Aesthetic Exploration Of Fu Lei 's "Spiritual" Translation

The aesthetical speech "resemblance in spirit" has witnessed a long history in Chinese art and literature, and has been very appreciated by translators since Mao Dun introduced it in translation studies. The most famous advocate of this speech should be Fu Lei, a great translator of French literature. Under the guidance of the "resemblance in spirit", Fu Lei has left us a huge amout of french literature works translated by him, and among them is the word-famous trilogy Illusions Perdues, a huge brick in Balzac’s literary edifice Comedie humaine. This thesis aims at discovering the rich connotation of the "resemblance in spirit" advocated by Fu Lei.This thesis is divided in six parts, the introduction part gives the reason for the choice of this subject, the significance of the study and the methodology of research. Chapiter one gives a short presentation of the translator Fu Lei, the fiction Illusions Perdues and the latest researches of this work in China.The second chapiter traces back the source of the traditional aesthetical speech "resemblance in spirit" and displays the understandings by several intellectuals in order to draw out our researches.The third chapiter concentrates on the discovery of linguistic skills, which contributes to the spiritual communication. More precisely, the linguistic skills used by Fu Lei can be concluded as the fluency and livingness in structure, the flexibility and richness in vocabulary as well as the concision and accuracy in style.The fourth chapiter interpretes the "resemblance in spirit" from the angle of literariness. The literary translation involves inevitably the literariness of translation. This chapiter is divided in to two parts, respectively the exquisite description of descriptive texts and the translative art of characters’dialogues. The first part makes a study of the spirit lying in the lifelikeness of scene reappearance, in the refinement of physionomic description, in the poetry of poetic words’translation and the profundity of eristic arguments. In the second part, through the dialogues of the characters, we appreciate Fu Lei’s description on their personalities and the exposition of their situations in the context. By the analysis of this chapiter, we can see how Fu Lei active up all literary elements to get out the spirit of the original text.The fifth chapiter puts emphsis on the cultural inspection of the "resemblance in spirit" of Fu Lei’s Illusions Perdues. France and China are respectively two representants of occidental civilization and oriental civilization. At the back of langues and literatures are the conflict and unification of two cultures. The universality and uniqueness present in all human cultures, the former facilitates exchanges of different nations, the latter is however exactly what the translation should assume. Under the tension between the cultural universality and uniqueness, we can catch the spirit resided in. This thesis discusses successively from language skills and literariness to culture in the discovery of the connotation and incarnation of the "resemblance in spirit" located in the Illusions Perdues that translated by Fu Lei. Certainly, the "resemblance in spirit" is very rich in significance, which worths further research. This thesis is just trying to make the first step from the point of translation studies.As for the methodologie, we insist on positivism by means of comparing Fu Lei’s translation with the original text as well as the others versions of Mu Mutian, Gao Mingkai and Zheng Yonghui in order to make Fu Lei’s version prominent in "resemblance in spirit".