An Interpretation Of Creative Treason From The Perspective Of Rewriting Theory-a Case Study On Howard Goldblatt’s Translation The Republic Of Wine

“Creative treason” was first proposed by Robert Escarpit to denote the fundamental property of any translation endeavor. Since the “cultural turn” in translation studies in the 1970 s, however, “creative treason” has been endowed with new concepts and contents, and diverted from deviation at the linguistic level to deviation at higher levels such as the literary and cultural. And it is specifically these three levels of “creative treason” that this thesis is engaged to tackle. Considering that “creative treason” as a concept is too intricate to bring to study, the thesis examines its concrete representations in Goldblatt’s translated version of Mo Yan’s novel Jiu Guo. This novel is selected above all others because it features an appallingly magic-realistic plotting, an unprecedentedly peculiar composition and an inimitably colorful and fickle writing style, and thus supplies a supreme stage for the appearance of creative treason in translation.To more objectively decipher the mechanism of “creative treason”, the thesis recruits the theoretical support of Rewriting Theory put forward by Andre Lefevere, which holds that translation is a rewriting of the original text due to a range of manipulative factors, with ideology, poetics and patronage being the three most influential ones. As the theory breaks off the conventional source text-oriented and linguistic approach towards translation, it opens up a more comprehensive scope to reinterpret the phenomenon of rewriting in translation. And since what Andre Lefevere termed as rewriting is in concept correspondent to “creative treason” in that in a narrow sense they both refer to “formal divergence” in translation, and since Rewriting Theory acknowledges the inevitability and legitimacy of such divergence, it indirectly corroborates the necessity and validity of “creative treason” in translation. As such, Rewriting Theory proves a well-suited foundation on which to base the study of creative treason.Therefore, this thesis, with Rewriting Theory as the theoretical cornerstone and case study as the cardinal research method, examines the individual, cultural and social factors behind creative treason, each represented in the thesis by ideology, poetics and patronage, the three central factors in Rewriting Theory. To more exhaustively reveal how each of the three factors impacts on creative treason, the thesis scrutinizes the effect of each factor on creative treason at three levels, namely, the linguistic, the literary and the cultural. Through this study, the thesis not only objectively exposes the mechanism of “creative treason” and its merits and demerits in literary translation, but also displays and cross-examines the advantages and disadvantages of Rewriting Theory in accounting for creative treason both theoretically and pragmatically. All these findings will surely contribute to a more profound understanding of creative treason and the interpretive force of Rewriting Theory on creative treason.