資本與行動者網路的運作──《紅高粱家族》英譯本生產及傳播之

Capital and Actor Networks: A Sociological Analysis of the Translation and Circulation of Mo Yan's Red Sorghum

2012年10月，大陸作家莫言獲頒諾貝爾文學獎，旋即出現一股對其作品翻譯的討論與研究熱潮，美國漢學家、莫言著作主要英譯者葛浩文 （Howard Goldblatt） 成為中文媒體和學界關注的熱門人物。莫言代表作之一《紅高粱家族》葛譯本由維京企鵝圖書公司初版於1993年，借張藝謀在海外大獲成功的同名電影《紅高粱》（1988年）之力，迄今發行兩萬餘冊且未絕版，在西方產生較大影響，對莫言獲諾獎貢獻良多。近十年西方翻譯學界出現「社會學轉向」，注重研究翻譯生產過程，即分析各種行為者（或行動者）如何構建網路，合力生產和傳播一個譯本，為我們探討中文文學國際傳播提供了一個合適的理論工具。現有研究多從語料庫、文學或描述翻譯學視角考察葛譯《紅高粱》特點及面貌，運用翻譯社會學探討其生產、傳播過程的尚罕見。本文運用法國學者布迪厄的場域理論和拉圖爾等人的行動者網路理論，分析各種行動者如何透過資本轉化在美國文學場域內進行運作，如何交互、聯結構成行動者網路，順利完成《紅高粱》英譯本在美國的生產和傳播，同時探討該案例對中文文學國際傳播的啟示意義。

Since mainland Chinese writer Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 2012, there have been many studies of his works in translation. American sinologist Howard Goldblatt, Mo Yan's primary English-language translator, has been the topic of heated discussions in the Chinese media and in Chinese academic communities. Mo Yan's early masterpiece Hong Gaoliang Jiazu (Red Sorghum), first published by Viking Penguin in 1993 in Goldblatt's masterful translation, has sold more than 20,000 copies without going out of print, thanks in part to Zhang Yimou's commercially successful film (1988) of the same title based on the novel. In fact, Mo Yan's winning of the Nobel Prize owes much to the novel's successful translation and circulation. While the past decade has witnessed a “sociological turn” in Western translation studies with case studies of “translations in the making,” we have not seen a sociological approach to the translation, circulation and reception of Red Sorghum; rather, we have gotten the usual analyses based on literary, corpus-assisted or descriptive translation studies. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's field theory and Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory, this article looks at how various human and non-human actors—operating in a hypothesized American literary “field”—interacted with each other, through the transformation of various forms of capital, to create pre- and post-translation and circulation networks leading to the successful production and circulation of Red Sorghum in the United States. The future implications for the translation and circulation of Chinese literary works in the West are discussed in the conclusion.