n China. “Mo Yan”, which means “don’t speak” in Chinese, is his pen name. He attended primary school in his hometown and was actually forced to drop out because of China’s Cultural Revolution. He was sent to the countryside where he had to perform manual labor for many years. In 1976, Mo Yan joined the PLA(China’s People’s Liberation Army) and held the posts of monitor, librarian, teacher and secretary. In 1981, he started his writing career. Mo Yan is a prolific writer who has published about 120 short stories and novels in Chinese, among which Hong Gao Liang Jia Zu (Red Sorghum), Tian Tang Suan Tai Zhi Ge ( The Garlic Ballads ), Feng Ru Fei Tun ( Big Breasts and Wide Hips), Jiu Guo ( The Republic of Wine), Sheng Si Pi Lao ( Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out ) are some typical ones and had been translated into English by Howard Goldblatt.The original novel Hong Gao Liang Jia Zu includes five chapters: Red Sorghum, Sorghum Wine, Dog Ways, Sorghum Funeral and Strange Death. This novel was first published in 1987 and it is Mo Yan’s first work which was translated into English and ran commercially in the west. Its English version is called Red Sorghum. Later, it has been translated into more than twenty languages and becomes a best-seller. As a representative of Mo Yan’s “ root-seeking” works, Hong Gao Liang Jia Zu expressed the author’s complicated love-hate emotion towards his hometown, Gaomi county, which also serves as the setting for almost all his novels and the inspiration for his writing. In the novel, Mo Yan tells us a common peasant family story during the Anti-Japanese War in Northeast Gaomi Township from the first person point of view and describes a group of sorghum heroes who are the combination of both evil and goodness by means of breaking the traditional time order and logic.
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2.2 Previous Studies on Red Sorghum
In 1993 when the translated version of Hong Gao Liang Jia Zu got published in America, it became a best-seller and won a good reputation at home and abroad. From then on, many people began to do researches on Red Sorghum. According to search data from www.cnki.net, there are a lot of journal articles and theses about the original novel. However, researches on Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Red Sorghum are much less. So far, current studies on Red Sorghum can be mainly divided into the following four kinds. A lot of researches on Red Sorghum are conducted from the perspective of translation theories, which include post-colonial translation theory, semantic translation theory, eco-translatology, rewriting theory and so on. This type of research mainly studies the translation strategies and methods adopted by Howard Goldblatt. Zuo &n
