Building The Third Space In Hybridity

With the rising of postcolonial translation studies since the late of 1980s, some translation scholars begin to explore the cultural significance of translation from the perspective of postcolonial contexts, and problems such as translation and empire, translation and cultural identity, translation and colonial hegemony become hot issues. Homi K. Bhabha, one of the three leading figures in postcolonial criticism discourses, discusses cultural translation in his The Location of Culture. He constructs a complicated definition of the term"hybridity"and"Third Space", and applies the concept of"hybridity"as an effective strategy to resist the Western imperial cultural hegemony and to deconstruct the binary oppositions in colonial and postcolonial discourse. Bhabha's hybridity theory provides a new perspective and methodology for translation studies in the postcolonial contexts.Seamus Heaney, the famous poet in Northern Ireland and the Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1995, undertook to translate English classic epic Beowulf in 1980s and he spent fifteen years translating the epic from Old English to Modern English. The publication of his translation received many positive comments, and won the Whitbread Award as the best book of 1999. The problem of the translator's cultural identity, and the complicated historical relations between England and Ireland reflected in Heaney's verson make the translation contain great political and cultural significance.In this dissertation, with the notion of Homi K. Bhabha's theory of hybridity as the theoretic perspective, the author tries to analyze the charateristic of hybridity in Heaney's translation of Beowulf in order to explore the cultural motive and cultural value behind the phenomenon of hybridity. The dissertation consists of six parts, including the introduction, conclusion and four chapters of the main body, among which the introduction briefly concerns the theme, subject and range of the study, the research background of studies on Homi K. Bhabha and Seamus Heaney, and the structure. Chapter two, as the theoretic basis of the dissertation, mainly introduces the two notions of"hybridity"and"Third Space"of Homi K. Bhabha's postcolonial theories, and Seamus Heaney's postcolonial consciousness. The third and fourth chapters analyze the phenomenon of hybridity in Heaney's translation of Beowulf, including Heaney's hybrid cultural identity, and the hybridity of style, such as the translation of language, metre and kenning. Chapter five examines the translator's cultural attitude and the cultural significance of the phenomenon of hybridity. Hybridity not only reflects the multi-cultural characteristic of contemporary Northern Ireland, but also indicates an effective strategy to resist hegemonic culture. The author draws a conclusion that Heaney's Beowulf manifests the translator's strong subjectivity and consciousness of participating cultural construction, which will play a positive role in the national cultural construction and multi-cultural integration of contemporary Northern Ireland.