A Comparative Study On The Two Versions Of Xi You Ji In The View Of Translating Literariness

Xi You Ji, one of the four classics in Chinese classic literature, is the fictionalized legendary novel with combination of essence of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. The novel, which has been adopted into TV series and motion pictures, has been translated into more than10languages and is well received in the world. It vividly describes the legendary pilgrimage to India of the great Buddhist monk Xuan Zang and his four animal disciples. It shows a colorful world of fairies and demons and marks as the peak of romanticism and ancient mythological novels. The artistic achievement shall rely on its artistic imagination, moving and complex plot, vivid artistic images and humorous language.Literary works, carrier of human civilization, can not only enrich the expression of a language, but also preserve culture and share civilization with other nations. Literariness, the basis for existence of literary works, is a hot topic in contemporary literary criticism. The topic of this thesis shall be literariness as noumenon, essence and nature of literariness. In1921, Roman Jakobson, a Russian Formalist, proposed literariness, namely, the subject of literary science is not literature, but literariness, i.e. that which makes a given work a literary work. In fact, literariness can be performed on linguistic forms of poetic essence. It is considered that literariness shall be organized violence committed on ordinary speech. Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. People shall be attracted and reflected by the defamiliarization, which can extend the process of aesthetic perception and enable language with poetic functions in order to realize the literary aesthetics.After the discussion of proposal and development of literariness by Russian formalism and other schools, this thesis tries to investigate the mechanisms and realization of literariness in literary texts, which can be produced at phonological, syntactic and narrative level in the original and translated versions of Xi You Ji. The literariness, representation of value of literary works, can bring aesthetic perception to readers in both the source language and target language. By discussing the representation of literariness in linguistic forms in SL and TL, the artistic value can be realized and strategies of going abroad of Chinese culture shall be highlighted.Linguistic forms can be the source of literariness produced. Literariness can be reasons and conditions for succession of literary works, and literary works can be the consequence of realization of literariness. This thesis discusses the mechanism of producing literariness from the linguistic perspective, especially the most representative levels, like phonological, syntactic and narrative level. At phonological level, duplicated characters, rhyme in Fu and strategies for preservation of musicality in translated versions are discussed from the perspective of musicality. Focuses shall be on the four-character expressions and balanced yin-yang structure to show the conciseness and metric balance which is regarded as a source of literariness at syntactic level. Strategies of preserving literariness in translation shall also be worthy of discussing at this level. Point of view, characterization and other narrative devices are discussed to show the beauty of traditional narrative in China, although the discussion on mechanisms of producing literariness is difficult. The aesthetic perception in target language shall be of the same importance as in the source language at narrative level.The discussion on the two translated versions of Xi You Ji showed merits of each version, translators’the understanding and interpretation of source text and the efforts they made to translate the Chinese classics to foreign readers. However, Yu’s translated version can display the advantages of translators with Chinese background which can be made good use of to preserve the literariness at stylistic and narrative levels. Thus, significance of literary translation and translation studies from Chinese to foreign languages can also be shown in the study of translating literariness.