A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Versions Of Fu Sheng Liu Ji:an Intertextual Perspective

Literary text carries the author’s thoughts between the lines.Literal translation not only emphasizes the faithfulness of words and sentences,but also truthfully reflects the author’s thoughts.Fu Sheng Liu Ji is an autobiographical essay written by Shen Fu during the Jiaqing period of the Qing Dynasty.Although Shen Fu lived a simple life,he built a "Peach Blossoms" with his nib.Lin Yutang was the first translator to translate the book into English and introduced it to the Western world.Lin Yutang chose this book because it has spiritual and emotional resonance.Shen Fu and his wife’s pursuit of nature,indifferent to fame and wealth,is consistent with his advocates of leisure life,and Shen Fu’s writing style and his advocates of "spirit" and "self-centered,leisurely lifestyle" is also very similar.Intertextuality theory emphasizes that any text is the absorption and transformation of its pre-text.The creation space of the author of the original text hides countless intertextual signs.These hidden intertextual signs,also the traces of the authors’ intertextual memory,contain several forms of the interweaving and mutual dependence of literary works.When facing literary texts,the translator must recognize and continue such memory in the target text,and do more translation and writing work.As a famous writer,scholar,linguist and translator in modern China,Lin Yutang has written a lot in his life.He spent most of his creative career floating between Chinese and Western cultures,delivering Chinese culture to the Western world.His literary world is a treasure trove of many topics for academic research.From the perspective of intertextuality theory,this paper intends to compare two English versions of Fu Sheng Liu Ji,one by Lin Yutang and the other by Leonard Pratt and Chiang Suhui.It aims to discuss the embodiment of Lin Yutang’s Taoist thoughts in his version,and to highlight the differences of translators from different cultural backgrounds.At the same time,the author finds out that the researches on Lin Yutang’s translation are mostly focused on the translator’s subjectivity and on the intertextuality theory itself.Few scholars discuss Lin Yutang’s Taoist thoughts based on the intertextuality theory.This paper makes a comparative study of the two English versions of Fu Sheng Liu Ji.It aims to sort out the cultural images in the two versions,and to highlight the Taoist thoughts of Li Yutang through the analysis of specific examples.The studies on Lin Yutang’s Taoist research are mostly reflected in his other works,while few are focused on his translated version of Fu Sheng Liu Ji.Brief and simple as it is,the study is hoped to offer some suggestions for further studies.