UNSW Chinese Studies Seminar Series
4:15-5:30pm Tuesday 10 April 2018
Morven Brown Building Room 309, High Street, Gate 8, Kensington Campus
Lu Xun (1881-1936) has been widely regarded as the founder of modern Chinese literature. In response to the age of turmoil and repression in which he lived, his fiction came to feature irony manifested in artistic forms that ideally should be retained in English translation to achieve equivalence. Failure to do so would weaken or lose the ironical effect intended by Lu Xun and might result in Western readers disregarding the historical and social contexts of his time and thereby missing the thematic significance of his works. In view of the heretofore inadequate nature of research on this topic, this paper will explore artistic forms of irony in Lu Xun’s fiction, the preservation of form and ironical effect in English translations of Lu Xun’s works by William A. Lyell, Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, and Julia Lovell and their strategies of compensation for inevitable loss due to cultural and linguistic differences between Chinese and English.
The seminar paper will be presented in English. Discussion will be bilingual.
Yang Yikuan is a visiting PhD research student at UNSW from Beijing Normal University. His other research projects include the translation of irony in the works of Jane Austin into Chinese.speaker’s email: yangyikuan87@163.com
convenor: Prof. Jon von Kowallis, Chair, Chinese Studies, School of Humanities and Languages, UNSW
email: j.vonkowallis@unsw.edu.au
tel. 9385-1020