VASP Brown Bag: Ximeng Lang "Narrative Style in the English Rendition of Marginal and Interlineal Comments Embedded in Feng Menglong’s Gujin xiaoshuo"

Gujin xiaoshuo is the first collection of vernacular short stories entitled Sanyan edited by Feng Menglong in the Ming dynasty. Feng’s marginal and interlineal comments embedded in the works give readers a glimpse of his standpoint on friendship, love and the civil service examinations. With the release of whole translation of Gujin xiaoshuo by Yang Shuhui and Yang Yunqin, the marginal and interlineal comments are beneficial to distinguish between the reliable narrator and unreliable narrator in the English context. The unique storyteller-narrator expresses explicit voice of the author, while the implied author’s point does not always coincide with the storyteller-narrator’s words. The narrative style employed in the English rendition of these remarks can prove, strengthen or undermine the storyteller-narrator’s expressions unveiling the mask of the concrete views of the implied author.   

Ximeng Lang is a PhD candidate in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Wuhan University, China. Her research interest is about translation studies on classical Chinese short stories. Her current dissertation project is on English translations of Feng Menglong’s Sanyan collections, namely Gujin xiaoshuo, Jingshi tongyan and Xingshi hengyan.