Stylistic Deviation Of Feng Tang’s Translation Of Stray Birds

Stray Birds is a collection of free verse poems written by the famous Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and published in 1916.In 2015,it was translated by the modern Chinese writer,Feng Tang.Because of his bold diction,explicit description of sexuality and the usage of internet slangs in eight poems,it caused quite a stir in the field of translation and literature in China.Feng’s version attracted furious remarks and harsh criticism from the public,so much so that Zhejiang Literature& Art Publishing House removed all the copies from the market.The “revoke event” has aroused a new round of studies on Tagore’s Stray Birds and its Chinese translations.Nevertheless,the studies on Feng Tang’s translation are far from sufficient.Firstly,Feng’s translation is undervalued and biased,since some scholars don’t take Feng’s translation as a serious literary work of high research value.Secondly,the previous studies mainly focus on the subjectivity,the transmission and acceptation of Feng’s translation,the language appropriateness and faithfulness.Few is done on his stylistic features and artistic effects.Besides,most researchers limit their studies on the discussion of the eight rebelling poems and the supporting materials are mostly derived from the comments of critics on the internet,the conclusions they have reached are neither comprehensive nor objective due to the insufficient corpus.Therefore,in order to have a more comprehensive and scientific knowledge of Feng’s translation,with the Stylistic Marked-ness theory put forward by Liu Miqing as the theoretical framework,this thesis analyzes how Feng’s version stylistically deviates from the original text in terms of formal elements including lexicon,register,phonology,syntax and figures of speech.Based on a detailed text analysis,the stylistic features and artistic effects of Feng’s translation are analyzed and the reasons behind the deviations are given.This thesis mainly consists of five parts.Introduction briefs the research background,research objectives,reseach significance and research questions of this thesis.Chapter One reviews the relevant studies on Feng Tang’s translation of Stray Birds in China these years.Chapter Two introduces the history of Marked-ness theory and the connotations of the five form markers.Chapter Three is a detailed text analysis on the original text,Feng Tang’s translation and Zheng Zhenduo’s translation from the perspectives of phonological markers,syntactical markers,lexical markers,register markers and the markers of figures of speech.Chapter Four analyzes the features of stylistic deviation of Feng Tang’s translation and the underlying reasons.After a detailed textual analysis,it is found that Feng’s translation stylistically deviates from the original text on the above five formal aspects in varying degrees.The phonology and syntax are the two formal markers where the stylistic deviation of Feng’s translation happens most extensively;the deviation happens on lexicon and register is the root cause of language vulgarity;as for markers of figures of speech,Feng’s translation shows a tendancy to strengthen the rhetorical effects.As a whole,the language of Feng’s translation is more poetic and modern than Zheng’s translation.The stylistic deviation of Feng’s translation is mainly caused by three reasons: the pursuit of minimalism and rhyming;Feng’s translation views and the consideration of reader’s expectations.Although Feng’s translation is embedded with a strong personality and deviates from the original text to a large extent,and is far from faithful to the original text,it is undeniable that there are still many shining points in his rendering.Compared with Zheng’s and other translators’ versions,Feng’s translation is more poetic and diversified in form and language.As a modern-day translator,Feng has made a breakthrough in language performance and cultural communication which was not desirably achieved in previous Chinese versions due to the limitation of ages.Feng’s translation is a meaningful attempt which brings back Tagore and his brilliant work Stray Birds to contemporary readers’ eyes.