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Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, as one of Mo Yan’s representative works, is a meta-fiction about the story of a landlord who is reincarnated in the form of various animals during the Chinese land reform movement. The landlord observes and satirizes Communist society. Enclosing the topic of land, this novel gives an account of the relationship between peasants and land. Moreover, it demonstrates peasants’ life and their spirit of perseverance, optimism and tenaciousness since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Extremely prolific, Mo Yan wrote Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out in only 42 days. He composed more than 500,000 characters contained in the original manuscript on traditional Chinese paper. When asked to recommend one of his books to the college students in the interview by the Nobel jury after Mo won the prize，he said that firstly they should read Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out published in Sweden because this novel represented his writing style more comprehensively and some new exploration on novel consciousness．This novel is reviewed highly by the literary scholars abroad，though some critics suggested the narrative style was at times difficult to follow．Jonathan Spence (2008:112) described it as “a wildly visionary and creative novel, constantly mocking and rearranging itself and jolting the reader with its own internal commentary. This is politics as pathology…a vast, cruel and complex story.”(Jonathan, 2008) Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out wins several prizes enhancing Mo Yan’s readership and honor, such as “Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2006” awarded by Japanese government, World Chinese Novel Prize by Hong Kong Baptist University in 2008 and so on. These achievements of this work of Mo Yan motivate the paper to select this novel as a case study and conduct a specific research on the English version in the light of translator’s visibility and invisibility.文献综述
2.2 Previous Studies of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and Howard Goldblatt’s Translations
As Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is a representative work of hallucinatory realism, many a research mainly focuses on this novel and its English translated version. In terms of this novel, some scholars study the land complex of Mo Yan---Gaomi northeast countryside haunting in mind. Some conduct research on the awareness of Buddhism---life’s bitterness and the reincarnation of life and death. Considering that this thesis emphasizes on Howard Goldblatt’s English translation of Sheng Si Pi Lao --- Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, some critical articles on this novel from the perspective of literature at home and abroad will not be discussed in detail here. This thesis will just refer to a thesis written by Gao Peihua who majored in Chinese modern and contemporary literature in Jilin University---The Narrative Art and the Stylistic Features of Sheng Si Pi Lao finished in April 2008(Gao, 2008). The author conducts a relatively systematic study of the Chinese version from narrative point of view, character’s dialogues and languages features, and openness of the theme. As for the English version, a master’s thesis needs to be mentioned---“The Application of Explicitation in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out in the Perspective of Stylistic Approach of Translation” by Shao Lu of Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in 2013(Shao, 2013). In this dissertation, Shao studies the explicitation as a strategy in English translation of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and points out that explicitation is one of the prominent stylistic markers of the target text by Howard Goldblatt.