3 Howard Goldblatt’s Translation of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out ７

3.1 Rewriting ７

3.1.1 Ideology ７

3.1.2 Poetics ９

3.2 Reconstruction １０

3.2.1 Discourse Reconstruction １０

3.2.2 Paraphrase １１

3.2.3 Gain Metho １２

3.3 Summary １３

4 Significance of Translator’s Visibility and Invisibility in Translation １５

5 Conclusion １７

Bibliography １９

1Introduction    In October, 2012, The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Mo Yan "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary," (The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012) which can be regarded as a milestone in Chinese literature. More and more attention has been attached to not only Mo Yan’s works but also the translators of his works, among whom is the most eye-catching one, the American sinologist Howard Goldblatt, for he has played a significant role in introducing Mo Yan’s works to the English-speaking world. He has translated more than 50 works of over 20 famous Chinese writers, such as Yang Jiang, Feng Jicai, Jia Pingao and so forth. His translations, rigorous and recherché, add British and American literature’s flavor into the translated versions of Chinese literature, which contributes to the further spreading of Chinese literature to the world. Moreover, his translations are highly appreciated by the original authors and Western literary criticism and scholars.

Meanwhile, with the increasing focus on Mo Yan’s works and his translators, some people even wonder whether it is Mo Yan’s works or his translators that deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature. German sinologist Gu Bing（2009:45）once said Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize in Literature mostly attributes to Howard Goldblatt’s translations. Admittedly, Howard Goldblatt has indeed made great contribution to the wide spreading of Mo Yan’s works. On account of cultural differences and plenty of Chinese dialects existing in Mo Yan’s works, it is a difficult and skillful job to accurately comprehend and translate his works.

In order to tackle with these barriers, Howard Goldblatt make use of various kinds of strategies and adds his own understanding into his translations. Therefore, the thesis is to resort Lawrence Venuti’s Translator’s Invisibility Theory as the theoretical basis to explore Goldblatt’s translation strategies in the aspect of rewriting and reconstruction and the reasons of Mo Yan’s success as well as the further direction of Chinese literature translations.

2 Literature Review 

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is one of Mo Yan’s masterpieces. There are many studies about it from different aspects, such as functional equivalence, domestication and foreignization. While in this thesis, Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, as the most typical one, will be analyzed from the perspective of translator’s visibility and invisibility.

2.1 An Introduction to Mo Yan and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

Mo Yan, the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in China, was born in Gaomi Township of Shandong province in 1955. As a Chinese novelist and short story writer, he is famous for a series of rural works filled with the complex feelings of homesickness and he himself is classified as the writer of “home-seeking literature”. Mo Yan has written 11 novels, several novellas and short story collections, such as The Garlic Ballads (1988), The Republic of Wine (1993), Shifu: You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh and so on. According to rough statistics, Mo Yan’s works have been translated into at least 40 kinds of languages. He is best known to Western readers for his 1987 novel Red Sorghum Clan which was later adapted for the film Red Sorghum. In 2012, Mo Yan has received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his works as a writer “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” (The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012) The worldwide spreading of Mo Yan’s works demonstrates that Chinese literature has made a step forward in the “Going-Out” of Chinese literature.源:自*751~·论,文'网·www.751com.cn/ 文学翻译中译者的显身与隐身以《生死疲劳》葛译本为例(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_67820.html