A Narratological Study On The English Translation Of Ba Jin's Jia

Ba Jin's realistic novel Jia is the earliest one of his trilogy entitled Current and his masterpiece which starts his writing career.It describes the downfall of the bureaucratic feudal Gao family and the progress and resistance of the young generation.Its success depends not only on the complex moving plot and progressive ideas implied in it,but also on the unique art skills.In 1958,The Family,the English version of Jia by Sidney Shapiro,was published by Foreign Languages Press.In the past several decades,the original work of Jia was researched very deeply and a lot of findings have been made,but the research on The Family was very limited in terms of perspectives.Therefore,there is a very large untouched part of The Family waiting for more attention and research.In the 1960 s,under the influence of Russian formalism and French structuralism,narratology was born as an independent discipline in France.Narrative mode is one of the most important aspects for the success of novel.Therefore,the rendition of narrative mode is a conspicuous aspect in the process of novel translation.Ba Jin is good at creating typical full characters by describing the inner psychology of them,so the narrative techniques of Jia are very typical and need more attention toward them.From the perspective of narratology and with the methods of documentary analysis and comparative analysis,this paper tries to explore the rendition of narrative point of view,mode of speech,and narrative rhetoric in the translation of Jia,aiming to see whether the narrative art in Jia is transmitted effectively by Sidney Shapiro.The results show that the narrative features of Jia are transmitted successfully to a large extent except some little loss;narratology provides guidence for fiction translation criticism and practice.Finally,it is hoped that this paper could arouse translators' attention to the rendition of narrative features and provide some guidance for their translation practice.