ABSTRACT
Translation has played a crucial and indispensable role in the canonization of the Chinese Nobel Laureate Mo Yan’s novels in the West. Undoubtedly, the huge success of Mo Yan’s novels in the Anglophone world can be attributed to the enormous social and symbolic capital possessed by the author himself and the translator Howard Goldblatt. However, it is arguably also the translator’s re-narration of these novels in the target language that has contributed to their successful reception by the target readers. In this regard, narrative theories may be able to provide powerful theoretical, analytical and explanatory tools for the study of literary translation. Drawing on the theory of cognitive narratology, this chapter takes Howard Goldblatt’s English translation of Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out as a case study to explore the narrative shifts in fiction translation. By contrasting the target text with its source text, it is found that changes in the narrative modes occur between metalepsis, paralipsis, and the pseudo-diegetic narrative in the translation. It is also found that in the translation there are transgressions between the extradiegetic and intradiegetic, as well as the heterodiegetic and homodiegetic levels of narration. Such changes of narrative modes and narrative levels of the target text have played an important role in enabling distinctive reading experiences for the target readers, and have thereby contributed to the warm reception of the translated novel.
