| The main reason why the fictions narrated by first-person complicate narrative effect might lie in the overlap of the narrative subjects among the narrator,the implied author and the story character,who simultaneously share the same pronoun “I”.This conflation also poses a challenge for translating such novels.At present,whereas the burgeoning cultural paradigm has enriched the scholarship of translation studies,the external research beyond the textual scrutiny does not shed light on literary interpretation.In other words,cultural studies are not conductive to a close understanding of the original text in terms of literary translation,which might undermine the quality of literary translation.To address this shortfall,this thesis,through the prism of narratological stylistics,delves into the intricacy of experiencing self and narrating self as well as the discourse representation of the protagonist.The case under investigation is Cisneros’ s The House on Mongo Street and its two Chinese versions by Pan(2006)and Lin(2010).The method adopted by this thesis is “an overall-extended close reading”,which brings the follows three aspects into account:(1)the interaction between the various components within the work,(2)the examination of the work and context,and(3)the inter-text comparison between the work and the related works.The narrative subjects in first-person novels usually comprises twofold point of view:“I” who is experiencing the events of the story(experiencing self)and “I” who narrate the story in retrospection(narrating self).Experiencing self in The House on Mongo Street observes the world in a childish manner.In contrast,narrating self sets out from an adult’s point of view.Moreover,the differences between English and Chinese with regard to free direct speech,free indirect speech and narrative behaviors pose challenge to the dynamic process of translation.On top of that,the tangled point of view of the characters and the presentation of the characters’ discourses further reveal a legion of unreliable narratives in the source text.The unreliable narrative is in conflict with the implied author’s values.If a translator randomly tampered with the unreliable narration,the poetic values of the translation may be eroded.In light of the popular criteria of translation quality assessment,no serious problem might be spotted in Lin’s version.However,the results of this study showed that Lin’s version adopted a rich array of adjustment including addition and omission.These changes lead to the effect of “de-defamiliarization” in his translation as an improper display of the translator’s subjectivity.On the contrary,the seemingly unsmooth language in Pan’s translation duplicates the poetic values of the source text.With reference to the unreliable narration,this paper delved into the literariness of translated literature so as to complement the textual lacuna of cultural studies and shed new light on the study of the literariness of novel. |
