From Taboo to Adaptation: Reconstructing Sexual Narratives in Lin Shaohua’s Translation of Norwegian Wood through Lefevere’s Rewriting Theory

Drawing on André Lefevere’s rewriting theory, this article examines the reconstruction of sexual narratives in Lin Shaohua’s first Chinese translation of Norwegian Wood. Through a comparative analysis of the Japanese source text, Lin’s translation, and the present author’s literal renderings, this study explores how sexual expressions, bodily representations, and related narrative meanings are reshaped in the process of translation. The findings suggest that Lin’s reconstruction of sexual narratives resulted from the interaction between ideological constraints and target-culture poetics. While ideological factors encouraged the filtering of explicit sexual content under the framework of moral norms, poetic considerations motivated the translator to reshape bodily expressions in pursuit of “aesthetic fidelity.” This process enabled the translated text to conform to the expectations of the target cultural context, but it also weakened certain narrative functions of sexuality, including its role in representing trauma, emotional reconciliation, and character complexity. The article argues that literary translation should be understood not merely as textual transfer but as a process of narrative reconstruction, in which ideological restrictions and poetic preferences jointly redefine the ethical and aesthetic boundaries of translated literature.