Research On Imagination From "the Other" Of Red Poppies

Red Poppies is a full-length novel written by the Tibetan writer A Lai,which has won the Fifth Mao Dun Literature Prize in 2000.Now nearly 30 countries have purchased the rights to The Dust Settles,with over one million copies in print and nearly 600 in the World Cat collection.This novel is a model of overseas communication of contemporary Chinese novels,with the English translation of Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin,in particular,being the most successful in the English-speaking world.The novel’s popularity is mainly due to its unique writing of the nation-state community,to its author,Alai,who is of mixed Tibetan and Hui ethnic group origin and travels through heterogeneous cultures,and to its translator,Howard Goldblatt.As an overseas sinologist with a dual cultural identity,he has re-imagined the novel in a way that meets the aesthetic interests of readers in the English-speaking world and has been well received by them.From author,translator to reader,it is exactly how contemporary Chinese novels construct the “self” in interaction with “the other” in overseas communication.This study analyses the writing and imagining of the nation-state community in the original text and in the translation,by taking the transmission of Red Poppies in the English-speaking world as an example.The main body of the paper is divided into four parts,which include:Part I.The analysis of the writing of the nation-state in Red Poppies at the author’s level,revealing the image of an open and developing Tibet image presented by Alai based on the "pluralistic" view of the nation-state,and the people’s identities with Tibetan ethnicity.Part II.The analysis of the reproduction of the nation-state imagination from the perspective of the translator Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin,discussing the loss of the cultural connotation and the strengthening and dismantling of the nation-state community of "China".Part III.Based on the English literature,the variation in the acceptance of the novel by the academia,the media and the general readers is analyzed;Part IV.It is suggested that the overseas communication of contemporary Chinese literature should focus on a combination of internal and external interactions,facing the scrutiny and criticism of “the other” and constructing its “self”.In conclusion,on the basis of our ontological research,this research pays more attention to the receiving end and explore the literary and communication value of Red Poppies in the interaction with “the Other”.