2. Literature Review

2.1 Jonathan Swift and A Modest Proposal

A Modest Proposal is the most representative essay of Jonathan Swift, who is well known in China for his satirical novel “Gulliver’s Travels”. He is one of the greatest masters of English prose and master of satire. In     Swift’s lifetime, Ireland was mercilessly ruled by the English government which enforced prohibition laws upon Ireland on its exportation. Thus, its commerce was ruined and agriculture crippled. The working people of Ireland were oppressed and exploited by the English government and their landlords, and the streets were crowded with beggars. A large number of people were struggling with starvation while the rich “fine gentlemen” from England did nothing but indulging themselves with the luxuries exploited from the poor. Deeply astounded and enraged, Jonathan Swift wrote this famous prose. He imitated the uncaring attitude of the British landlords and referred to the poor people as “creatures”, “goods” or “commodities” and made this “proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public”. With the special power of satire and irony, he exposed the vice of the society, the cruelty and brutality of the rich and the authorities both at home and abroad, taking off their mask of hypocritical charity and presented a vivid picture of the misfortune and miseries of the poor. 

Swift’s prose is distinguished among his fellow prose writers mostly for two reasons: his style is extremely plain, and his ironies are extraordinarily bitter. His language resembles people’s daily talk, with few scholarly lexes from high register. When reading his prose, one feels at ease, effortless and off guard. So we can say that the diction of the plain style is the most common words we use in everyday conversations, the sentence structure also resembles the predicate-object order used in daily talks. The figurative devices are comparatively less used in plain-styled prose than in other works. However, in Swift’s work, there is one figurative device which is lavishly used, and it is also in using this figurative device that Swift is at his best -- irony. As the master of irony, Swift is expert in creating a bitter contrast by choosing certain words over others which will create a thought-provoking effect against the overall calm and peaceful tone. He also tends to pretend to be a naïve or even fallible narrator who talks in a way that would irritate anyone who reads his work, while at the same time enable them to see the truth through all those ostensive interpretations. All these factors contribute to Swift’s high status in British literature and have made his works a subject matter which deserves careful study and research.

2.2 Two Chinese versions of A Modest Proposal

There are several translated versions of this essay in China, among which Zhou Zuoren’s is the earliest. First published in 1923, Zhou’s translation inevitably bores some traces of the age he lived in. The translation was written in modern vernacular Chinese. Although some dictions Zhou chose could be considered slightly arcane in today’s modern Chinese, the form of the language itself in general is the same as that we use today. More than eighty years after Zhou’s version was published, a new translated version of the same source text met the readers. In Liu Bingshan’s selection of British Essays On the Cries of London published in 2007, A Modest Proposal was presented under the title “育婴刍议”, inheriting the same title translated by Mr. Zhou. This version becomes a well-accepted version.