An Analysis Of The Chinese-English Version Of Lu Xun Za Wen Xuan From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

As “the Father of Chinese Modern Fiction”, Lu Xun was one of the most important writers, thinkers and revolutionists in the 20 th century. His essays have drawn much attention of the scholars at home and abroad. Many scholars and researchers have done lots of work on his essays, but there are few researches on the English version of his essays. From the perspective of literary stylistics, this research focuses on the study of English version of Lu Xun Za Wen Xuan(Lu Xun Selected Essays).As a new-born discipline, the purpose of literary stylistics is to interpret the thematic meaning of the literary text and its aesthetic value. As a bridge between linguistics and literary criticism, stylistics pays much attention to the author’s choice of words to express and strengthen the thematic meaning and aesthetic effect.Lu Xun’s essay is a monument in the field of Chinese literature. This thesis is mainly focused on five essays, which are chosen from Lu Xun Za Wen Xuan translated by Yang Xianyi and Dai Naidie. The literary stylistics provides a novel angle of view to study the essays. What’s more, a few mini-databases are set up to analyze the lexicology and syntax of the source text and target text. The author hopes this study could give some help to more readers in understanding Lu Xun’s works so as to widen the scope of research on Lu Xun’s essays.After introducing literature review and the theoretical basis, the thesis analyzes Lu Xun Za Wen Xuan and its English version from the two levels of lexicology and syntax. The study finds that: from the macroscopic aspect, if the translator has the sense of style, he or she would be able to make the translation better correspond to theoriginal text in words, sentences and discourse. In terms of literary stylistics, the Yangs(Yang Xianyi Dainaidie) have done very well in translating Lu Xun’s essays. In terms of microscopic aspect, i.e, to convey the original meaning as fully as possible,the Yangs have adopted various types of translating strategies. However, the literal translation at the syntax level is adopted far more frequently than at the lexicology level. Because of the difference of languages, there are some flaws in their translation which needs further discussion.The thesis comes to the following conclusions: the literary stylistics is beneficial to the translation of literary works and it can serve as a guide for other translations and researches concerning literary works. If the translator pays enough attention to style features of a text, his or her translated version would be much closer to the original text in form and content.