Abstract:
From lullabies to fairytales, from moral stories to adventure stories: from the day of our birth, books go along with us in our long life journey.
Books have always been central in our life; they allow us to dream, to travel, to learn, to relax and we can only lose ourselves in their pages. For these reasons, children’s literature is an important part in everyone existence.
Each country has its own literary baggage, and so does China. Even though it’s not common knowledge in the western world, China has a long literary tradition and the production of children’s books has always been growing. However, because of the close contact between party policies and their consideration of children, children’s literature in China has struggled to have its own identity. Thanks to the May Fourth Movement (1919-1936), a new literature is born, there is a new concept of “world of children” and some authors are focused on the inner world of children, the world of their imagination .
The aim of this thesis is to present a woman writer, Ling Shuhua, one of the protagonist of this period, and the translation of her work. It is divided in three parts.
In the first one, there is a short presentation of children’s literature, from the beginning of twentieth century to the May Fourth Movement, with particular attention to the children’s literature in this last period.
The second part is dedicated to the author and the translation of some chapters of her work Xiao ge er liang 小哥儿俩 (Two little brothers).
The third one is the commentary, vocabulary and translation strategies adopted.
