Exploring Moss Roberts’ Three Kingdoms By Pure Language Theory

Three Kingdoms is one of the four great Chinese master pieces. It is the first Zhang Hui novel in our country, and it is also a traditional Chinese novel with each chapter headed by a couplet giving the gist of its content. In China, Three Kingdoms has given mythic status to the century chronicles (A.D.168-280.). The book starts from the Yellow Turbans Uprising (184) and ends in Xi Jin Dynasty (280), totally including97years. It describes the contradictions and struggles among three political and military groups-Wei, Shu and Wu, which respectively ruled by Cao Cao, Liu Bei, Sun Quan. The "loyalty" among the brothers, Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, are highly appreciated. The novel vividly reflects the experiences and wisdom of the fights by describing military, political, diplomatic incidents among the three countries. It has made many artistic achievements, and successfully created over more than400distinct but lively characters.Since Three Kingdoms published in China, it has been translated into nearly20languages. As for the translation version in English, they can be divided into abridged translation and cover-to-cover translation. But in this thesis, Moss Roberts’ Three Kingdoms will be chosen as the research object, which is the newest and also regarded as the best version by experts among all translations. The translator, a well-known Western sinologist, was born in New York, for more than30years he was devoting himself to Chinese culture and was long active in New York University and Sinological fields of the United States.In the1860s, Deconstruction firstly appeared in philosophy field. Then it gradually affected others, such as the field in architecture, literary criticism, translation and other humanities and social science. Deconstruction is essentially a group of innovation, it opposes and challenges authority, fights against hierarchical ideas that one is inferior to another in a duality system. In view of the scholars who represent the Deconstruction theory of translation, no one believes absolute loyalty between the original text and the target text, and they regard translation as a complementarity for the source language. In The Task of The Translator, Walter Benjamin explains the relationship between the original text and the translation. He says the relationship between them should not be like master and servant in traditional translation theories, but be equal and complementary; he explores text translatability under the framework of language philosophy. In his eyes, translatability is the inherent value of the translation, and it is also the regeneration capacity of some works; In The Task of The Translator, Walter Benjamin firstly questions the faithful principle.Pure Language is not only an obscure and abstract but an incredibly important concept. It is regarded by Benjamin as the highest language of the humans, which can only be found in a variety of specific and individual natural languages. As per Walter Benjamin, the translator’s task is to develop Pure Language during the process of translation. He believes that different languages can claim for a same thing, only does the translator seize the eternity in the works and constantly let source language updated, the original text and the target text can be harmonious, thus, Pure Language will be infinitely deplored, and the life of the original will be continuous accordingly.Through Three Kingdoms’ English translation study, the present thesis will go to a feasibility analysis for Benjamin’s Pure Language. The thesis will begin with an introduction for the importance of Three Kingdoms in Chinese literature, as well as the background of the translator. In Chapter Two, a Three Kingdoms’review for the current research including abroad and at home will be presented. The thesis’s methodology will be told in the meanwhile; the writer will also explain the process how the idea comes up to establish the relationship between Three Kingdoms and Pure Language. In Chapter Three, a series of theories will be tidied up. They includes Deconstruction, translatability, especially the concept of Pure Language; it is worth mentioning that the author will show Walter Benjamin’s translation theories through a chart in this part. In Chapter Four, excellent examples and ill-considered examples of Pure Language will br demonstrated respectively. The last Chapter will tell of the limitations of this thesis, and some suggestions for the future research will be declared.