摘 要

威廉福克纳所著《献给艾米丽的玫瑰》是美国南方哥特文学中最富代表性的作品之一。小说讲述了艾米丽小姐的悲剧人生，其恐怖悬疑色彩也相当成功地给读者们留下了深刻印象。其独特的哥特式叙述风格融恐怖、死亡及浪漫色彩于一体，制造其恐怖悬疑的气氛，给读者们留下了极为深刻的印象。译介过程中，也有为数不少的译者致力于重现小说的哥特叙述风格，一定程度上，他们的汉语译本也达到了其目的。在小说现有的汉译本中，杨岂深所译《献给艾米丽的玫瑰》被广泛认为是最具有吸引力的。本文以杨岂深译本为例，从翻译目的、翻译策略及翻译方法来探讨其哥特风格的重现。

关键词：《献给艾米丽的玫瑰》；哥特风格；杨岂深汉译本；翻译策略及方法

Abstract

A Rose for Emily, written by William Faulkner, is regarded as one of the important representative works of southern gothic fiction in America. The story writes about Miss Emily’s tragic life with horror and suspense, which successfully and greatly impresses readers. It is famous for the gothic narrative style which combines fiction with horror, death, and at times romance. For a variety of translators, they attempted to represent the gothic style of the novel in their translations, and to some extent, they did. Among the Chinese versions, Yang Qishen’s version was found the most intriguing, and the present author resolved to find out how the gothic style is represented in his translation. The paper makes a thorough research of Yang’s translation by means of analyzing his translation notions, strategies and methods which make great contributions to the representation of the gothic style.

Key words: A Rose for Emily, Gothic style, Yang Qishen’s translation, translation strategies and methods

Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 A Rose for Emily 1

1.2 The gothic style 1

2 Literature Review 3

2.1 Translations of A Rose for Emily 3

2.2 Translation-related research of A Rose for Emily 3

3 Theoretical Foundation —— the Skopos Theory of Translation Studies 5

3.1 Development of the Skopos Theory 5

3.2 Rules of the Skopos Theory 5

4 The Analysis of Representation of Gothic Style in Yang Qishen’s Chinese Translation 7

4.1 An evidence-based analysis of representing the gothic style in Yang’s translation 7

4.2 A discussion of translation strategies in Yang’s translation 11

5 Conclusion 13

References 14

Acknowledgements 15

On Representation of the Gothic Style in A Rose for Emily

- A Case Study of Yang Qishen's Chinese Translation

1 Introduction

1.1 A Rose for Emily

William Faulkner is considered one of the most important writers of the southern literature of the United States, primarily known for his novels and short stories. His writing is tactful in story-telling with complex syntax, featured by his creative writing skills such as great application of stream of consciousness, interior monologue, multiple points of view, disruption of the time sequence and complicated psychologic changes of characters. A Rose for Emily, one of the best known and most widely read short stories written by William Faulkner, also one of the representatives of gothic fiction, describes the huge transition and fierce conflict between the southern traditional culture and the northern advanced values after the American civil war (Kerry, 1989). Miss Emily, as a declining aristocracy under the special background, insists on pursuing her love but ends with poisoning her lover to death and sleeping with his body every day and night till she dies (Faulkner, 1950).

1.2 The gothic style

The origin of gothic fiction is attributed to English author Horace Walpole in the late eighteenth century, with his famous novel The Castle of Otrant written in 1764, which creates the early classical mode of gothic fiction. After its appearance, it gradually comes into sight and gets welcomed by readers due to its unique features. First, there are some notable factors in gothic fiction such as terror, mystery, supernatural, misfortune, death, decadence, old house with ghost living in, craziness and family curse. Second, it always has similar backgrounds like waste land, extreme weather, exoticism, collapsed castle, dilapidated basement and attic etc. Third, it also has its own special plot mode, such as brave hero defeating evil or monster with aid of his courage and wisdom, then saving abducted beautiful heroine from dangerous environment and getting married. As it increasingly develops in literature field, more excellent representatives are read by people: Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otrant, Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum; or, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Harmon, 2013).

In A Rose for Emily, Faulkner creates gothic mainly from three aspects. At first, he applies the theme of death through the whole plot, including the murder of Homer Barron, the natural death of Emily’s father and Emily herself. Besides, the story starts and ends with funeral, strengthening the strong gothic impression---death. Secondly, the grotesque and arabesque in the story are closely connected with characters. Faulkner sets special bizarre roles, especially Emily and her servant Tobe. Both of them act weirdly and far from people in the town (Lu, 2013). Thirdly, the author gives his own exquisite setting to strengthen the gothic atmosphere. For environment, he describes terrifying scenes, including the big, squarish frame house, the closed door for a long time, the dim light, enclosed space and the corpse on bed, delivering a feeling of uneasy terror to readers. For time, Faulkner totally ignores the imprisonment of time, rendering readers to find meaningful clues to make an effect of unique suspense (Zheng, 2014). Readers only find out the truth about Emily in the end because of some uncertain factors purposely arranged by Faulkner. Gruesome scenes and suspense contribute to a horrible gothic atmosphere. Based on his successful gothic arrangement, Yang Qishen also vividly expresses the eeriness effect in his translation and tries to tremendously push the development of gothic novel with his distinctive translation skills and strategies, which the paper will emphatically explore and study later.

2 Literature Review

2.1 Translations of A Rose for Emily

During the research, the author has found three Chinese versions of A Rose for Emily, respectively translated by Yang Qishen, Yan Linhai and Yezi. All of them have their own artistic characteristics and special receivers group. This paper mainly discusses Yang and Yan’s versions. The former is much earlier than the latter, finished in 1980s. Yang tries to reproduce the gothic story successfully as possible by applying his different strategies and techniques, subtle adjustment of characters’ emotion as well. Yan finishes his version in 2011 with his own unique comprehension and expression methods.