A Comparative Study Of The Two Chinese Versions Of Martin Eden From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

Literary stylistics is an important discipline that connects linguistics and literarycriticism, and it has a crucial effect on translation and translation criticism with uniqueanalysis and evaluation perspective. The theory and analytical method of literary stylisticsplays a great guiding role in literary translation, particularly fictional translation, it canprovide references for the translators, ascending literary accomplishment, strengtheningtranslators' attention to the style and improving the level of translation.Jack London is regarded as “the Father of the Proletariat Literature of America”, andMartin Eden is an outstanding representative work of his, which was published in1909. Itis a semi-autobiographical novel, in which Jack London describes his life from childhoodto famous through the bumpy experience of Martin Eden. The vivid description of detailsattract readers eyeball, with remarkable stylistic characteristics and abundant rhetoricmethods. Mr. Wu Lao thought highly of the work and regarded as “part of the humancultural heritage”. The novel has been translated into many versions and attracted manyscholars' research interest in China. However, most of them limited their attention on thetheme,“the American dream” and individualism. This paper does a comparative study ofthe two Chinese versions of Martin Eden from a perspective of literary stylistics, aiming atproviding a new research perspective on the Chinese versions of Martin Eden.The paper builds itself on Style in Fiction by Leech and short, and the concepts of“deceptive equivalence” raised by Shen Dan will be adopted, too. This paper will selecttexts on character description and conversation as data, and conduct a comparative study onMartin Eden from four categories: lexical category, grammatical category, figures ofspeech and context and cohesion, by analyzing both the style of source texts and targettexts, to show the different stylistic effects the two Chinese versions have achieved, though the comparison we can see version1surpasses the other in translation of style, from whichthe paper shows how literary stylistic approach guides fictional translation.