Loss Of Appealingness In Yang Xianyi's Translation Of Lu Xun's Short Stories

Lu Xun is one of the founders of Chinese contemporary literature.His 33 short stories harshly criticize the decayed feudal ethic and value through depicting the survival plight and spiritual predicament of Chinese people,which has a far-reaching influence.Wolfgang Iser first puts forward the “appealing structure” and asserts that it is the most fundamental structure of literary text.Appealing structure is formed by indeterminacy and blank,which stimulates readers' concretization with their aesthetic experience and imagination.And that's how the readers actualize the meaning and aesthetic value of literary works.Zhu Liyuan improves the concept of appealing structure,arguing that the appealingness exists in pronunciation and intonation,semantic construction,rhetoric,image and sentiment.Lu Xun resorts to innuendoes and leaves numerous indeterminacy and blanks in his short stories,mainly in the description of characters,scenes,events and cultural images,forming strong appealingness.According to Iser,the more indeterminacy and blank a literary work have,the more deeply readers can participate in the realization of the aesthetic potential of literary works.In translation,Yang Xianyi is first a reader,thus he is stimulated to concretize the indeterminacy and blanks according to his understanding.However,translator's concretization can eliminate the indeterminacy and blanks in translation text,causing the loss of appealingness.As a result,target language readers' concretization and imagination are restrained,and the meaning and aesthetic effect of original literary work are decreased.Employing the concept of appealing structure proposed by Iser and Zhu Liyuan as an approach,this thesis takes Yang Xianyi's English translation of Lu Xun's short stories as a case study to explore the loss of appealingness through the translator's concretization in literary translation.In the end,two main factors that cause translator's concretization are analyzed.