摘 要

为了传播中华文化，中国翻译家林语堂曾将清朝涨潮所著《幽梦影》一书中的部分内容翻译成了英文。作为明清小品文的经典代表作之一，《幽梦影》中蕴含丰富的人生启示和哲理，内涵深远，因此文字表面上的意义和文字背后的深刻含义之间的距离造成文本意义不确定，根据接受美学理论，这种意义的不确定形成了文本空白。本文从接受美学角度分析了《幽梦影》中的文本空白，包括语义空白和意境空白，并具体探究了林语堂对这些空白所采用的翻译策略和审美意境在译语文本中的再现。

关键词：文本空白；接受美学；林语堂

Contents

1. Introduction 1
2. Demonstration. 3
   1. Text blanks in Dream Shadows 3
      1. Text blanks in semantics 3
      2. Text blanks in artistic conception 5
   2. Lin Yutang’s translation of text blanks in Dream Shadows 6
      1. Literal translation 7
      2. Translation with amplification 8
      3. Omission 10
      4. Free translation 12
3. Conclusion 13

Works Cited 15

Bibliography 16

On Lin Yutang’s Translation of Text Blanks in Dream Shadows

from the Perspective of Reception Aesthetics

Introduction

Dream Shadows is one of the excellent essays in the Ming and Qing Dynasties written by Zhang Chao, a famous novelist and poet in the early period of Qing Dynasty. It consists of more than two hundred concise sentences without characters or plot. However, the simple words and expressions are full of wisdom and life philosophy which shows the leisurely and carefree mood of the writer and the attitudes towards life. The ideas and values conveyed by Zhang Chao greatly impressed Lin Yutang, who is well known as a scholar with profound knowledge in both Chinese and western culture and linguistics. He appreciated Zhang Chao very much, highly agreeing with his attitude towards life, and in order to promote Chinese culture overseas, he translated some parts of Dream Shadows into English. Studies on translation of Dream Shadows at home have begun since the beginning of the 21^st century, mainly from the aspects of Lin Yutang’s translation style, translation techniques, as well as from the perspectives of subjectivity of translator and eco-translatology, but very few has been from the perspective of reception aesthetics.

Reception aesthetics was developed by some scholars in Germany during the

late 1960s and early 1970s. Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser are two major representative theorists, who emphasized the significance of the role of reader's participation in reading, challenging the traditional author-centered and text-centered literary theories and shifting the focus to the text-reader relationship. The main points of reception aesthetics were introduced for the first time in Hans Robert Jauss's lecture in 1967, which was then published under the title "Literature History as a Challenge to Literary Theory". In the work he criticized two opposite extremes in literary theory: Marxist and Formalist methods. Jauss stated that “both the methods of the formalist school and Marxism lack the reader in his genuine role, a role as

unalterable for aesthetic as for historical knowledge; as the addressee for whom the literary work is primary destined” (Jauss 1198). The theory was further developed by Wolfgang Iser in 1970 when the book Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction was published.

Iser’s theory relies considerably on the phenomenology of Roman Ingarden. Interested in the relationship between the reader and text, Iser pays close attention to the dynamic role of the reader in the reception of the text. He states that there is a “response-inviting structure” in the text which compels the reader to interact with the text to concretize the potential meaning. In his description of text response-inviting structure, Iser proposes the term “text blanks” or “gaps” which he defines as follows: blanks or gaps are bound to open, and offers a free play of interpretation for the specific way in which the various views can be connected with one another. These gaps give the reader a chance to build his own bridges, relating the different aspects of the object which have thus far been revealed to him (Iser 36). In addition, the uncertain meanings produced by these blanks called “indeterminacy”.