On Poetics In Translation Of On The Road

On the Road is a novel by the American Beat writer Jack Kerouac. It was regarded ascontroversial due to its rejection of mainstream values and erratic writing style. However,these rebellious qualities enabled it to become one of the few works by contemporaryAmerican and British writers to be introduced to China in the1960s. In recent20years,scholars at home and abroad have shown an increased interest in the Beat Generation,especially in the writers’ poetic exploration. This trend sheds new lights on theinvestigation of translations of Beat Classics.This thesis is a case study that reviews the translation of On the Road in China, andanswers the following questions through historical description and theoreticalexplanation: How was such a novel, avant-garde in poetics and controversial in its ownculture, received in China? What were the obstacles in its reception and how were theyreflected in the novel’s translation, criticism and canonization? Overcoming theshortcomings in the past researches, this thesis aims at promoting the understanding ofthe novel and its translation in China.This thesis is majorly backed by the theories of polysystem scholars including Lefevereand Even-Zohar. On the basis of highlighting the avant-garde poetics of On the Road byreviewing Kerouac’s literary life and the novel’s canonization in the West, it continues todiscuss the Chinese translations of the novel from1962to the21stcentury. Thetranslation activities are approached in an all-round way, from the socio-cultural contextsto the characteristics of the texts and the overall designs of the translations aspublications, and to the related comments of ordinary readers and scholars. This thesisshows that in the translations of On the Road, poetic conflicts are a more direct andconsistent contributor to the manipulation of the texts and their reception.