An "Inter-Ness" Perspective Into Literary Translation

Under the traditional “subject-object” dualism, literary translation is often studied as alanguage transformation or individual creation process involving a single subject. Theprocess is deemed as the reproduction of the original author’s writing purpose or the truthwithin the original text, or to the other extreme, purely individual interpretation based onthe translator’s own literary experience, culture background and attitudes. However,literary translation is not the kind of literary production by a single subject under a singleculture background involving a single text. As the defects of dualism are becoming evernoticed and the philosophical thoughts are changing towards an “Inter-ness” point of view,literary translation study is also showing a perspective-change accordingly. More and moreresearchers are beginning to look at the relationships among the multi-subjects, multi-textsor multi-cultures involved in the literary translation process from a plural and dialogicpoint of view in order to analyze the nature of literary translation in a more comprehensiveand objective way.However, current studies focus mainly on one of the several aspects of “inter-ness”involved in literary translation, and by leaving out the other inter-related elements, canhardly have an overall understanding of the translating process. And the studies are mainlytheoretical in nature, with only a few digging in specific translation processes andtranslated texts. This paper attempts to describe and analyze literary translation processfrom a combined “inter-ness” perspective of inter-subjectivity, inter-textuality andinter-culturalism. And David Hawkes’ translation of “Hong Lou Meng” would threadthrough the paper as an example to make the study more concrete.In the introduction, the background of the study, the reason to write this paper and thestatus of the current studies are outlined.Chapter1is an overview of the “inter-ness” perspective. First, the philosophicalorigin of the “inter-ness” theory is stated, and then its main concepts, namelyinter-subjectivity, inter-textuality and inter-culturalism are discussed and summarized. Andbased on all these, the author comes up with the two basic ideas of “inter-ness”, that is,“co-existence” and “dialogue”.Chapter2narrows down the discussion of “inter-ness” to literary translation. The concepts of “fusion of horizons”,“inter-textuality” and “culture difference” are introducedto analyze the coexistent and dialogic relations among the multi-subjects, multi-texts andmulti-cultures involved in literary translation process. And it is stated further that the threeaspects of “inter-ness” are intertwined to make the process of literary translation what it is.Chapter3looks at the general picture of Hawkes’ translation of “Hong Lou Meng”from the combined “inter-ness” perspective. It is discussed from a broad view how themulti-subjects fuse their horizons through “communication”, how the multi-texts arereferring to each other aesthetically and how the original and targeted cultures are“negotiating” and “reconstructing” during the specific translation process. And the reasonto pick up Hawkes’ translation for study is also clarified.Chapter4digs into the translated text after a look at the big picture. Specific examplesin “The Story of the Stone” are cited to further illustrate how several aspects of “inter-ness”exist and impact the literary translation process, and how the translator negotiates betweenthe original author and the targeted readers, and creates with different literary and culturetraditions in mind.In the conclusion, the entire paper is summarized and several points are raised forfuture study, namely: what criteria should be set for literary translation? How to reach thecriteria and how would it benefit cross-literary and cultural communication? At last, thelimitations of this paper are also pointed out.