As a part of human consciousness,rhetorical consciousness is regarded as perception and under-standing of rhetorical phenomena,beingness and rhetorical situation.Linguistic and cultural barriers may pose difficulty for translators to understand completely the content and stylistic features including the rhetorical phenomena and beingness of the original,hence result in discontinuity of rhetorical consciousness in the tar-get text,and consequently fail in interpreting the rhetoric.The cognitive differences among authors,transla-tors and readers are considered as the main reason for the discontinuity of rhetorical consciousness and failure of interpretation in literary translation.It is of critical importance to realize that reception happens in a suc-cessive manner.The truly effective rhetorical discourse can be well received through due diachronic inter-pretations.The practice of literary translation shows that translators can manage to maintain literariness in the target text to achieve resonance of the audience and thus promote literary reception.