Reproduction Of The Original Style In Gladys Yang's English Version Of Biancheng

Shen Congwen's novels, due to the deep exploration into the eternal humanity, the serious concern for modern people's situation in the world and their unique style, are attracting increasing attention in the literary circles in and out of China. Owing to his fantastic imagination and peerless devotion to art, his more successful stories not only deeply affect common readers, but also prove to stand careful critical scrutiny. Biancheng, a novel valued by the writer himself, is acclaimed as "an indelible pearl through all ages." There are so far two English versions of Biancheng, one by Ching Ti and Robert Payne, published in 1947, reprinted in 1982, the other done by Gladys Yang in 1981.Fruitful endeavor has been made by scholars in and out of China on studies of Shen Congwen and his Biancheng. However, studies on its English versions are very scarce. Although there is one M.A. thesis from Eastern China Normal University by Wu Lianjiao entitled "A Study of the Cohesive Devices in the English Version of Biancheng", no attempt has been made in and out of China to conduct a systematic critical study of the English version of Biancheng.Biancheng's everlasting artistic fascination resides in its unique style. Therefore, the successful transfer of the original style is the decisive factor in the assessment of its English version. Adopting literary stylistics as the tool for analysis, the present study conducts a comprehensive and systematic critical study of the reproduction of the original style of Biancheng in Gladys Yang's version, with Ching Ti's version referred to when necessary. Successful treatments by the translator are pointed out while in some cases the author's advice for improvement is provided. The paper is intended to make prominent the important constructive role literary stylistics plays in literary translation and literary translation criticism.Literary stylistics is an intermediary discipline mediating between linguistics and literary criticism, which attaches equal importance to the description in linguistics and the interpretation in literary criticism. With language style and stylistic features as its objects of investigation, literary stylistics lays emphasis on how writers strive to express thematic meaning and heighten aesthetic effects through linguistic choices. Drawing nutrition from both linguistics and literary criticism, in exploring the aesthetic meaning of literary texts, literary stylistics can effectively help fend off the impressionistic and subjective tendency that literary criticism is susceptible to so as to achieve utmost objectivity in literary criticism. Applying literary stylistics to fictional translation benefits translators in that an enhanced stylistic awareness enables them to be more sensitive to the aesthetic function and stylistic value of linguistic forms and to avoid stylistic losses in translation.Biancheng's unique style manifests itself in the delightful serenity of its ideorealm, idyllic atmosphere and delicate lasting effect on reader's emotions---a "limpid pastoral style" in C. T. Hsia's words. The original style expresses itself in five essential stylistic features, namely, lyricism in scenery description, rich local color, re-narration technique, subtle shifts of narrative point of view and symbolism. The present paper makes a detailed study of the transference of the above mentioned stylistic features in Gladys Yang's version to arrive at a reasonable evaluation of Yang's treatment and offers advice for improvement where necessary.Through a detailed stylistic analysis of the original Biancheng and Gladys Yang's translation, this paper comes to the conclusion that on the whole the original style is successfully reproduced although in some cases improvements can be made. It also proves that as a handy analytic tool, the introduction of literary stylistics into translation facilitates translators' command of the relevance between form and style.This paper is a case study of English versions of modern Chinese literature, the first attempt to conduct a stylistic analysis of Biancheng in a comprehensive and systematic way. It is hoped that more attempts of its kind will be made to promote the translation of Chinese literature so that Chinese literature works can present themselves in the English-speaking world without any regrettable loss of their beauty.