DOCSLIB.ORG

B18355213.Pdf

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
B18355213.Pdf Abstract This thesis focuses on the Chinese translation of Shakespeare’s bawdy language, a subject which is seldom addressed in the field of Shakespearean studies within China. Among the many works by Shakespeare, ten plays and the sonnets are taken as the primary texts and are dissected in great detail. The selected bawdy innuendoes are then distinguished into two aspects, sexual” and non-sexual” bawdy. Once categori$ed, these suggestive terms are studied and compared with their translations to identify the various relationships between the source-text bawdy and their corresponding sections in the target texts. In this study, I have adopted a descriptive approach, with the ultimate aim of finding reasons and explanations for the changes that have been made to the source text after undergoing the translation process. The first two chapters are introductions to the definition of bawdy”, the characteristics of Shakespeare’s suggestive language, previous studies on the topic and the overall theoretical framework of the present research. In chapters three and four, I will move on to present findings of a contrastive analysis of the bawdy innuendoes in Shakespeare’s texts and their translations, from the macro- and micro angle respectively. The implications of the results are further discussed in chapter five, where I seek to evaluate and expound the occurrence of specific translational behaviour by uncovering a variety of the norms” that govern the translators’ preferences in dealing with the problem. An in-depth analysis shows that the transposition of Shakespeare’s bawdy, in the Chinese context, involves a rich combination of underlying factors that exert influence on the decisions of different translators. Firstly, there is a cultural norm which prescribes the minimi$ation of bawdy elements. The norm, however, was in conflict with other types of norms that prevailed at the time of the translations. In addition, linguistic constraints arose during the transference of ribaldry, fluctuating theatrical interpretations of bawdy overtones and the subtle changes in indelicate vocabulary over the centuries all contributed to the distortion and loss in translation. Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful to my research supervisors Dr. Chu Chi-yu and Mr. Brian Holton, whose suggestions and criticisms have helped me immensely in writing the dissertation. Both of them have inspired and supported me through the last few years. A special than goes to my colleague Agnes, for her friendship and encouragement. I am also indebted to Siu Pong, for reviewing the manuscript and having endured my highs and lows. Finally, I would li e to than my beloved family, for their patience and care, and without whom my graduate wor would not have been completed. Contents Abstract Acknowledgements List of abbreviations and figures 1. Introduction and Literature Review................................................................................. 1 1.1 Introduction............................................................................................................................. 1 1.2 Previous Studies of Shakespeare’s Bawdiness in China.................................................... 4 2. Definition and Methodology.............................................................................................. 6 2.1 The Definition of “ awdy(................................................................................................... 6 2.2 Chinese Translations of Shakespeare’s Works: An Overview......................................... , 2.3 The Selection of Data.......................................................................................................... 11 2.3.1 Te.tual Sources......................................................................................................... 12 2.3.1.1 Source Te.ts.................................................................................................. 12 2.3.1.2 Target Te.ts................................................................................................... 1, 2.3.2 E.trate.tual Sources................................................................................................. 21 2.4 Shakespeare’s Bawdy: 0odes of Translation.................................................................... 22 2.4.1 Delabastita’s Model of Pun Translation................................................................ 2, 2.4.2 Translating Bawdy Puns and Non-Puns: An Ad3usted Model........................... 30 3. The Treatment of Shakespeare’s Sexual Bawdy by Translators............................ 35 3.1 Se.ual2 awdy Puns............................................................................................................... 36 3.1.1 Reproducing or Recreating Bawdy Puns............................................................... 38 3.1.2 Ma3oring on the Innocent or Bawdy Meaning..................................................... 40 3.1.3 Omissions.................................................................................................................. 41 3.1.4 Editorial Notes and Stage Instructions................................................................. 42 3.1.5 Other Translation Strategies................................................................................... 44 3.2 Se.ual2 awdy Non-Puns..................................................................................................... 4, 3.2.1 Retaining the Se.ual2 awdy Non-Puns................................................................. 48 3.2.2 Omissions.................................................................................................................. 48 3.2.3 Rendering into Innocent E.pressions................................................................... 48 3.3 Macro2level Shifts................................................................................................................. 50 3.4 Micro2level Shifts.................................................................................................................. 60 3.4.1 E.pressions Tied up with Erotic Passion............................................................. 60 3.4.2 Male and 9emale Se.ual Organs ............................................................................ 65 3.4.3 The Bawdy Punning Names................................................................................... ,3 3.4.4 The Syphilitic Puns................................................................................................... ,6 4. The Treatment of Shakespeare’s Non- exual Bawdy by Translators.................. ,8 4.1 Scatological Bawdy............................................................................................................... ,8 4.2 Other Types of Offensive Oaths....................................................................................... 84 4.2.1 Religious Cursings.................................................................................................... 84 4.2.2 Ethnic Slurs............................................................................................................... 88 5. Bawdy, Translation and Norms....................................................................................... 80 5.1 The Fluctuating Interpretation of Bawdy Overtones...................................................... 80 5.2 Linguistic Constraints and the Change of Vocabulary.................................................... 85 5.3 Norms in Translation.........................................................................................................102 5.4 Norms Pertaining to the Acceptability of Bawdiness ...................................................108 5.4.1 Se.ual Descriptions in China................................................................................111 5.4.2 Diachronic Development of Se.ual Norms.......................................................118 5.5 Translation Norms .............................................................................................................124 5.5.1 Preliminary Norms.................................................................................................125 5.5.2 Ethical Norms and Communicative Norms ......................................................131 ,. Concluding Remarks ........................................................................................................13, Notes..........................................................................................................................................138 Bibliography............................................................................................................................143 Appendix 1: The Translation of Shakespeare’s Bawdy Puns Appendix 2: The Translation Shakespeare’s Bawdy Non-Puns Abbreviations Translation: ST source text TT target text SL source language TL target language FE formal equivalence DE dynamic equivalence Shakespeare’s works: A&C Antony and Cleopatra ADO Much Ado About Nothing CE Comedy of Errors 2H4 he Second Part of Henry IV H5 Henry V HAM Hamlet LR (ing Lear MM Measure for Measure MN A Midsummer Night)s Dream MW he Merry Wives of Windsor O H Othello R&, Romeo and Juliet SON he Sonnets &C roilus and Cressida Names of translators: Bian Z.L. Bian Zhilin Cao W.F. Cao Weifeng Cao Y. Cao Yu Fang P. Fang Ping )u Z.K. )u Zhengkun Liang S.Q. Liang Shiqiu Liang Z.D. Liang Zongdai Peng J.-. Peng Jingxi Shi Y.Z. Shi Yong.hou Sun D.Y. Sun Dayu Tian H. Tian Han Tu A. Tu An
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Universiteit Leiden
    Universiteit Leiden MA Thesis When Shakespeare encounters China: A study on the translation strategies in the Chinese translation of Romeo and Juliet Presented to the Faculty of Humanities, Institute for Area studies Presented by: Alessandra Battistelli s1896229 [email protected] July 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 2 1. How China entered in contact with Shakespeare: Historical shifts of China’s attitude towards the greatest English dramatist…………………………………………………………... 3 1.1 Initial phase…………………………………………………………………………………………….. 3 1.2 The Beginning of Chinese Shakespeare……………………………………………………… 4 1.3 Halt to Shakespeare studies………………………………………………………………………. 6 1.4 Final rebirth of a Chinese Shakespeare………………………………………………………. 7 2. Translation theories in China……………………………………………………………………………. 9 2.1 Lin Shu and Yan Fu: the initiators of Western literature’s translations…………….. 9 2.2 Lu Xun and Qu Qiubai: following May the 4th Movement……………………………... 11 2.3 Fu Lei and Qian Zhongshu: surpassing the criterion of “fidelity”……………………. 13 3. Translating Shakespeare in Chinese…………………………………………………………………. 16 3.1 Rendering the blank verse in Chinese………………………………………………… 16 3.2 Cultural discrepancies in the translation…………………………………………………… 23 4. Translating Romeo and Juliet into Chinese……………………………………………………. 26 4.1 Rendering sexual references in Chinese…………………………………………………… 26 4.2 How to translate Shakespeare’s puns into Chinese……………………………………. 27 4.3 Mythological references in Romeo and Juliet……………………………………………
    [Show full text]
  • General Problems in Chinese Translations of Shakespeare
    www.ccsenet.org/ach Asian Culture and History Vol. 2, No. 2; July 2010 General Problems in Chinese Translations of Shakespeare Yanna Sun Department of Foreign Languages, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry Zhengzhou 450002, Henan, China E-mail: [email protected] Zhengzhou University of Light Industry Fund for Doctoral Research Abstract Shakespeare was not known to the Chinese until Lin Zexu’s (1785-1850) translation of Hugh Murray’s (1789-1845) Cyclopedia of Geography (1836). Since then, the Chinese perception of Shakespeare has changed several times, from his being regarded as a story-teller to being fully received as a seasoned playwright and poet, through to his plays being rendered into the Chinese language and performed on the Chinese stage. First and foremost is the question of how to adequately translate Shakespeare. The quality of the translation is important, particularly for those readers who have no knowledge at all of the English language or of the historical and cultural backdrop to his plays. But this is no easy task – not least because there are many significant cultural and linguistic divergences between China and England and their respective languages. Through detailed analysis of previous Chinese renditions of Shakespearian plays, this article will point out some general problems frequently facing the translator of the playwright. Keywords: Chinese translations of Shakespeare, General problems in renditions, Language, Culture Since the first true rendition of a Shakespearian play into modern vernacular Chinese by Tian Han with his Hamlet in the year 1921, many Chinese scholars have attempted to translate Shakespeare and his works. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in particular, apart from the ten-year Cultural Revolution between 1967 and 1977, translations, together with performances and literary criticism, flourished.
    [Show full text]
  • SHAKESPEARE STUDIES in CHINA by Hui Meng Submitted to the Graduate Degree Program in English and the Graduate Faculty of the Un
    SHAKESPEARE STUDIES IN CHINA By Copyright 2012 Hui Meng Submitted to the graduate degree program in English and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. ________________________________ Chairperson Geraldo U. de Sousa ________________________________ Misty Schieberle ________________________________ Jonathan Lamb Date Defended: April 3, 2012 ii The Thesis Committee for Hui Meng certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis: SHAKESPEARE STUDIES IN CHINA ________________________________ Chairperson Geraldo U. de Sousa Date approved: April 3, 2012 iii Abstract: Different from Germany, Japan and India, China has its own unique relation with Shakespeare. Since Shakespeare’s works were first introduced into China in 1904, Shakespeare in China has witnessed several phases of developments. In each phase, the characteristic of Shakespeare studies in China is closely associated with the political and cultural situation of the time. This thesis chronicles and analyzes noteworthy scholarship of Shakespeare studies in China, especially since the 1990s, in terms of translation, literary criticism, and performances, and forecasts new territory for future studies of Shakespeare in China. iv Table of Contents Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………1 Section 1 Oriental and Localized Shakespeare: Translation of Shakespeare’s Plays in China …………………………………………………………………... 3 Section 2 Interpretation and Decoding: Contemporary Chinese Shakespeare Criticism……………………………………………………………….
    [Show full text]
  • Book Reviews
    Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance Manuscript 1167 Book Reviews Limin Li Qian Jiang Follow this and additional works at: https://digijournals.uni.lodz.pl/multishake Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance vol. 22 (37), 2020; https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.22.11 Book Reviews Hu Kaibao, A Corpus-Based Study of the Chinese Translations of Shakespeare’s Plays (Shanghai: Shanghai Jiaotong University Press, 2015). Reviewed by Limin Li The rapid development of corpus-based translation studies has pushed translation studies towards empiricism, opening a fruitful dialogue within the discipline and beyond the boundary. It is a dialogue between theoretical and applied translation studies, and between translation studies and corpora studies, thus fostering interdisciplinary studies like corpus-based translation studies, translational stylistics and so on. Hu Kaibao’s monograph A Corpus-Based Study of the Chinese Translations of Shakespeare’s Plays tackles challenging issues in the field of corpus-based translation studies, like the much debated topic of universal features of translated texts, the corpus-based methodology employed in translation studies, and the list of universal hypotheses, etc. The book has not only approached those hot topics, but also provided solutions. First, the corpus-based study of the Chinese translations of Shakespeare’s plays provides a strong qualitative basis for describing the most distinctive English and Chinese expressions, which is quite systematic and objective. 1) Hu’s DIY English-Chinese Parallel Corpus of Shakespeare’s Plays is a big and balanced one. After a critical review of the studies on Chinese translations of Shakespeare’s plays, Hu selects three most influential Chinese translated versions of Shakespeare’s plays: Zhu Shenghao’s (1912-1944) translation published in 1957, Liang Shiqiu’s (1902-1987) translation in 1967 and Fang Ping’s (1921-2007) translation in 2000.
    [Show full text]
  • Brick Lane Patchwork
    The Bard’s Journey to the “Small time” in China by David Li Jun The phrase “small time/small-time”, in a general sense, means “operating on a small scale, second-rate, unimportant, insignificant” (OED). As for the term “small-time Shakespeare”, it was coined by Christy Desmet in Shakespeare and Appropriation, referring to “individual [Shakespearean] acts of ‘re-vision’“ from local, more pointed responses to the Bard” and with “motives ranging from play, to political commitment, to agonistic gamesmanship” (1999: 2-3). This coinage was in contrast to a previous term, “big-time Shakespeare”, employed by Michael Bristol (1996) to denote the institutionalization and appropriation of Shakespeare that, in Desmet’s words (1999: 3), “serves corporate goals, entrenched power-structures, and conservative cultural ideologies”. Drawing upon this terminology, Alexander Huang describes “small-time Shakespeare” as the type of Shakespeare production that is “adapter/actor-centered” and “autobiographical”, involving “individual engagements or reframings of Shakespeare’s plays that reaffirm local and even personal interpretations” (2004: 204, 206). In light of Desmet and Huang, this paper attempts to further explore the dimensions of “small-time Shakespeare” in a contemporary Chinese context (referring to the mainland in particular). Recognizing the relevance of Desmet’s discussion of “small-time Shakespeare” in the West and insights from Huang’s examination of “small-time Shakespeare” in a “Chinese-speaking” (especially Taiwanese) context, the author firstly clarifies that this paper focuses on the recent situation in Mainland China, Saggi/Ensayos/Essais/Essays Will forever young! Shakespeare & Contemporary Culture – 11/2017 76 more precisely the last 15-20 years.
    [Show full text]
  • Nostalgic Tragicomedy in Chinese Romeo and Juliets
    W&M ScholarWorks Undergraduate Honors Theses Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 5-2010 "For ne'er was a story of such wit" Nostalgic Tragicomedy in Chinese Romeo and Juliets Megan Ammirati College of William and Mary Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses Recommended Citation Ammirati, Megan, ""For ne'er was a story of such wit" Nostalgic Tragicomedy in Chinese Romeo and Juliets" (2010). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 740. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/740 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Undergraduate Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “For ne'er was a story of such wit” Nostalgic Tragicomedy in Chinese Romeo and Juliets A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Bachelors of Arts in English from The College of William and Mary by Megan Ammirati Accepted for ___________________________________ (Honors, High Honors, Highest Honors) _________________________________ _________________________________ Paula Blank, Director Colleen Kennedy, Committee Chair English Department English Department _________________________________ _________________________________ Erin Minear Roy Chan English Department Modern Languages Department Williamsburg, VA April 28, 2010 Ammirati 2 “For ne'er was a story of such wit” Nostalgic Tragicomedy
    [Show full text]
  • Reading Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange
    IS THERE A CHINESE SUBJECT IN CHINESE SHAKESPEARES? READING CHINESE SHAKESPEARES: TWO CENTURIES OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE Suoqiao Qian Abstract: This is a review essay on Alexander C. Y. Huang’s book Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange. The global traveling of “Shakespeare” and the globalization of Shakespeare studies correlate to the advance of Chinese modernity which was very much characterized by cross- cultural exchanges between China and the West. Prompted by Huang’s book, the essay examines the cross-cultural issue of “Chinese Shakespeares” in three interrelated levels: “China” in Shakespeare, Shakespeare in China, and China and Shakespeare. After exploring the colonial legacy in Shakespearean studies relating to China and Shakespeare’s reception in modern China, the paper applauds Huang’s innovative attempt to go beyond the “Shakespeare in China” model by offering a fresh look into the cross-cultural relation between China and the West surrounding the traveling of “Shakespeare” over the past two centuries. In the meantime, it also highlights the problematic of Chinese subjectivity in Chinese- Shakespeare scholarship, and in Chinese cross-cultural studies in general. I. “China” in Shakespeare WHEN I WAS a graduate student in the department of comparative literature at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s, I was a “Graduate Student Instructor” for several years teaching English reading and composition courses for which I got to design the course themes with five literary texts of my own choice. But the department set forth several guidelines and rules for choosing the texts, two of which I remember clearly: one of the texts must come from an “underrepresented group” which means ethnic, minority, non-Western, a woman writer, etc.; and one of the texts must be a Shakespeare.
    [Show full text]
  • Book Reviews
    Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance; vol. 20 (35), 2019 http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.20.12 Book Reviews Balz Engler, Constructing Shakespeares: Essays on the Making of a Great Author (Dozwil: Edition Signathur, 2019. Pp. 260). Reviewed by Silvana Carotenuto∗ Constructing Shakespeares by Emeritus Professor Balz Engler offers an important critical contribution to Renaissance studies and, together, to performance studies. Consisting of five essays—“Construction,” “Monumental Shakespeare,” “Occasions: Status and Process,” “Hamlet: Passages We Live By” and “Re-Productions,” with an introduction which sets the book’s “Premises” and its final “Coda”—the publication, supported by the Berta Hess-Cohn Foundation and the Max Geilinger Foundation of Zurich, is consistently interested in the Shakespearean oeuvre as a performative authority through history via the notion of the deconstruction of the text as a “classic,” and in contemporary times through the “media” apparatus that makes it enjoyable and relevant still today, in the global world, among different and differentiated audiences. The question of the “audience” is the focus of the “Premises,” which deals with the modalities in which the Shakespearean text (the main reference goes to Prospero’s Epilogue and its final invitation to the audience’s indulgence, that is, its applause) inserts the notion of the “performance as process” (17), the play being “an occasion of which the audience is part” (18). Indeed, Engler’s position is that the audience takes part, plays a central part in the performance, contributes to the success or failure of the play, and represents the oral/social agent of dramatic authority.
    [Show full text]
  • King Lear in a Jingju Actor’S Reminiscence: Wu Hsing-Kuo’S Lear Is Here
    Journal of Literature and Art Studies, ISSN 2159-5836 December 2014, Vol. 4, No. 12, 1103-1112 D DAVID PUBLISHING Rerouting King Lear in a Jingju Actor’s Reminiscence: Wu Hsing-kuo’s Lear Is Here Ivy I-chu Chang National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu City, Taiwan Jingju actor and director Wu Hsing-kuo’s (吳興國) Lear Is Here (2001) is a 90-minute solo performance adapted from Shakespeare’s King Lear and performed in jingju style. In this performance, he alternately performs 10 male and female characters including himself in jingju role types of sheng (male), dan (female), jing (painted face), mo, and chou (clown) in search of dual identities. This paper will investigate Wu’s performance in Lear Is Here from three directions: First, how Wu subtly combines Shakespearean dramatic tension and psychological complex, his versatile jingju performing styles, and Brechtian alienation effect in developing his unique artistic flair? What are at stake of such an eclectic performance? Second, in the rooting and re-routing of both Shakespearean plays and jingju acting style where Wu Hsing-kuo meets King Lear, how Wu articulates the meticulous details of both source culture and target culture while at once extracting them out of context to interweave and re-articulate them into an eclectic intercultural theater? Third, investigating the cultural exchange, bicroleurs, audience reception, and production mode of the work, the author will try to do away with the “authenticity” or “representativeness” of either the East or the West, but explore the possibilities of the hybrid theater in search of alternative aesthetic and emerging performance genre.
    [Show full text]
  • Ethics and Translation of Shakespeare's Dramas —A Case
    ISSN 1798-4769 Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 715-723, July 2018 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.0904.06 Ethics and Translation of Shakespeare’s Dramas —A Case Study on Zhu Shenghao’s Translation of Romeo and Juliet Zhiwei Gu Confucius Institute, Egerton University, Nakuru, Kenya; College of Foreign Studies, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, China Abstract—Since 1980s, the researchers weren’t bound by the ideal of “faithfulness” in translation, but the ethics of “keeping differences” is advocated. Establishing a code of conduct of the cross-cultural exchanges and the translator will be and should be bound by these guidelines has been advocated. This is the translator's professional ethics called the Ethics of Translation. Ethics of Translation has greatly expanded the view of translation studies and made a great significance in protecting the vulnerable culture from being invaded by the strong culture. As everyone knows, Shakespeare’s plays had a great impact on both the Chinese and Western cultures. So a lot of well-known translators have translated Shakespeare’s plays. Among them, many readers are favor of Zhu Shenghao’s translation of “Romeo and Juliet”, which will be explained in the paper in the perspective of Chesterman’s ethics of translation to find the inherent relationship between Ethics of Translation and the translations of Shakespeare’s plays, so that we can find a new way to study the translation of Shakespeare’s plays and make the ethics of translation into practice. Index Terms—ethics of translation, Shakespeare, Chesterman, Romeo and Juliet, Zhu Shenghao I.
    [Show full text]
  • Chinese Hamlets: a Centenary Review
    Shakespeare: Authenticity and Adaptation De Monfort University, Leicester, UK 7-9 September 2000 DRAFT Chinese Hamlets: A Centenary Review By Ching-Hsi Perng Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures National Taiwan University Taipei, Taiwan, ROC E-mail: [email protected] Chinese renditions of Shakespeare fall into three kinds: 1) paraphrase, represented by the translation of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, which is also the earliest introduction of Shakespeare’s work into China; 2) complete translation of play texts, in the form of various versions that strive for “faithfulness” to the original; and 3) theatrical adaptation, which explicitly tries to put Shakespeare in Chinese contexts. Hamlet, one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s works, is also an obvious favorite with Chinese translators or adaptors. This paper discusses some of the more significant renditions of Hamlet, either on page or on stage, from the beginning of the century to the present. It is observed that these versions inevitably sinicizes Shakespeare to different degrees; theater productions, especially, are most daring and innovative in appropriating Hamlet. I. Paraphrase: Lin Shu & Wei Yi’s story version Compared to his introduction to some other Asian countries, such as Japan, Shakespeare came to China relatively late. The name Shakespeare was first introduced to the Chinese by a British missionary in1856, with the publication of his Perng, “Chinese Hamlets” translation of a history of Great Britain (Mu 22, Chou 5, Meng 2).1 But a more or less “literary” introduction of Shakespeare’s work had to wait almost a half-century, when, in 1903, a translation of 10 of the 20 chapters from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare appeared.2 This was followed the next year by Lin Shu and Wei Yi’s Ying-guo shi-ren yin-bian yen-yu [Chitchat of an English poet], which contains all 20 tales from the Lambs’ work.
    [Show full text]
  • Yuk Sunny Tien
    The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School Department of Comparative Literature LITERARY HUMOR AND CHINESE MODERNITY: THE ADAPTATION AND TRANSLATION OF SHAKESPEARE, WILDE, AND SHAW A Dissertation in Comparative Literature by Yuk Sunny Tien © 2012 Yuk Sunny Tien Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2012 The dissertation of Yuk Sunny Tien was reviewed and approved* by the following: Thomas O. Beebee Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and German Dissertation Co-Adviser Chair of Committee Alexander C.Y. Huang Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese Dissertation Co-Adviser Co-chair of Committee Shuang Shen Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese Martina Kolb Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature On-cho Ng Professor of History, Religious Studies, and Asian Studies Linda Woodbridge Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Women’s Studies Caroline D. Eckhardt Professor of Comparative Literature and English Head of the Department of Comparative Literature *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School ii ABSTRACT This study explores how English humor has manifested itself in modern Chinese culture, by focusing on Chinese adaptations and translations of the works of William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw. Issuing from contemporary time and space, adaptation demonstrates an emerging new sense of self in its negotiation of identity in the translational process. There are plays that fuse comedy and tragedy, or laughter and tears, but adaptation allows us to see how comedy can be transformed from tragedy, through changing perspectives and the distance or detachment created by time and culture.
    [Show full text]