The Retranslation Contrast From The Dangerous Relationship "poetics And Moral Essence, To See Translation

The French18th century epistolary novel 《Dangerous liaisons》 is the representative piece of literature of French writer Chardelos de Laclos. Since its publication, the audacity of the content allowed the novel to gain rapidly a scandal reputation and was accused of "blasphemy towards religion", which made itself considered for a long period of time to be a banned book. The mid-twentieth century marked its recovery both in the literature and the art domain, since1959, the novel was several times adapted to films and theatres in France.The novel entered in China in1987by two translations, plus the two retranslations in2000and2002, none of them has aroused any interest of Chinese readers. In this context, in2011two retranslations published, translated respectively by JIN Hengjie and YE Zun. The languages in these two translated versions are of great concern for us, because JIN employed in his translation the combination of "classic written Chinese and contemporary written Chineses", meanwhile YE used only the contemporary written Chinese. They present before us two totally different styles, which deserve our great attention.So we couldn't help ourselves asking two questions. First of all, why and which element contributed to this difference? And secondly, could they both declare loyal to the original text?We keep in mind these two curiosities to explore our research based on the translation subjectivity. We begin in the first chapter with the presentation of the literariness of the novel, especially the value of language of Laclos, then in the next chapter commit the comparison between the two retranslations and examine the alleged loyalty of translation. This chapter is mainly attributed to our technical part. In order to put two retranslations into comparison, we will present the translational position, the translation horizon and then reduce their proper translation project. Through this process of looking for the translator, we will reach a conclusion that it's just the adventurous project of JIN by using classic written Chinese which contributes to the difference.And in the last chapter, we try to make it clear, in view of the translation poetics of Henri Meschonnic and the translation ethics of Antoine Berman, that this kind of language is not proper for the modern translation of foreign literature works. The alleged flowery rhetoric of classic written Chinese is not a loyal translation, by means of which it disfigures the style and rhythm of the original text. As a result, the translation of JIN becomes in the end not only an ethnocentric translation, but also a hypertexual one which destroys the original 'poetics rhythm' and betrays the unity of form and content.In the end, we consider this preliminary work as an attempt to present a mode of critics about literature translations. Maybe the poetics and ethics horizons could open a new chapter for the long period debate about the loyalty between form and content, literality and paraphrase.