A Stylistic Approach To Two Chinese Versions Of The Sound And The Fury

The Sound and the Fury is William Faulkner’s major work. With its fragmented nature, its distorted chronology and its distinctive narrative method, it departs radically from more traditional novels. Its two translated Chinese versions are also very influential in Chinese literary field as a whole. This thesis is intended to compare those two versions of The Sound and the Fury from the stylistic perspective. Stylistics is not introduced into China until the 1980s. But within a few years, it has been developed very quickly and is promising in facilitating the translation theory.Mr. Li Wenjun’s Xuan Hua Yu Sao Dong (《喧哗与骚动》) and Mr. Li Dengxin’s Sheng Yin Yu Feng Nu(《声音与愤怒》)are acknowledged as two classic versions of The Sound and the Fury. By analyzing the characteristics of the two versions at lexical, syntactical and rhetorical levels through description, interpretation and evaluation of the Benjy, Quentin, Jason and Dilsey sections, the author demonstrates the importance of applying literary stylistics in translation practice. It is generally assumed that Li Wenjun’s version is more successful in recreating the thematic meaning of the original version, while Li Dengxin’s is better in reflecting the original form. However, after a close observation, the author finds that that conclusion is too hasty because actually both of the translators attach great importance to the deviant and foregrounded features of the original text as a whole in the meanwhile they also make efforts to conduct some normalization as a result of ignoring its stylistic significance or because of the intention to make the translated version more acceptable to the reader of the target text. Therefore, the author reasserts the application of literature stylistics in translation and the adoption of a“norm-to-norm”or“deviant-for-deviant”translation strategy to recreate the“literariness”of the original work.