1.1 Introduction to Qian Zhongshu and His Fortress Besieged

Born in November 1910, Qian Zhongshu is a Chinese literary scholar and writer, who is widely admired and esteemed by many people because of his wisdom and erudite knowledge. He is famous for his satirical novel Fortress Besieged, which has been considered one of the greatest modern Chinese cultural masterpieces. It has drawn the attention of generations of readers with its erudition, satire, humor and especially the unique theme, distinctive insight into humanity. Employment of a large number of vivid metaphors in this novel is another outstanding feature. Qian (2002:1) himself once said that in this book, he wants to write about a certain part of modern Chinese society and a certain kind of people living in this period of time. When depicting such people, I always have bear the fact in mind that they are humans, just humans, and basically, they are they are hairless biped at root. Of course, the characters are imaginary and fictional, but those who have obsession of textual literary criticism will of course refuse to miss the opportunity to seek after the subtle unknown and give up the right to participate. According to Xia Zhiqing (1990:192), a Chinese literary critic, Fortress Besieged is the most entertaining and carefully written novel in modern Chinese literature; possibly it is the greatest. There are many foreign versions of the novel, such as English, French, Russian, German, Japanese, Korean version, etc.

Published in 1979 by Indiana University Press, the only English version translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao is a great success promptly after its publication. Although the translators like Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K.Mao are both bilingual and bilingual scholars with expert translation skills and profound knowledge of both English and Chinese. In addition, literary critics and many scholars think of the English version as a successful work. Nevertheless, set against the approvals, the version is also questioned by some writers from both home and abroad because of some translation errors, for instance, impure English, inadequacies, mistranslation, rigid fossilized cultural transplantation. In spite of these translation errors, it goes without saying that the English version of the novel is, indeed, a piece of art.

1.2 Metaphor and Its Translation

Metaphor, as a common linguistic phenomenon, has already attracted the attention of a great many famous linguists. Traditionally, metaphors used to be restricted to the definition and category of a kind of rhetoric device which adds additional charm to linguistic context. Therefore metaphors seem to demonstrate the truly beauty of language. According to Aristotle (1954:120), metaphor is a linguistic tool or an instrument to replace one thing with another and to transfer one semantic field to another. The definition of metaphors can also be found in dictionaries “a word or phrase used to describe somebody or something else, in a way that is different from its normal use, in order to show that the two things have the same qualities and to make the description more powerful, for example She has a heart of stone; the use of such words and phrases.” (A.S. Hornby, 2014:1304)

Nevertheless, as a matter of fact, metaphor is not only an embodiment of people's capability of observing objects, appreciating cultural and life experience, but also, as a cognitive means, it offers us a brand new way we understand novelties in the world. It plays the role of an embodiment of transferring meanings as well as a reflection of people's profound knowledge of the world. Human beings possess the ability to probe into new world from another angle due to metaphors. Metaphor provides us with an approach to make certain our cognitive activities, and through these activities we are capable of making use full of a certain extent presented by one word or a phrase to be aware of another experience or conceptual extent. According to what Richards points out, metaphor is the ubiquitous element of language. It is more than a rhetorical device or a language phenomenon, and, to a considerable degree, it is a thinking pattern of human beings. Conventional metaphoric theory believes that the role of metaphors is simplex among different contexts instead of multiple. The thinking pattern of human beings is closely linked to metaphors by nature. Thinking proceeds with comparison, this brings about metaphors in language (Richards, 1936:315). Experts who study traditional rhetoric take notice of the transference of meanings, but they overlook the process where transference continues. As a result, they fail to make clear why two things do not share a similarity can form metaphors. As a matter of fact, metaphor, synecdoche and metonymy all contain the usage of non-literal meanings.