A Comparative Study On The Chinese Translations Of The Picture Of Dorian Gray From The Perspective Of Cognitive Narratology

The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only novel by Oscar Wilde,a well-known English playwright.It embodies Wilde’s aestheticism of “art for art’s sake” and has great literary value.As Wilde’s transitional work from drama to full-length narrative fiction,this novel has a strong dramatic style and uses many narrative techniques.Since Yu Dafu translated the preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1922,the novel has now been translated into more than twenty Chinese versions.The present study selects two classical versions,namely,Rong Rude’s version,a representative translation,and Huang Yuanshen’s version,a widely circulated translation.With cognitive narratology as the theoretical framework,the present author will make a descriptive and comparative analysis of the two translated versions.Cognitive narratology emerged in the mid-1990 s and has become one of the most dynamic branches of post-classical narratology.It combines narratology with cognitive science and contributes to the revival of narratology in the West in its unique way.It is a trend of interdisciplinary research to apply the theories and methods of cognitive narratology in literary translation studies.However,such theories are still in its infancy in China.Systematic and in-depth research results are scarce,and studies applying it to the comparison of translations are even rarer.Based on this,this study adopts David Herman’s cognitive narratology to compare and analyze The Picture of Dorian Gray and its two Chinese versions.To be specific,the thesis uses the method of textual and comparative analysis to describe and compare Rong Rude’s translation and Huang Yuanshen’s translation in terms of polychrony and hypothetical focalization.The results of the study show that:（1）At the level of narrative time,Rong’s translation uses many temporal cues to shift scenes.In contrast,Huang’s translation juxtaposes narratives in different time domains,which better conveys the polychronic feature of the original text;（2）at the level of narrative focalization,compared with Rong’s translation,Huang’s translation tends to create a hypothetical witness to observe the characters and environment in the story.From the perspective of cognitive narratology,Huang’s version better preserves the narrative style of the original,thus better mobilizing the cognitive process of the reader.The originality of this study lies in the detailed comparison and analysis of two typical versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray in the framework of cognitive narratology.This study verifies the applicability of cognitive narratology in translation studies,expands the dimensions of literary translation research,and is also a beneficial exploration of the retranslation study on Wilde’s works.