A Study On Li Jihong’s Retranslation Of Literary Classics From The Perspective Of Reader Reception Theory

Li Jihong,as a foreign literature translator has aroused heated discussions and controversy among respectively readers,translation and foreign literature world for his extensive retranslation of many writers’ representative works from western literary classics.William Somerset Maugham(1874-1965)is a trans-century well-known British realistic novelist and playwright,whose literary achievements and status have not received much attention in British literature.Maugham’s literary works have entered a “public domain” since 2015 which has brought a heat of retranslation and has aroused extensive related translation researches on his works.His representative work The Moon and Sixpence has been sought after by readers for its theme of pursuing dream and exploring humanity,and also classic translations which have provoked widespread discussion,research and retranslation over the years.The Moon and Sixpence has been the one retranslated most among his literary classics.This paper will take Li’s translation and paratexts(prologue and annotations)as research objects to analyze the different language style between his translation and others’ by close reading and comparison under the guidance of western reception theory;to analyze the reception of Li’s version among Chinese readers by exploring the preface,the content and type of annotations with the help of readers’ comments from Douban Reading so as to provide reference for the future study on literary retranslation.The findings show that paratexts of Li’s retranslation help target readers to understand western cultural context and the social background of the novel while too many introductions and annotations make the translation over explicit,which would easily distract readers from the text and diminish their reading interests.The domesticating translation on western culture and culture-loaded words lead to a loss of dissemination effects of its original text which ruins readers’ aesthetic expectation on the original culture.Moreover,the findings show that the multiple interpretability possessed by literary classics,the update language and the modest increase of paratext are helpful for readers to have a deep understanding on literary classics,and provide acase study for literary retranslation.