Study On André Lévy And His Translation Of The Ancient Chinese Novels

Andre Levy,French sinologist and translator,has devoted his whole life to the translation and the research of the ancient Chinese literature,especially to those of the classic novels in vernacular Chinese.He has brought to the French-speaking world many translations during his career of almost half a century.He is the first and only person who has finished the complete French translations of the two masterpieces,Fleur en Fiole d’Or(Jin Ping Mei cihua)and La Peregrination vers l ’Ouest(Xiyou ji),which are two among the "Four Extraordinary Books" of the Ming dynasty.He has also presented to the French-speaking readers without precedent the complete Chroniques de l’etrange,the Liaozhai zhiyi of Pu Songling.In addition,he managed to translate a quantity of short stories and novellas from Qingpingshan tang huaben,Feng Menglong’s San Yan,Ling Mengchu’s Er Pai,as well as the chuanqi of the Tang dynasty.Thanks to him,several erotic stories of the Ming dynasty,such as Huanxi yuanjia,Yipian qing and Bian er chai,are introduced to their readership in France.At the same time,Andre Levy never ceased his studies on ancient Chinese literature,in which we can see some relevance to his translation practices.His research and translations are complementary to each other,and between the two exalted a positive interaction benefiting both parts indefinitely.Considering his contribution,we take Andre Levy and his translation of the ancient Chinese novel as the object of study through textual analysis of his translations,published works and articles.Invoking several theories of translation,we would like to present a detailed study of Andre Levy’s translation activities throughout his life,concerning his choice of text and the interaction between his translations and his literary research.From there,we are going to explicate some principles and strategies as well,which he adopted and applied throughout his translation.The thesis consists of the introduction,three chapters and the conclusion.In the introduction,we give a retrospection of the life of Andre Levy and present a panorama of all his translations and scholarly writings.We point out the lacuna in existing studies and thence we highlight the purpose of this thesis.The keyword of the first chapter is "choice".We first go back to the time when Andre Levy decided to learn Chinese in France and later discovered the novels in vernacular Chinese in Vietnam.We try to work out a reason why he finally took them as the main object of his translations and research.We then establish a detailed catalog which covers all the ancient Chinese novels chosen and translated by him to reveal the common characteristics of the chosen works,and finally arrive at an analysis of his literary taste.According to this analysis,Andre Levy always had a clear preference for the marginal works,whose marginality is embodied in two main aspects:the genre and the theme.Moreover,his choices reflect the considerations he had given to the narratology,the continuity and the evolution of Chinese literature in the framework of the world literature.The second chapter aims to highlight the interaction between Andre Levy’s literary research and his translations.With his articles and books since 1963,we demonstrate his extensive knowledge of the ancient Chinese novel and intend to show the influence of his research on his choice of text and accuracy of translations.We are also interested in how his translation practices had directed him to Chinese literature studies in various fields.In this case,we divide this chapter into two parts.One analyzes his translation and research of several collections of short stories and novellas in vernacular Chinese,such as Qingpingshan tang huaben,the San Yan and the Er Pai;the other focuses on those of the brilliant saga of the Ming dynasty,Fleur en Fiole d’Or(Jin Ping Mei cihua).In the third chapter,we find reflections made by Andre Levy in various articles and interviews.On that basis,we enter the texts to discuss his translation principles and strategies.In this chapter we have three sections,each of which contains a great deal of detailed analysis of the extracts of his work and their original text in Chinese.In the first part,Andre Levy always took the readership into consideration in his translation practice.For him,it is essential to take into account what the intended audience expects and to modify his translation strategies for the sake of different publishing houses.According to him,the fidelity of translation is a question of dosage and a translator should master it.The principle requires that no one can compromise fidelity in pursuit of beauty.Fidelity in literal aspect is crucial.Any attempt to misinterpret the source language for the convenience of understanding in target language is unacceptable,whereas a strictly literal translation would be inconceivable.Respect for the literary style,as well as the flow of narration,constitutes a much more fundamental fidelity.In his opinion,the "impossibility" of translation is embodied in the intransposability of the particular relations between Chinese language and its characters,the absence of the perfect solution for the restitution of the "two languages" and the potential intangibility of certain works.We therefore intend to examine the strategies he had applied to overcome the difficulties of translation and arrive at a conclusion that Andre Levy accommodated such "imperfectness" in his work.In the last part we argue that,as far as his translations of the ancient Chinese novel are concerned,Andre Levy always had a good plan when making his choices of texts.In fact,there is a noticeable relevance among all the works translated by Andre Levy,from which we tend to infer that he had the plan to reveal a chronology indicating the evolution of the fictional genre of Chinese literature.As a sinologist who attached as much importance to research as to translations,Andre Levy guided his choices of texts with in-depth explorations and mastery of the ancient Chinese literature.In his case,a maximized degree of text understanding leads to a perfection of the translation.The rationale he followed and the strategies he adopted have effectively settled some embarrassing situations of translation.In the end,we would like to pay tribute to Professor Andre Levy who passed away a few months ago.By writing this thesis,we intend to commemorate all the efforts he has made for the cause of the translation and reception of Chinese literature in France throughout his lifetime.We hope that this study would serve a bit for the "going-out"enterprise of Chinese literature.