to support the study of Lefervre's poetics of translation in Chinese translation and further research in this area.