La influencia de la estética oriental en la autotraducciónanálisis de la novela bicultural The Good Earth de la autora P.S. Buck

Abstract

This dissertation analyses the Eastern cultural influences present in the aesthetic of P.S. Buck’s best seller The Good Earth, as the main element responsible for the novel’s success. This novel was awarded several prizes such as the Pulitzer Prize and, ultimately, led the author to obtain the Nobel Prize in Literature. Furthermore, this novel had relevant social and political repercussions in the United States at the time (Liao, 1997). Thus, the objective is to study the characteristics of Buck’s aesthetic as a product of a creative process of self-translation (Evangelista, 2013) between the Mandarin language, the author’s first language, and English, her second language. Moreover, the description of her Chinese characters has also been studied taking into account the main philosophical movements and politeness aspects present in China at the time. The methodology of analysis has focused on the characters of the novel, the strategies used to refer to them (names, nicknames, lexical references or kinship), the characters’ idiolect and their social interaction, i.e. facework as presented in some dialogues of the novel. Finally, these cultural aspects have been compared with one of the Spanish translations available of the novel. To carry out this study, the main Western and Eastern literature movements at the beginning of the twentieth century together with Chinese traditional literature have also been revised in this work. The results obtained show a novel highly influenced by the Eastern tradition, especially from Taoism, where the idiolect of the characters show an influence from both East and West possible thanks to the mechanism of self-translation, and where the author shows a thorough knowledge of the politeness rules applicable to several of the dialogues.