Translating China (Topics in Translation)

Translating China

TOPICS IN TRANSLATION Series Editors: Susan Bassnett, University of Warwick, UK and Edwin Gentzler, University of Massachusetts/Amherst, USA Work in the field of Translation Studies has been expanding steadily over the last two decades, not only in linguistics and literacy studies, but also in business studies, economics, international studies, law and commerce. Translation Studies as a discipline in its own right has developed alongside the practice of teaching and training translators. The editors of the Topics in Translation series encourage research that spans the range of current work involving translators and translation, from the theoretical to the practical, from computer assisted translation to the translation of poetry, from applied translation to the history of translation. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

TOPICS IN TRANSLATION Series Editors: Susan Bassnett, University of Warwick, UK and Edwin Gentzler, University of Massachusetts/Amherst, USA

Translating China Edited by

Luo Xuanmin and He Yuanjian

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Buffalo • Toronto

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Translating China/Edited by Xuanmin Luo and Yuanjian He. Topics in Translation Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Chinese language–Translating–History. 2. Translating and interpreting–China–History. I. Luo, Xuanmin. II. He, Yuanjian. PL1277.T67 2009 495.1′802–dc22 2009026145 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-187-3 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-186-6 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA. Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada. Copyright © 2009 Luo Xuanmin, He Yuanjian and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/ or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Datapage International Ltd. Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Group Ltd.

Contents Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vii Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Introduction Luo Xuanmin and He Yuanjian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1

Cultural and Historical Perspectives on Translation in China Li Xia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Chinese Translation of Buddhist Terminology: Language and Culture Chi Yu Chu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Transformer Sinicized and the Making of Chinese Buddhist Parlance Francis K.H. So. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 The Art of Misreading: An Analysis of the Jesuit ‘Fables’ in Late Ming China Sher-shiueh Li . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 The Cultural Politics of Translating Kunqu, the National Heritage Yeung Jessica. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Cooperative Translation Models: Rediscovering Ezra Pound’s Approach to Classical Chinese Poetry Sylvia Ieong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Ideology and Literary Translation: A Brief Discussion on Liang Qi-chao’s Translation Practice Luo Xuanmin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Translating Modernity Towards Translating China Shaobo Xie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 ‘Authenticity’ and Foreignizing Translation Yifeng Sun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Representation, Intervention and Mediation: A Translation Anthologist’s Reflections on the Complexities of Translating China Martha P.Y. Cheung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

. . . 13

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Translating for the Future: Some Reflections on Making A Dictionary of Translation Technology Sin-wai Chan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

12 Translating Alien Sources from and into Chinese: What does the Translator do, and why? He Yanjian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

Acknowledgements This collection is the product of six years of hardship. It started in 2003 when all the contributors were invited to write papers with a focus on translating China. The topics were original and designed to cover a wide range from ancient times to modern China. We are grateful to all the contributors for their understanding, patience and firm support in the past few years. Thanks go to Professors Edwin Gentzler and Susan Bassnett, who had a thorough reading of the manuscripts and included them in the Topics in Translation series by Multilingual Matters, whose staff are worthy of our great respect for their strong team work and highly professional efficiency. Thanks are also due to the journals Perspectives: Studies in Translatology and Journal of Translation for permission to use their papers. Gratitude to Professor Michael Heim from UCLA, Professor HehHsiang Yuan from Taiwan University and Professor Federico Masini from University of Rome La Sapienza for their valuable blurbs, their comments were of great encouragement. Xuanmin finally expresses his thanks to Professor Wang Ning, a colleague whose invitation to join a huge project in Chinese Studies five years ago helped to ignite the torch of the book.

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Contributors Sin-wai Chan is Professor of the Department of Translation at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is Deputy Chairman of the Department and Director of the Centre for Translation Technology. His research interests are computer translation and bilingual lexicography. His recent publications include Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture (Bilingual Edition) (Pearson, 2003), A Dictionary of Translation Technology (The Chinese University Press, 2004), A Topical Bibliography of Computer(-aided) Translation (The Chinese University Press, 2008) and A Chronology of Translation in China and the West: From the Legendary Period to 2004 (The Chinese University Press, 2009). Martha P.Y. Cheung is Chair Professor in Translation and Associate VicePresident of Hong Kong Baptist University. She has translated many works of Chinese Literature into English, including the works of Han Shaogong, Liu Sola, and Hong Kong poets such as Leung Ping-kwan. Her most recent publication is An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation, Volume One: From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project (St Jerome, 2006). Her recent interests include literary translation, translation history and translation theory. She has just finished guest-editing a Special Issue of The Translator on ‘Chinese Discourse on Translation and International Translation Studies’ and is working on volume two of An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation. Chi Yu Chu is Associate Professor and Head of the Translation Program at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He was Assistant Editor of Renditions and is currently Executive Editor of Translation Quarterly. His publications include a range of papers on Chinese translations of Buddhist literature and English translations of A Chinese Winter’s Tale by Yu Luojin (Chinese University Press, 1986) and Selected Poems of Gu Cheng (Research Centre for Translation, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1996).

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He Yuanjian is Professor at the Department of Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is author and co-author of four books on Chinese generative grammar (1996, 2001, 2002, 2007) and more than 40 research papers published on translation studies, language typology and Chinese linguistics. Li Xia is the founder of Chinese programs and Convener of Chinese at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where she teaches Chinese language, literature and practical translation. She has published extensively on the Chinese poets Gu Cheng and Yang Lian and on aspects of comparative Chinese-Western literature. Her articles have appeared in Modern Chinese Literature, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Neohelicon, Interlitteraria, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, Chinese Translators’ Journal and so on. She is a teacher of English (Cambridge RSA) as a second/foreign language and a highly qualified translator/ interpreter with five years of practical experience in the corporate sector. Sher-shiueh Li got his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago, and is at present an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He is also on the faculty of the Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation, Taiwan Normal University, and the author of many books, which include European Literature in Late Ming China (in Chinese). Luo Xuanmin is Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages, Director of the Center for Translation and Interdisciplinary Studies, Tsinghua University, Beijing. His publications include books, translations and articles in various presses and journals at home and abroad. He is the founding editor of the journal Foreign Languages and Translation and chief editor of Abstracts of Chinese Translation Studies. He is also on the advisory/editorial Board for several journals, e.g. the Canadian journal TTR, the Danish journal Perspectives: Studies on Translatology and Journal of Chinese Translators. He was twice Visiting Fellow at Yale’s Comparative Literature Department and Fulbright Research Scholar at UCLA. He is the translator of Barack Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream and now the Deputy Secretary-General of the Translation Association of China (TAC). Francis K.H. So is Professor of English and President at Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages, and he also holds a joint professorship with the

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Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. He has published on medieval and Renaissance English literature, comparative literature and religion. His articles appear in Monumenta Serica, Monumenta Serica Monograph series, Chung-Wai WenHsueh and Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities. His most recent book in Chinese is Literature, Religion, Gender and Ethnicity: England, Middle East and China in the Middle Ages (Linking Books, 2005) and he has edited A Guide to Major Texts in English Literature (Bookman, 2007) and co-edited Emotions in Literature (Seoul National Unversity Press, forthcoming). Sylvia Ieong received her education in China and the UK with a BA, MA and PhD in English. She is Associate Professor/Associate Dean of Faculty of Education, University of Macau and on the Executive Committee of the Translators’ Association of China. Her research interests include English Education, Curriculum and Translation Studies. Her recent publications include Children’s Trilingual Picture Dictionary, Macao China (English), a Chinese translation of P. Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, Classical Chinese Poetry Glowing with the Dynamic of Modernism, and scores of journal papers including those published by Common Ground, Australia; ALC Press, Japan; University of Paris, France; and ERIC, USA. In 2004, the Macao SAR Government awarded her a gold medal for her contributions to education. Yifeng Sun is Head of the Department of Translation, Lingnan University, Hong Kong and Honorary Director of the Research Institute for Foreign Languages and Literatures, Jinan University, China. He is the author of several monographs including Perspective, Interpretation and Culture: Theory of Literary Translation (Tsinghua University Press, 2004; 2nd edn. 2006) and numerous articles that have appeared in Across Languages and Cultures, Babel, Modern Language Quarterly, Neohelicon, Journal of Translation Studies, Perspectives, Tamkang Review, Chinese Translators Journal and Translation Quarterly, among others. He has co-edited Translation, Globalization and Localization: A Chinese Perspective (Multilingual Matters, 2008). He is also Vice President of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies. Shaobo Xie is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. He is Associate Editor of ARIEL. He has published on literary theory, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and Chinese modernity. Among his recent publications are Cultural Politics of

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Resistance and Dialogues on Cultural Studies: Interviews with Contemporary Critics (co-edited with Fengzhen Wang, 2002). Jessica Yeung is Associate Professor of Translation Program, Hong Kong Baptist University. She is also a practicing theater critic and actress. She worked on productions of jingju (Beijing Opera) and kunju (Kun Opera) before joining the academia. She is author of a number of articles on translation and theater studies, and the monograph Ink Dances in Limbo: Gao Xingjian’s Writing as Cultural Translation.

Introduction LUO XUANMIN and HE YUANJIAN As the title implies, the current volume Translating China is unique in its probe into the important issues of how China has brought its civilization, intellectuality and culture in touch with and to the appreciation of other civilizations by means of translation, and by the same means, how China has advanced its civilization and civil society through learning from the outside world. As is well known, translation as a trade or societal practice has been long-standing in China as well as abroad, and the approaches to engaging the issues that are involved in the production and characterization of a translated text have also been decidedly diverse in both Chinese and Western traditions, due to the multi-dimensional properties of a translated text and the inherently cognitive process that produces the translated text. To date, we know very little about this cognitive process and have always faced the diverse approaches to translation practice and the ramifications that they have brought upon the characterization of a translated text. The past three decades have, however, witnessed some practical shifts in the translation profession. First, the status of the translator has become more occupational than ever before; second, specialized and pragmatic translations are taken up much more than literary ones; third, translators’ training has been more institutionalized than self-tutored individual tradecraft. At the same time, there have been some visible corresponding shifts in academic studies on translation: (1) adopting a more systematic approach, instead of a piece-meal and ad hoc one, to the training of translators and to the study and practice of translation. (2) Recognizing translation as an integral whole of product, function and process. (3) Paying more attention to universal principles that govern the translation exercise, irrespective of language pairs. (4) Approaching translation from an interdisciplinary approach, borrowing theoretically and methodologically from a number of relevant discourses and disciplines. The tenet that lies behind or unites these academic shifts is 1

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that in order to conduct any meaningful investigations into the nature and properties of translation, no matter how we may undertake this daunting and arduous task, we need to adopt empirically applicable and testable approaches to the study of translation (e.g. Reiss, 1971; Holmes, 1972; Steiner, 1975; Popovic, 1976; Lefevere, 1978; Snell-Hornby, 1988; Bassnett-McGuire, 1990; Toury, 1995; Baker, 1993, 1997; Luo, 2006, among others). The empirical nature of translation simply has to do with the fact that translation is a bilingual process conditioned and constrained by the linguistic and cultural coding systems of the source and the target text. Namely, the source text provides the input for itself to be processed into the target linguistic and cultural coding systems. At the end of that process, we thus have the target text. Such a process makes translation differ from monolingual speech production and perception, such as reading and creative writing using one language only. In monolingual reading or writing, the process involved is subject to the reader/writer’s own competence and performance systems that are applied to the task alone. By contrast, in translation, ideally and in theory, we would like the bilingual process to be able to reach equilibrium between the source and the target linguistic and cultural systems, so that no transfer of any input from the source text is lost. In reality, the process imposes many inherent and otherwise constraints cultural and ideological, that directly affect its outcome, i.e. the target text. Inherently, the source and the target linguistic and cultural systems are bound to differ from one another in certain aspects; performance-wise, individual translators are framed and tuned to their own systems representing the source speech community on the one hand and the target speech community on the other. Unfortunately, at the present time, we do not yet have a coherent system (or systems) of theories that take(s) into account all relevant variables in translation and is (or are) thus able to account for the textual and contextual functions of a translated text based on its translation process, i.e. systems that are comparable to those employed for studying other empirical processes, like a free-fall object traveling from Point A to Point B. But it is a useful start to recognize that there are empirical grounds to treat translation differently from monolingual reading or creative writing. Unlike monolingual reading and writing, translation is based on the source text serving as the input as well as conditioning and constraining the output, i.e. the target text. The key is to establish the relevant conditions and constraints and their interrelations, so that we are able to describe and explain translational facts and related issues independently of any other discipline such as linguistics and literary

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studies, as other authors have already pointed out (e.g. Holmes, 1978; Toury, 1980, 1995; Bell, 1991, 1998). Chinese authors have also been quick in responding to and experimenting with this line of thinking, elsewhere (e.g. He & Wei, 1998a, 1998b, 1999; Zhu, 2000; Luo, 2004, 2005; Chu, 2004; Xie, 2004; Cheung, 2004; Sun, 2004, and this volume). To begin with a historical perspective, Li Xia’s paper investigates the issue of how translation has played a powerful role in China’s national enlightenment and identity construction from the 17th century to the present era. She argues that during this period of time in which Chinese translation activities were once intimately related to the promotion of religion (Buddhism and Christianity) or secular Western scientific thought and literature, the translator enriched the mind of Chinese intellectuals and political leaders by opening up new cultural and scientific frontiers to the nation as a whole, and this role has not diminished even in today’s economic mobility of the country and its re-emerging visions of ‘Chineseness’. Continuing on this historical note, Chu Chi Yu’s paper and that of Francis So examine how Chinese thinking on translation has evolved from the intensely engaged period of translation of Buddhist scriptures in the Chinese cultural history. But the cases in hand tested by the two papers are different. Chu’s paper focuses on translation of terminology as reflected in the theory and practice of Chinese translations of Buddhist canons, assessing the tension and conflict between foreign ideas on the one hand and the Chinese language and culture on the other, and then examining how compromises were reached between them. He argues that what appeared to be prominent in translation history is very much related also to the modern terminology that we use to describe translation strategies today. Namely, in translation where two languages and cultures compete, the foreign texts may gain dominance in terms of syntax, but often lose out to the target culture on the word level, as was demonstrated in the translation of Buddhist scriptures, where the Buddhist translators adopted a foreignizing strategy with respect to sentence structures and, at the same time, domesticated the Buddhist concepts in terms of lexis. This may lead us to rethink descriptions of translation strategy: perhaps it would be helpful to distinguish syntax and lexis in such discussions. The case for Francis So is, however, more of a mixture of phonetics and syntax than lexis. He argues that the translation of Buddhist scriptures has induced a phonological process through which the Chinese language has acquired a poly-system, which it did not have

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before and which enables it to acquire an innovated way of naming, taxonomy, fiction-making and perception to know the abstruse. Specifically speaking, by adopting a Sinicized form in the target text, the translated Buddhist texts have also enabled the Chinese reader ‘to understand a higher metaphysical power’. Over several centuries of cumulative translation of Buddhist texts, the Buddhist parlance has become a driving force for the Chinese language to conform to certain existing phonetic and syntactic features and for the Chinese people to adopt certain cultural patterns of thinking that originated from the Buddhist texts, as demonstrated by the fact that certain Buddhist expressions have entered into popular daily Chinese expressions. Thus, to the author of this paper, the introduction of Buddhism to China through translation has had ramifications that are as complicated and complex, if not more so, as those that had occurred together with the spread of Christianity through the translation of the Bible into relevant vernaculars. Both have encountered rough patches brought upon by the different linguistic and cultural systems and both have vigorously and faithfully tried to bridge the source and the target systems, even though some distances would always remain between them. Taking a literary turn, Sher-Shiueh Li’s paper analyzes the Chinese translation of the Jesuits’ texts, in this case the Jesuit use of Aesopic fables, which are one of the major components of Jesuit exemplum from Greco-Roman lore. He argues that this element of European exemplum, a type of brief narrative generally employed to illustrate a religious point, which had enjoyed enormous popularity in the European pulpit, was brought to the late Ming China by the Jesuits through the Chinese translation of the Jesuits’ literature, a process that retold and reinterpreted the pagan tales in Chinese. As a result, it had transmitted literary material of an important European heritage to China, exceeding the previous perception that the cultural contribution of the Jesuits in the late Ming China was mainly dissemination of Western scientific and technological knowledge. The issue of translating China through stage is important for translation studies. Jessica Yeung’s paper examines literary translation of a different genre, the translation of kunqu, an opera form of play that originated from the town of Kunshan, Jiangsu Province of China, and has gained national prestige and the status of national cultural heritage. As is well known, translation of plays may take the text form either to read for pure literary pleasure or to be acted out on stage. In addition, if the play is performed in its original language, subtitles in the target language could be presented on a screen next to the stage to inform the audience.

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The fact that kunqu possesses a quintessential ancient Chineseness prevents itself from being easily rendered into any one of the three forms, among which subtitles are probably, Yueng argues, the least disturbing for the stage performance and therefore the most challenging. According to her, subtitles displayed on a screen remind the audience of the imminent communication process in the theater and belong to the primary reality in the auditorium. The distance it draws from the performance for the audience is not only dramatic, but also cognitive. The subtitler may thus wish to devise strategies in three aspects: to avoid reinforcing Orientalism, to evoke associations with more progressive texts in the target culture in order to prompt a more progressive consciousness in the audience, and to engage in a dialogue with the other signs on stage to create a critical distance for the translation text itself, and also for the audience. If translation is thought about in this way, we will no longer see it as a product, nor a process, but a site where negotiation of meaning, identity and discourses takes place, where differences and autonomy can be articulated. Sylvia Ieoing’s paper dwells upon Chinese poetry translation in English with Ezra Pound as a special case. The paper examines the approaches and sources of Ezra Pound’s best-known translation album Cathay, a very fine selection of English translations of classical Chinese poetry. Ieoing first traced down the original Chinese sources of the English translation, an exercise that previous researches had not managed to do, but rather relied on the ‘immediate or intermediate sources’. She further argues that no study of this complexity is complete without a careful study of these original sources, and translational issues will remain vague and elusive without a meticulous effort to identify and locate all the original texts and their authors. Pound’s translation methods are examined within the framework of a couple of cooperative translation models, ‘cooperative’ in the sense that cooperative efforts have always played an important role in accomplishing great human deeds, including translation projects of a considerable scale such as Pound’s, whose attempt at translating the crown jewel of classical Chinese literature leads to an exciting spectacle of a ‘relay’, which Pound inadvertently ran in and which was brilliantly completed by the cooperation and intellectual synergy of an international team transcending time and space. Thus, the most illuminating contribution of Cathay for today’s world appears to be the cooperative efforts that resulted in its creation. Ieoing’s concluding remarks then come as little surprise: in her view, only cooperation that generates intellectual synergies is made, can any attempt at translation of the vast and profound Chinese heritage

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be realistic. In a more and more globalized world and an era exploding with knowledge, cooperation is perhaps the trend that provides the answer to reconciling conflicting theories in translation studies and helps overcome some of the difficulties in literary translation. Turning to a more modern note, Xuanmin Luo’s paper looks into the translation activities of Liang Qi-chao, a towering and inescapable figure of modern Chinese intellectual history, and a committed pioneer to bring democracy and freedom to China through his hard-won process of learning from the West. Previous studies on Liang’s works of translation seem far from adequate. Based on a recent survey conducted by the author, among a total of 464 articles on Liang that were published from 1994 to 2003 covering his writings on literature, journalism, language and so on, only four articles, less than 1% of the total, are related to his critical views on translation. Although some articles discussing the so-called ‘New Novel’ had mentioned his views on translation, their emphasis was on reforms of new literature or fiction. It is thus apparent that the study of Liang’s works on translation has been marginalized or alienated to something as simple as a supplement to literature, rather than being used as a tool for transforming society and culture as Liang clearly wished. According to Luo, Liang’s translation practice had a utilitarian motive with an ideological touch, namely, to awaken Chinese people with progressive Western ideas. Luo has summarized four striking points of Liang Qi-chaos’ translation practice: to choose political novels as translation materials, to translate Western political novels through Japanese (re-translation), to manipulate translation with deletion and adding in the target language, and to publish translation in chapters in newspapers so as to create an immediate impact on the mass. In his concluding remarks, Luo emphasized that Liang’s translation practice was utilitarian but his guiding principle for translation was mainly built upon aesthetic and academic values, a reflection of Buddhist insights in the nature of translation. Such a principle could still guide our practice of translation today. To view the translators’ efforts collectively as a whole in bringing about a new cultural modernity and identity in China is the theme of Shaobo Xie’s paper. Xie argues that modernity always originates with translation and with the translating community’s collective effort to work for a modern and new world in their land, which he calls ‘a cultural Other’. In this sense, translation can be defined as transformation and re-signification indispensable to a society longing for change. At each phase of the changing process, Chinese modernity derives its criteria or parameters from translating Western theories of modernity. However, no

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Western idea or theory comes to China unmodified, untransformed or unhybridized. This is the way Chinese modernity takes its shape. For instance, Chinese translations of Western ‘humanism’ and ‘postmodernism’ have invariably altered, expanded and hybridized Self and Other at the same time, for at the end of the translation process neither remains what was known before and both have become displaced, enriched and revised. Thus, to translate modernity in China is to translate China in a double sense. On the one hand, China is adorned with a self-transformed and self-reinvented identity via the process of performative translation of Western ideas and values, and on the other, China emerges from the process of appropriative translation of the same with a form of modernity different from and alternative to the hegemonic modernity of the West, thus returning a Chinese version to the world of modernity from and for translation. Also striking a cord with transformed cultural identity via translation is Yifeng Sun’s paper, which argues that what is known as ‘foreignization’ in translation is both desirable and hazardous at the same time, as such a practice is perceived as allowing the target language to be influenced directly by the source text, not just in terms of linguistic features, but more significantly, in the realm of cultural and political values. But how much do we know about what elements and issues are at stake when foreignization takes place? Presumably, foreignization brings benefits to the target systems by virtue of the fact that translation is conducted to import useful foreign things in the first place. But foreignization may also provoke resistance from the target culture, and as a result it hinders rather than facilitates foreign influence. Thus, it is essential in the study of translation to identify elements and issues that play a role in harmonizing this foreignization process. Here, Sun argues that foreign influence is viable only after effective intercultural communication is achieved across the source and the target cultures, and in this sense cultural appropriation is a necessary part of the process of translation, because, on the one hand, it opens the way for effective cross-cultural intercultural communication and, on the other, it helps the target culture to avoid being improperly or excessively influenced by imported culture values. Martha Cheung approaches to analyze the complexities of translating China with a different focus, which is not on the linguistic, semantic or phonological dimensions of translating. In other words, the focus is not on the factors located within the text, not even on the text itself, but rather on the factors that lie outside the text. Instead of taking China as the receiving culture in which acts of translating produce catalytic effects,

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the paper adopts the perspective of someone engaged in an attempt at translating China, via the compilation of an anthology, in English translation, of texts on Chinese thinking about translation, from earliest time to the beginning of the 20th century. To the author, the anthology is a personal embodiment of translating China, so to speak. Thus, she wishes to bring to light to the translating community through her analysis of various issues pertinent to the compilation of the anthology, the rationale for undertaking the anthology project, principles of selection, and the problems encountered in the process of conceptualization and implementation of the project. In particular, the analysis explores what behind these topics - the issues of representation, intervention and mediation. Ideologically charged and steeped in cultural politics, these issues lie at the very heart of the complexities of translating China, but are all too rarely highlighted for discussion. In so doing, the author hopes to draw the attention of translators and translation anthologists alike to the enormous power and responsibilities they have - the power and the responsibility to represent, to intervene and to mediate - as they engage in the act of translating in China, and in other countries as well. The important function of translation technology is largely ignored and neglected. Sin-wai Chan’s paper is derived from his experiences of compiling a useful reference book for translation, A Dictionary of Translation Technology. As we know, modern technological advances over the past two decades have widened the horizon of the translator and the translation scholar alike. Chan’s paper specifically shows that the prevalence of information technology in the present age has brought about three major changes in the field of translation: the emergence of corpus-based translation studies, the coming of a technological turn in translation and the creation of proactive translation studies. Through the use of bilingual parallel corpora, a solid basis for descriptive generalizations are made from data, related concepts formed and operative methods created. The emergence of a technological turn in translation is supported by the growth of the discipline through a number of approaches and turns, by the organization of conferences on computer translation and by works on translation technology in the last decade. Looking ahead, proactive translation studies will be a major area of research for translation scholars, as this prospective approach will better prepare informative and intelligent translation for the changes and transformation that will take place on a global scale in the near future. Lastly, Yuanjian He’s paper investigates how contemporary Chinese political and ideological discourses are translated into English based on a parallel textual corpus constructed with English translations of the

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Chinese government white papers and their Chinese originals. The focus is on explaining why indigenous and sensitive Chinese political and ideological discourses are found mostly ‘transplanted’, i.e. translated closely following the source encoding into the target text. Pragmatically, those discourses are often politically and ideologically sensitive and hence are not subject to omission or substitution. However, the paper wishes to answer a deeper question as to how transplantation might take place in the cognitive process of translation. It argues, in that respect, that transplantation takes place in the process of translation as a result of a performance-related cognition constraint, namely, the constraint of conceptual mapping. In translation, when a source concept that is shared across the target speech community is mapped out in the translator’s cognitive systems, it goes through the Language Faculty (i.e. decoding) to the Conceptual-Intentional System for mental representation, and then back from the C-I System to the Language Faculty for encoding. However, a deviation of such normal route of processing will occur when an alien source concept cannot be mapped onto the C-I System of the translator representing that community, for the alien source concept is not shared across the target speech community. Then, two processing options exist. First, the offending alien source concept is filtered out or substituted in the C-I System, as is often the case with translating certain types of culturally indigenous concepts, like imageries embedded in historic idioms and conventional metaphors. Second, if the offending alien source concept cannot be filtered out or substituted, as is often the case with translating politically, ideologically or religiously sensitive discourses, then, the C-I System is by-passed by the Memory Systems, which will instruct the Language Faculty to encode into the target language the source forms that carry the alien source concept instead. As a result, we have transplantation. If such a perception of the cognitive process of translation is appropriate, then it opens doors to further inquiry into the nature and properties of plausible translational constraints in terms of cognition and psycholinguistics. The editors hope that the investigations in this book will reflect the nature of translation and demonstrate the important part translation has played in the formation of Chinese modernity. Translation is not merely a tool or a method, but rather a process, an action for deconstruction and construction. For this reason, this book also hopes to introduce a certain ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ into Chinese traditional translation studies and help Chinese scholars to maintain a rational viewpoint when dealing with Western translation theories. For example, Andre Lefevere holds that the Chinese translation tradition had been dominated by ‘elegance’

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until the end of feudalism in China and the appearance of common Chinese, which replaced classic Chinese at the beginning of the 20th century. Andre is an excellent scholar, but this belief of his is misleading for Western scholars. In China’s translation history, ‘elegance’ and ‘faithfulness’ always went side by side. At one time, ‘elegance’ was placed above ‘faithfulness’, but in another time, ‘faithfulness’ was the main trend (Andre, 1998; Zhang, 2005). Today, most Chinese translation theorists have accepted the view that ‘foreignization’ is the positive way for translation while domestication is negative and unfavorable. But they neglect the fact that the word foreignization (alienation) has special connotations in Chinese and could be understood in two ways: ideological and linguistic. In the former, foreignization in translation is preferred, but in the latter, both foreignization (alienation) and domestication (assimilation) are acceptable: they are complimentary rather than contradictory to each other. It is wise to put the word interdisciplinary at the end. The word interdisciplinary has two meanings: from outside, it’s a method that is applied to different disciplines to absorb nutrition from each other; from inside, it is an epistemological search, because in translation, there is too much indeterminacy and flexibility. The investigation of the nature of translation discipline is never exhausted; on the contrary, it is hard to imagine a self-disciplined translation studies. So translation, on the one hand, benefits from interdisciplinary studies, and on the other hand, shares its contribution with the development of other disciplines. A foreignization translation may help native writers in their literary creation; translated texts can provide important corpus for contrastive analysis in linguistic investigation; translation discoveries in discourse can strengthen literary and historical studies. In the long run, translation can shape the formation of a nation’s modernity. The completion of this book is not an end, but rather a start, because translation studies from a cultural perspective is still young, and has a long way to go. We sincerely hope this book can provide solid facts and analysis for scholars at home and abroad. References Baker, M. (1993) Corpus linguistics and translation studies: Implications and applications. In M. Baker et al. (eds) Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair (pp. 233
250). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Baker, M. (1997) Corpus-based translation studies
the challenges that lie ahead. In H.L. Somers (ed.) Terminology, LSP and Translation (pp. 175
186). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Bassnett-McGuire, S. (1990) Translation Studies. London: Routledge. Bell, R. (1991) Translation and Translating: Theory and Practice. London: Longman. Bell, R. (1998) Psycholinguistic/cognitive approaches. In M. Baker (ed.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (pp. 185
190). London: Routledge. *Cheung, M. (2004) Some suggestions on promoting translation studies in China. Chinese Translators Journal 167, 3
9. *Chu, C. (2004) Categories and strategies: On functional typology of translation. Chinese Translators Journal 165, 3
9. He, Y. (1999) Translating: Toward a principles-and-parameters theory. Journal of Translation Studies 3, 97
114. *He, Y. and Wei, Z. (1998a) Descriptive translation studies: A case study on the use of disjunctives in two Chinese translations of ‘‘The Tale of Genji’’. Chinese Translators Journal 128, 12
17. He, Y. and Wei, Z. (1998b) Descriptive translation studies: Theory and practice. Foreign Languages and Translation 16, 1
9. This is fuller version of He and Wei (1998a). Holmes, J.S. (1972) The name and nature of translation studies. In J.S. Holmes (1988) Translated!: Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies (pp. 67
80). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Holmes (1978) Describing literary translations: Models and methods. In J. Holmes, J. Lambert and R. van den Broeck (eds) Literature and Translation: New Perspectives in Literary Studies (pp. 69
82). Leuven: Acco. Lefevere, A. (1978) Translation studies. The goal of the discipline. In J. Holmes, J. Lambert and R. van den Broeck (eds) Literature and Translation: New Perspectives in Literary Studies (pp. 234
235). Leuven: Acco. Lefevere, A. (1998) Chinese and Western thinking on translation. In S. Bassnett and A. Lefevere (eds) Constructing Cultures (p. 14). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Luo, X. (2004) Translation theory and practice in China. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 1, 20
31. *Luo, X. (2005) Language, Cognition and Translation Studies. Beijing, Foreign Language Press. Luo, X. (2006) Translation Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Popovic, A. (1976) Dictionary for the Analysis of Literary Translation. Alberta, Edmonton: Department of Comparative Literature, University of Alberta. Reiss, K. (1971/2000) Translation Criticism* The Potentials and Limitations: Categories and Criteria for Translation Quality Assessment (E.F. Rhodes, English trans.). Manchester, New York: St. Jerome Publishing and the American Bible Society, 2000 (first published in German in 1971). Snell-Hornby, M. (1988) Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Steiner, G. (1975) After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. *Sun, Y. (2004) Perspective, Interpretation and Culture: Theory of Literary Translation. Beijing: Tsinghua University Press. Toury, G. (1980) In Search of a Theory of Translation. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University.

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Toury, G. (1995) Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. *Xie, T. (2004) Modernizing our thinking in translation studies. Chinese Translators Journal 163, 7
11. *Zhang, C. (2005) The controversy between Wen and Zhi and the tradition of Sutra translation. In X. Luo (ed.) Cultural Criticism and Translation Studies (pp. 3
14). Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. *Zhu, C. (2000) Coming out of the error zone: Reflections and prospects of translation studies in China. Chinese Translators Journal 139, 2
9. *Articles in Chinese.

Chapter 1

Cultural and Historical Perspectives on Translation in China LI XIA

Introduction In his monumental study After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, George Steiner (1975: 31) identifies communication across time and space as the key constitutive aspects of translation, and the translator as a powerful mediator between the distinctive values and traditions of cultures. His panoramic portrayal and interpretation of the complex formation of the cultural landscape of Western civilization over the centuries extends far beyond the narrow perspective of comparative linguistics or what Eugene Nida (1994: 1) refers to as ‘the mechanics of linguistic similarities and contrasts’, as the title of his study might suggest. Steiner’s penetrating vision thus anticipates the culture-oriented theoretical views articulated by leading Western translation scholars (and practitioners) of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Nida, Snell-Hornby, Vermeer, Venuti, Hatim and Mason, among others, on the role of translation in the construction and preservation of distinctly national and cultural identities as a hallmark of 19th and 20th century Western civilization. At the same time, it also reflects conceptual affinities to the Sapir-Whorfian understanding of language as ‘a house of consciousness’ and translation as an act of linguistic and cultural interpretation. Significantly, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958) expresses a similar view, albeit in a primarily philosophical and cognitive context (Eoyang, 1993: 111
121). Since China prides itself on a long and unique history of commitment to the preservation and promotion of cultural identity and tradition on a national and international level, the role of the translator or what Anthony Pym (1998: 150) calls ‘the human side of translation history’ in the context of specific cultural-political settings is of central importance. The translator’s ‘invisibility’ or ‘shadowy existence’, as described by Steiner and Venuti or 13

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highlighted in Larbaud’s metaphor of a beggar at the church door, might reflect a post-romantic view concerning notions of hierarchy in the chain of communication between author, text, reader and translator (BassnettMcGuire, 1980: 75), but it constitutes an equally significant reality with tangibly detrimental consequences for the translator, as spelt out in considerable detail by Venuti (1995: 8ff). While Venuti refers primarily to contemporary conditions in the West, most of them apply also to past and present circumstances in China, although the status and influence of translators in society was, generally speaking, higher than in the West. Significantly, the above chain-of-communication-model ignores the relevance of ‘material causes’ in the translation process defined by Anthony Pym as follows: However, if we look at history on the widest time scale, material causes are among the most profound and far-reaching factors one could wish for. For example, the technique for making paper moved westwards from China, reaching Baghdad just prior to the ninthcentury ‘‘school of translators’’ there, then reaching Christiana Hispania just prior to the thirteenth-century translation associated with another great ‘‘school,’’ that of Alfonso X. Paper does not produce translations. But its manufacture has certainly assisted in some major changes in translation history. (Pym, 1998: 151) Above all, it marginalizes the even more important role of politicoideological forces (including religious ones) in translation and the translator as an indispensable instrument in national identity construction that runs like a red thread through Chinese history, from Qin Shi Huang’s nationalistic outlook, highlighted in the standardization of the script, among others, to ‘Mao-era nationalism’ and the post-Mao-era of economic mobility and the associated visions of national identity or ‘Chineseness’. Regrettably, the key role of translators in determining and shaping not only prevailing attitudes towards translation, but society as a whole, has attracted insufficient attention in Chinese critical literature as well as in Western translation research (Pym, 1998: 150). Documents on translation in China go back well over 2000 years and highlight early government supervision and control through the establishment of translation offices for official interpreters and translators in Western Zhou Dynasty (Xi Zhou, 1066
771 BC). The establishment of such offices was administratively necessitated by the fact that China was made up of numerous nationalities with their own languages, dialects and cultures, including the members of the majority Han nationality. While different nationalities and dialect groups found it difficult to communicate

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orally, communication was possible in writing among the Chinese people of different dialects, since written Chinese characters do not rely on a phonetic component (DeFrancis, 1984: 38
66). Although early translation activities were predominantly oral (interpreting), they were conducted by government sponsored and professionally trained interpreters (Ma, 1984: 2). Unfortunately, historical records prior to the establishment of translation offices are missing due primarily to the burning of books and written (Confucian) documents under the First Emperor Shi Huang (221
209 BC), the founder of the Qin Dynasty (Yang, 1992: 3; Giles, 1930: 78ff). Little is known about the scale and exact nature of the very early translation activities in China. However, the administrative details contained in such classics as Li ji (The Book of Rites) and Zhou li (The Rites of the Zhou Dynasty) document the importance of translation officials and provide important information concerning the nature of their work in the context of China’s enormous linguistic and cultural diversity (Ma, 1995: 373
374). (Recent anthropological and archeological research rejects the notion of ‘isolated northern-plain culture’ in favor of an intensive cultural and economic exchange between various cultures in this area and outside China. See Friedman (1996: 175)). Efficient communication mechanisms at government level became particularly important after the unification of China in the Qin Dynasty, when imperial orders and messages had to be passed on to the vassal states in the North. Although no written documentary evidence is available with regard to specific aspects of translation, there is general agreement among scholars that official communication took place on an oral level and interpretation was restricted to spoken language, which seems to have remained the case in the early years of the Han Dynasty (206
25 AD). [For details see Liang Qichao (1984); Kenneth Chen (1972); Chen Fukang (1992); Tang Yongtong (1996); Lu¨ Cheng (1979); E.J. Eitel (1904); Qian Zhongshu (1979); Sun Changwu (1988)]. Translation proper began under government patronage and control with the translation of Buddhist scriptures, which shaped, together with Confucianism among others, the major facets of Chinese national culture and identity (and that of neighboring nations) for many centuries to come. The history of this development, however, is multifaceted and complex, and the subject of extensive research. In his preface to a special Chinese issue of the journal Meta, the translator critic Xu Jun divides the long history of Chinese translation into four major periods: translation of the sutras, translation in the Ming and Qing period, translation at the beginning of the 20th century and translation after 1949 and the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (Xu, 1999: 1). This view is shared by Wang Kefei and Fan Shouyi

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(Wang & Fan, 1999: 3) who divide the 5000-year history of translation in China into four major ‘waves’ over the centuries and Eva Hung who identifies three ‘peak periods’: the Buddhist sutra translation movement, the Jesuit translation activities in the late Ming Dynasty and the introduction of ‘Western learning’ into China in the second half of the 19th century. Significantly, the periods or waves identified above coincide with major social and political changes and national identity crises. Eva Hung (1999: 226) also draws attention to the little known fact that non-Chinese translators played a leading role in all three periods identified in her study. She also highlights the not infrequent practice of translation scholars to study the early history of translation in China in the context of current national boundaries, which is historically incorrect and untenable (Hung, 1999: 224).

Institutionalizing Buddhism While there is uncertainty as to the exact time of the introduction of Buddhism in China, historical evidence points to the existence of Buddhist temples in China in the later part of the Han Dynasty (25
220 AD). However, little is known about the exact beginning of the translation of Buddhist scriptures, and scholarly opinions vary with regard to the first Buddhist texts translated into Chinese (Ma, 1984: 10ff; Giles, 1930: 110). There is general agreement that translation of Buddhist scriptures started on a large scale towards the end of the late Han Dynasty when the Buddhist monks An Shigao and Lokaksin arrived from Central Asia and Scythia via the Silk Road in Luoyang, the then capital of China, to spread Buddhism among the ‘ruling elite of the time’ (Hung, 2001: 52
58; Ma, 1984: 17). The endeavor to have Buddhist scriptures translated into Chinese enjoyed government support from the very beginning, reached a climax in the Tang Dynasty and continued well into the 12th century. According to Ma Zuyi (1995: 374), more than 150 translators have been identified as being involved in this enormous task, unique in the history of translation. As the majority of the Buddhist monks were identified as foreigners, their activities were not entered into the official government records, which explains the fact that little is known about them. Nevertheless, they prepared the ground for the steady propagation and institutionalization of Buddhism in China. Significantly, the translation activities of Buddhist monks were generously patronized by the Imperial Court through sponsorship of special translation projects and financial support of Buddhist missionary work among the people. This strategy was not motivated by an intrinsic

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interest in translation per se, but by the political advantages that the spread of Buddhism offered to the Imperial Court, which soon assumed ultimate authority and control over the choice of texts to be translated for inclusion in the authorized canon of Buddhist teaching, which highlights the political importance attributed to translation by the nation’s governing elite. Early in the 5th century, Buddhism began to develop in two distinctly different directions in the North and South. While the focus of the Buddhist monks in the South was on philosophical discussions with the educated Chinese (literati), the emphasis in the North was on rendering service in the form of military and moral advice to Chinese and non-Chinese rulers in the interest of the state, which led to a close supervision of the monastic communities in later years. The missionary work conducted by the educated monks in the South among the cultured and wealthy Chinese offered a broad base of support, which included the elite Chinese society as well as the great masses of the people (Chen, 1973: 93). Since Chinese was frequently not the translator’s mother tongue, local assistants were used as stylistic advisors. While the number of Chinese monks was small initially, their number increased steadily around 400 AD. Also, their translations were no longer addressed to the cultivated laity, but to monks by now familiar with Buddhist terminology and a jargon that ordinary Chinese without philosophical and religious training could no longer understand (Waley, 1952: 86). In the period that followed, political and social instability prevailed and Buddhism became particularly attractive to the intellectual elite and government officials as an alternative to Confucian values. With the foundation of the translation center in Chang’an in 383 AD under imperial patronage, translation activities became more or less a government enterprise with social status and sufficient funding to attract the most eminent Buddhist scholars from China and outside (India). The promotion of Buddhism was thus no longer a private undertaking, but an integral part of government policy and control, not dissimilar to Catholicism and Protestantism in Europe. Three translators stand out in this period: Dao An (314
385 AD), Kumarajiva (350
405) and Paramartha (499
569) who is also known under his Chinese name Zhen Di. The foundation and organization of the translation office in Chan’an (present-day Xi’an) turned the city into one of the great centers of learning and facilitated the rapid spread of Buddhism and the introduction of astronomical, calendrical and medical study all over China (Lu¨, 1979; Wang & Fan, 1999: 4). Dao An’s range and depth of activities and achievements beyond translation attracted the admiration of government officials and ruling princes (including the Emperor Hsiao-wu), who invited him to give lectures and sent him

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presents (Wang & Fan, 1999: 3). During his final years in Chang’an under the patronage of Fu Chien, Dao An enjoyed the admiration of numerous nobles and aristocrats and was finally appointed imperial advisor. Dao An’s intellectual brilliance, openness and commitment to both religious and secular engagement is a hallmark of the majority of leading Chinese translators, which distinguishes them from many of their counterparts in the West. This applies also to Kumarajiva, who spent his childhood in Afghanistan and arrived in Chang’an in 401, after several unsuccessful attempts by Fu Chien, the ruler of the Jin Dynasty, to attract the famous scholar to his household. His privileged position and closeness to the ruling Yao family in Chang’an is reflected in the following description: The Hsiao-yao Garden was placed at the disposal of Kumarajiva and his fellow monks, and here, with a thousand monks sitting in daily sessions, Kumarajiva carried out his translation activities. Sometimes the ruler, Yao Hsing, personally participated in these proceedings by holding the old translations which were used by Kumarajiva as the basis for comparisons (. . .) He was honoured with the title Kuo-shih (National Preceptor) and from 402 to his death in 413 he and his colleagues poured forth a steady stream of translations, which included some of the most important items in the Chinese canon. (Chen, 1964: 83) His closeness to the ruler, who was fascinated by his intellectual brilliance and intuitive wisdom (Prajna), is underpinned by the fact that he was appointed ‘arbiter of all things Buddhist’ shortly after his arrival in Chang’an and provided with royal quarters and also with the ‘pleasures of the inner apartments’, which ultimately led to tensions between himself and the more disciplinarian Buddhists (Chen, 1964: 109). During his time in Chang’an, Kumarajiva devoted most of his time and energy to translation. His translations are rather free and very pleasant to read. In contrast to other translators of his time, he held the view that ‘popular scriptures are literary works intended to make an aesthetic as well as an argumentative appeal’ (Waley, 1952: 87). He also broke with the longstanding tradition of exploring Buddhist concepts from a Daoist (native Chinese) perspective by coining ‘Chinese terms specifically suited to Buddhism’ (Yang, 1992: 18). His translation of the Diamond Sutra inspired Chinese poets and philosophers and has been a major factor in the popularization of Buddhism among the educated classes (Giles, 1930: 114f). As the initiator of the method of free translation, Kumarajiva implemented major changes in the organization of the center and the translation work carried out (Yang, 1992: 20). Also, the increasing popularity of Buddhism among the Chinese elite enticed

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many brilliant Chinese intellectuals to become Buddhist monks and to engage in translation (e.g. Seng Rui, Bao Yun, Hui Kai) and eminent poets and writers to become involved in translation (e.g. Liu Xie). The most illustrious and influential translator during the formative period of Buddhism in China was the monk Xuan Zang (602
664), commonly known in the West by his honorary Buddhist title, Tripitaka, that is, what Arthur Waley (1952: 11) refers to as ‘the real and historic Tripitaka’, whose legendary journey to India is the subject of the novel Xiyouji (Journey to the West), one of the great classical works of Chinese (and world) literature. Although Xuan Zang himself has left no account of his life and career, sufficient information has been transmitted in biographies and historical documents to identify his lasting achievements as a missionary, translator, scholar, philosopher, teacher and imperial advisor who enjoyed the favors of successive Emperors (Waley, 1952: 121). Like his predecessors Dao An and Kumarajiva, Xuan Zang had a high public profile and already enjoyed in his life-time a legendary reputation. For example, his return from India to Chang’an in 647 generated so much interest in the general public that he had to stay overnight in the outskirts of the city, as it was impossible to force a passage through the crowds that filled the streets in order to catch a glimpse of him (Waley, 1952: 77). The spectacle of Xuan Zang’s official entry in Chang’an the following day reflects imperial support, public interest and admiration on a grand scale, as highlighted in the following description: Next day a huge concourse of monks in solemn procession carried relics, images and books that Xuan Zang had brought back with him from India, to the Hung-fu Monastery, which lay just outside the Imperial Park, in the north-west corner of the City. The route was lined by dense throngs of ‘‘citizens and officials both of the Palace and the Civil Administration.’’ Lest the spectators should crush one another to death in their eagerness to see the holy objects, they were forbidden to move an inch while the procession was passing. Standing stock-still they burnt incense, threw flowers and broke out again and again in cries of wonder and delight. (Waley, 1952: 81) As a confidant of the Emperor and moral advisor, he was invited to occupy one of the best of the 4000 rooms in the Western Brightness Monastery in Chang’an and was attended to by ten newly ordained acolytes and ‘constantly visited by Palace eunuchs and high officials sent by the Emperor with gifts of precious stuffs, cassocks and so on from the Imperial stores’ (Waley, 1952: 124). The Emperor’s insistence of having Xuan Zang in his vicinity and accessible at all times was time consuming

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and seriously interfered with his interest in translation and religious activities. Also, due to multifarious secular commitments and administrative duties at the imperial court, such as looking after foreign visitors and dignitaries, translation of diplomatic communications, public lectures, selection of personnel, preparation of submissions for funds, representation of Buddhist interests at government level, political maneuvering at the court on religious matters, corresponding with the Imperial Court on all sorts of occasions such as birthdays, necessitating congratulations and letters to foreign governments on behalf of the Emperor, selection of suitable sites for imperial building projects, organizing public processions, presiding over official banquets as for example the banquet at the Monastery of Maternal Love on the occasion of the creation of a new Heir Apparent in 656 at which 5000 monks took part and prominent statesmen and officials were ordered to attend (Waley, 1952: 114
115), to name only a few, Xuan Zang was continuously distracted from his duties as official translator at the Imperial Court. In 657, when he requested to be allowed to retire in order to have more time for his numerous translation projects and meditation, the Emperor rejected this idea out of hand, despite the impressive list of translations (over 600 scrolls) that Xuan Zang had completed since his arrival in Chang’an, many of them promoting imperial interests and national security. Despite his privileged position, Xuan Zang’s translation activities were strictly controlled by the Emperor and his bureaucrats and he needed imperial approval with regard to the choice of texts for translation, to the translation of already translated works, the need of such translations, the method of translation, locations (monastery) of translation work, and apparently insignificant matters such as getting three days off in order to visit the grave of his parents in Luoyang (Waley, 1952: 120). In 659, on completion of his work on the 200 chapters of the Hinayana compendium Mahavibasha, Xuan Zang finally received the Emperor’s permission to withdraw to the Jade Flower Monastery in the vicinity of Loyang in order to commence work on the great Prajna Corpus, which consists of 16 long scriptures, supposed to have been preached by Buddha on various occasions (Waley, 1952: 124). The task ahead of him and his translators and disciples was massive. Nevertheless, despite initial doubts as to the feasibility of the project, he completed it in 663. ‘His final version ultimately filled six hundred volumes and is said to be eighty-four times the length of the Bible’ (Waley, 1952: 124). When a deputation of translators and monks approached him on New Year’s Day in 664 with the request to embark on a similar gigantic translation project (the Ratnakuta), Xuan Zang refused on health grounds. While there is consensus among critics with regard to the immense quantitative achievements of Xuan Zang’s life-long

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translation activities (Waley, 1952: 85), doubts have been expressed concerning the quality of his translations and his approach to translation, which differed considerably from earlier methods and style of translation insofar as the translation process was directed by Xuan Zang alone and the translation dictated by him was final (Waley, 1952: 88f). Little is known outside China about Xuan Zang’s intellectual brilliance and his achievements as official translator and advisor at the Imperial Court. However, most foreign visitors come across his legendary fame at visits to the Wild Goose Pagoda in Xian, which was built in response to his request in 652 to house the texts he had brought back from India. Although his grandiose plans of a stone pagoda in Indian style was rejected by the Emperor and replaced by a substantially lower timber structure, the present tower, which dates from about 1700, is, nevertheless, a conspicuous landmark in the cultural and intellectual landscape as well as the history of translation in China. With the decline of the Buddhist influence at the Imperial Court and in government and the ruthless persecution of the Buddhist community soon after Xuan Zang’s death, there was also a marked decrease in Buddhist translation activities, which is understandable as most of the key religious texts had been translated by the end of the Tang Dynasty. However, Buddhism had by now become ‘thoroughly acclimated to the Chinese scene’ and an integral part of the Chinese intellectual and cultural pattern (Chen, 1973: 303). The attempt by the Jesuits in the 17th century to do the same with Christianity turned out to be less successful, although their missionary strategy had initially a great deal in common with the Buddhist proselytizers. Another important factor the Jesuits had in common with the great Buddhist scholars and translators of the 7th century, was the use of translation as a powerful instrument in their mission of institutionalizing a religious belief in East Asia and the view that cultural mediation can be best achieved under imperial patronage and by establishing close contacts with the political, intellectual and moral leaders of society.

Sino-Western Encounter: The Jesuit Campaign The second important impetus for translation in China is associated with the attempt to introduce Christianity in China. While the impact of early Christian missionaries was negligible, the first serious encounter between China and the West with the arrival of the Jesuits and their missionary activity was of considerable significance as it highlighted the cultural and linguistic-conceptual divide between two great civilizations and the strategies employed by the West (Jesuits) to bridge them.

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The foundation for the Jesuits’ project of christianizing China was laid by Francis Xavier, who left Rome in 1540 and propagated Christianity successfully within seven years over large areas of East Asia. He was the first to link the conversion of Japan with the conversion of China and to appreciate the importance of science as an entrance to East Asian societies and a powerful missionary strategy: They did not know that the world is round; they knew nothing of the course of the sun and stars, so that when they asked us we explained to them they listened to us most eagerly regarding us with profound respect as extremely learned persons. This idea of our great knowledge opened the way for us to sow the seed of religion in their minds. (Ronan & Oh, 1988: 23
24) Equally important was the insight gained in Japan that for Christianity to succeed in Asia, ‘missionaries had to reach the natives on their own terms: speak, read, and write the native languages; become an integral part of a particular civilisation and behave like natives of the country’ (Ronan & Oh, 1988: 23
24). As a consequence of his experience as a missionary in India and Japan, Xavier also realized the need to use different approaches in different countries and a less Euro-centric perspective, if their mission was to be successful. For that reason, he ordered Michele Ruggieri (1543
1607) and Matteo Ricci (1552
1610) to learn to read, write and speak Chinese (Ronan & Oh, 1988: 63). Although he intended to go to China himself to do the same, he died in 1552 on the small island of Shang-ch’uan off the coast of China, unable to set foot on mainland China. However, his last design was supported by Alessandro Valignano (1539
1606), Visitor to the East (Ronan & Oh, 1988: 4) and implemented within a short time by the brilliant Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1582
1610), who immersed himself in the culture of what he considered the highest civilization outside Europe and articulated his insights in unprecedented detail in a manuscript of 131 folio pages: With the other documents it makes known the travels, actions and sometimes very words of the first great mediator between China and the West. It is an authentic record, tallying with the dynastic annals, of events, which really happened. Invention was unnecessary. The wonders, immensity and extravagance Europe expected of the East, the wealth and the beauty associated with dawn, the legends and dreams of centuries were finally surpassed by the simple truth. (Cronin, 1959: 15)

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Without doubt, Ricci’s manuscript is a document of historical significance that dispelled some of the myths of Cathay, Europe’s ‘fondest fancy’ (Cronin, 1959: 15). Even more important is his total immersion in Chinese culture and the intimacy with Chinese society and its people, as reflected in Ricci’s comprehensive manuscript and in his achievements as a missionary and translator within his own ideological framework of ‘cultural accommodation’ with regard to the three most potent forces in China: the political elite of the literati, Buddhism and Taoism (Ronan & Oh, 1988: 48). However, the rationale underlying his missionary strategy, also referred to as the ‘Ricci method’, reflects a disturbing degree of insincerity, opportunism and potential ignorance or cultural misunderstanding in matters of Confucian doctrine. Significantly, these issues have found little attention in past Western studies of Ricci’s missionary and scientific achievements in China, which have been presented in a predominantly positive (Christian) light. However, more recent studies have highlighted some of the more complex problems of the cultural, philosophical and linguistic encounter between China and Europe and the Jesuit’s (Western) one-sided attempt to solve them: From their apologetic writings to adaptations of Western learning, the Jesuit campaign to eradicate the culture of qi underlying neoConfucian spirituality was conducted in the form of translating difference, either across time by introducing a new reading of ancient Confucian texts, or across cultural boundaries by transplanting an alien system of learned traditions. The epistemological prerogative that defines translation*the aspiration to approximate one set of ideas, concepts, and texts with another* was notably absent in their cross-lingual endeavour. In Ricci’s Tianzhu shi yi, the Confucian classics were, above all, symbolic resources of power and control rather than source texts to be fathomed and interpreted in their own terms. (Zhang, 1999: 101) The most perceptive and enlightening studies on this subject are by Jacques Genet (1985), Jonathan D. Spence (1984), Roger Hart (1999), Qiong Zhang (1999) and David Mungello (1985), among others. By the time Ricci arrived in Beijing (1601), his linguistic skills were considerable and his desire to adapt to Chinese culture and lifestyle exemplary and unheard of (Ronan & Oh, 1988: 12
13). ‘He adopted Chinese manners, diet, sleep patterns, and clothing, down to cuffs, belt and sash hat and colours. He even gave up grape wine for rice wine (. . .) and his Western identity by using the Chinese name ‘‘Li Mat-tou’’ under which he is still widely known today’ (Ronan & Oh, 1988: 42, 72). At the

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beginning, Ricci, Ruggieri and their fellow Jesuits focused their missionary endeavors on the common people, and adopted the appearance of Buddhist monks as recommended by their superiors Xavier and Valignano, as they were perceived by educated Chinese as Buddhists. They dressed like Buddhist monks, shaved their heads and cut off their beards. At the same time, they attracted the attention of the learned sector of the population with maps, clocks, prisms and other items from Europe as well as by exhibiting their knowledge of the Chinese Classics. By 1597, when Ricci became head of the China mission, he had established a reputation among Chinese intellectuals as a scholar of considerable depth. But when he realized the low esteem in which Buddhism was held by the literati and saw the lifestyle and ignorance of some of the Buddhist monks, he accepted the advice of some of his educated friends and early Chinese converts to change his attire to the dress and appearance of Confucian scholars and to work primarily among the educated Chinese whose interests were similar to those of the Jesuits (Ronan & Oh, 1988: 40, 67). Ricci’s reputation for learning was particularly strong among educated Chinese who visited him in Nanchang and urged him to meet others: His familiarity with the Chinese Classics and his knowledge of mathematics excited much admiration. Many were amazed at his prodigious feats of memory*e.g., repeating after a single reading more than four hundred characters written at random by Chinese scholars. Since he could reproduce these characters forward and backward, he was urged to write an essay on his technique. This was his Western Memory Techniques (His-kuo chi-fa), published in 1595. At Nanchang Ricci developed a warm friendship with Chang Huang (1527
1608), a famous scholar and author of the Encyclopedia of Geography (T’u-shu pien). In 1595, aware that the Chinese frequently discussed the five friendships that Confucius had taught, Ricci wrote the Treatise on Friendship (Chiao-yu lun) and dedicated it to Chu To-chieh (d. 1601), the prince of Chien-an, then residing in Nanchang. (Ronan & Oh, 1988: 66
67) By the time Ricci arrived in Nanjing, Treatise on Friendship (Chiao-yu lun) had been printed several times and gained European civilization credit by promoting the view among educated Chinese that Europeans were actually more than just ‘barbarians’ (Ronan & Oh, 1988: 67). In Nanjing, he developed a deep friendship with several famous and influential Chinese scholars and converts, among them Xu Guangqi (1562
1633), Li Zhizao (1565
1630) and Feng Yingchun (1555
1606) who

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supported his scientific and scholarly activities and helped him later to get to Peking (Ronan & Oh, 1988: 67). Among the numerous aspects of Ricci’s brilliant mind, his scientific knowledge generated particular interest among his educated visitors and friends. As he had studied philosophy, Euclean geometry, physics, astronomy, map-making, mechanics and mathematics under the famous Jesuit Christopher Clavius (1537
1612), a friend and associate of Kepler and Galileo, Ricci was indeed in a perfect position to familiarize his Chinese admirers with the latest and most progressive scientific thought in Europe at that time. Moreover, most of the information available on these subjects were translated by him or under his supervision and thus made accessible for a wider circle of scientifically oriented Chinese scholars and literati. Ricci’s ingenuity in the construction of astrolabes, sundials, clocks and other scientific instruments also aroused admiration and interest among many of his Chinese contacts (including the secluded Emperor) and contributed to his reputation, which ultimately assisted him in gaining access to the imperial palace, however without ever being admitted to the Emperor himself. Despite his missionary zeal, Ricci freely admitted that among the six reasons for his popularity, his religious teachings came last (Ronan & Oh, 1988: 36
41). It is, therefore, important to remember that Ricci’s (and his predecessors’) approach to religious teaching was unique, as it differed greatly from that practiced by other Christian monks. Nevertheless, the rationale underlying his appearance and behavior was an integral part of his missionary strategy and his private views incompatible with those of his public persona. Ricci completed his first translation of the Four Books into Latin in 1592. Although he was already in command of well over 5000 ideograms (out of 50,000), he was faced with enormous difficulties with regard to the translation of unfamiliar concepts, etymological interpretation of characters (e.g. Hsiao), the phoneticization of proper names (e.g. Ricci originated the Western rendering of the Chinese K’ung Fu-tzu
respectable master Kung
transliterating it in Latin as Confucius), obscure utterances and the attempted adaptation of the ‘stiff style of the uninflected original’ to Ciceronian Latin (Cronin, 1959: 107). While Ricci’s translations of religious texts are considerable, his translations related to the sciences had a much more profound and lasting impact upon Chinese notions of the world and the physical structure of the universe. Together with his close friend Li Zhizao (Li Chih-tsao), Ricci translated in an abridged form the works of his teacher, the famous mathematician Clavius, which revealed for the first time in China the method of extracting square and cubic roots from

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whole numbers and fractions and Clavius’ critical views on a widely used mathematical textbook by the English scientist John Hollywood. They also collaborated in the translation of Euclid’s first six books and other minor mathematical works: Ricci translated orally while Hsu¨ transcribed. Hsu¨, who showed great aptitude for mathematics, wanted to translate the whole of Euclid, but Ricci explained that the latter books, being beyond most Chinese, would not further their apostolic work. Only two of Ricci’s friends* Paul Hsu¨ and Li Chih-tsao, the geographer* could fully master Euclid, and the first six books, published in the spring of 1607, were more admired than understood. (Cronin, 1959: 229) Another major scientific contribution is related to Ricci’s adaptation of the Gregorian system to the lunar year and its translation into Chinese, designed to enable Chinese converts to calculate the dates of Sundays and feast-days. Ricci’s ground-breaking work laid the foundation for the use of the European method of calculation by imperial decree from 1669 onwards (Dunne, 1962: 367), and thus highlights the social orientation of his scientific ingenuity and linguistic mastery of Chinese to the benefit of local and his own non-indigenous (Western) interests. Conversations with his Chinese friends and visitors on Chinese cosmography inspired Ricci in 1602 to improve his map of the world, which is still widely considered to be one of the most celebrated maps in the history of cartography. ‘Ricci translated all terms and place names into Chinese, and positioned China toward the center of the map, thus giving the Chinese their traditional pride of place as the ‘‘middle kingdom’’ (chung kuo). ( . . .) He himself tells us that many thousands of copies of his map were made, some under his supervision, while others were pirated’ (Foss, 1988: 211). No doubt, the knowledge the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans had of the outside world and the Europeans of China was largely derived from Ricci’s skills in combining his own cartographic and linguistic talent and indigenous ingenuity and expertise for this project. At the same time, the Jesuit missionaries also translated numerous Chinese texts into Latin and other European languages and by doing so, introduced Chinese culture, religion and thought in the West where they generated great interest (Song, 1994: 1
130). Despite the primary objective of propagating Christianity, the role of the Jesuits as mediators between China (Asia) and Europe in terms of overcoming the divide between the two civilizations with regard to language, culture and scientific thought is, therefore, not to be underestimated. Even though they (and other Christian missionaries) had to leave China in 1723, their

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brief presence in China and promotion of Western learning stands ‘at the beginning of a long and difficult path along which Westerners and Chinese struggled to comprehend, communicate with, and learn from each other’ (Zhang, 1999: 101). While the Jesuits’ mission of Westernizing (converting) the Chinese mind failed to take the three bastions of Chineseness, namely Confucianism, Buddhism and the literati, Western culture and thought became a powerful attraction in China from the mid19th century and has retained its relevance with the exception of short interruptions ever since.




Western Learning: 1811 1911 In his excellent study of the role of translation in the dissemination of Western learning between 1811 and 1911, Xiong Yuezhi distinguishes four major stages of development, based on specific characteristics related to translation practice in the political context of China’s humiliation and exploitation by the Western powers and Japan for the better part of the 19th century (Xiong, 1998: 13f). While the focus of translation activities during the first period (1811
1842) was primarily on the translation of religious texts and Chinese classics, with Robert Morrison (1782
1834) of the London Missionary Society as the most influential translator, educator, scholar and promoter of Western science and international understanding (Wang & Fan, 1999: 8; Xiong, 1994: 97
100), the second stage (1843
1860) was overshadowed by the Opium War and the establishment of six treaty cities, some of which quickly became centers of intensive translation activity, Western learning and publishing houses specializing in Chinese translation of Western works on religion, astrology, geography, mathematics, medicine and economics (Xiong, 1998: 15). After 1843, Chinese intellectuals in Shanghai and Guangzhou made major contributions to the translation of Western books as individuals: as, for example, Li Shanlan, Wang Tao, Guan Sifu, Zhang Fuxi and others. At that stage, translation work was primarily conducted as teamwork, or what later became known as ‘Missionary Speaks* Chinese Writes’ (Xiong, 1998: 16f). As a consequence of the Tianjin Treaty (1858), which ended the Second Opium War, eleven new treaty ports were designated and China was forced to open all treaty ports and allow foreigners to travel freely all over China. After 1860, the majority of translation bodies, government-owned and private, were located in Shanghai, among them the influential Jiangnan Arsenal, the SDK (better known as ‘Christian Literary Society’) and the Yi Zhi Publishing House, which published three quarters of all Western books

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translated in China (Xiong, 1994: 17
18). The dissemination of Western material in translation slowly made its way from the Eastern coastal regions to the inner parts of China and helped in gradually turning suspicion into heightened interest in Western learning. In the 1880s, the wealthy families of Shanghai, for example, had their children educated in such exclusive church schools as the Anglo-Chinese College and even the Guangxu Emperor openly demonstrated his fascination with translated Western books (Xiong, 1998: 20). The third stage, from 1860 to 1900, was also associated with the Opium War and the government permission for foreigners to move freely and under government protection to the interior of China. As a consequence of the numerous new centers of dissemination, newspapers and journals, as well as organizations and institutions publishing Western books in translation, Western learning and thinking gradually made its way to the Chinese education system. The period from 1900 to 1911 saw social unrest among Chinese intellectuals, which led to the Reform Movement of 1898 and the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and to drastic changes in the area of translation and dissemination of Western learning, with Japan as the main facilitator. Of the 555 books translated into Chinese between 1902 and 1904, for example, 89 were from English, 24 from German, 17 from French and 321 from Japanese (60%). There was also a remarkable increase in the volume of materials translated between 1900 and 1911. The number given by Xiong is at least 1599 titles, twice as many as published between 1811 and 1911 (Xiong, 1998: 20). In contrast to earlier years, the focus of interest was now clearly on material in the social sciences. The impact of Western learning was enormous and triggered off far-reaching changes all over China, which Xiong Yuezhi sums up as follows: The dazzling new disciplines and new vocabulary brought an entirely new outlook to academic and publishing circles. The meaning of many words and terms current even today, such as society, political party, government, nationality, class, and ‘‘-ism,’’ were all established at that time. This laid a solid foundation for the Vernacular Language Movement of the May Fourth Movement (1919). It can hardly be imagined that the future New Culture Movement could have succeeded without this injection of large quantities of Western learning and the veritable explosion of new words and terms, which took place as a result in late Qing China. (Xiong, 1998: 21) As a consequence of domestic problems, political setbacks and military defeats and humiliation (Opium War 1840
1842, Sino-Japanese War 1894
1895) and the ever present danger of foreign occupation and

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loss of sovereignty, China became more and more conscious of its isolation and economic and scientific backwardness in comparison with Western standards and the programatic demand of opening the nation to the West, as Japan had done in the Meiji Reform, gained momentum after the Sino-Japanese War (1894) and the Hundred Days of Reform of 1898: ‘Since Japan had profited from opening up to the West in the Meiji Reform, Chinese reformists and intellectuals argued that China should do likewise. Figureheads of the movement such as Kang Youwai and Liang Qichao promoted the use of Japanese translations which were available in large numbers’ (Ma, 1995: 381
382). In their eagerness to learn from the West, Chinese political leaders and intellectuals brought about a wave of translations, which included an enormous range of subjects and topics (Yang 1992: 36). In an excellent study, David Pollard (1998: 6) highlights the fact that fairly exact data is available about publication activities in the late 19th and early 20th century. Among the numerous Chinese translators of the time, two stand out: Yan Fu (1854
1921) and Lin Shu (1852
1924). Yan Fu was sent to England where he received tuition not only in naval science, but also in general science, political and social science and economics. On his return to China in 1879, he began a long and distinguished translation career, which helped to shape the minds of many 20th century Chinese intellectuals and political leaders. His very first project, Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays, was not a translation in a literal sense, but a rewriting of several chapters. In the following years, Yan Fu translated John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, E. Jenks, W.S. Jevon and many other influential Western thinkers (Yang, 1992: 36f). As a translator, Yan Fu had China’s need of modernization foremost at heart, which is reflected in the texts selected for translation. While he was generally considered a pioneer mediator between China and the West, and the ‘first Chinese who systematically introduced Western learning to China’ (Yang, 1992: 38), not everyone accepted his approach to translation. Yan Fu was the first Chinese translator who clearly defined his objectives in terms of xin (faithfulness or fidelity or authenticity), da (comprehensibility or expressiveness) and ya (elegance), the three criteria for literary translation, which have exerted great influence on Chinese translation theory and practice (Wang, 1996: 43
51; Wang & Xu, 1996: 7
12). Contrary to his theoretical view, many of Yan Fu’s translations can hardly be called authentic since the texts are often culled and mixed with personal comments and observations and rhetorical elegance is achieved at the expense of accuracy. This can be explained to some extent by his

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background in classical Chinese language and syntax, which he explains and justifies in his ‘General Remarks on Translation’ as follows: In using the syntax and style of the pre-Han period one actually facilitates the comprehensibility of the profound principles and subtle thoughts, whereas in using the modern vernacular one finds it difficult to make things comprehensible. Oftentimes, straining the meaning but slightly to fit the language can result in gross misinterpretation. Inevitably, I had to make a choice between these two media, not that I have a preference for the eccentric. (Yan 1973: 5) Yan Fu openly admits the unorthodoxy of his translational practice and refers to his works not as ‘translations’ but as Dazhi which has been translated as ‘paraphrase of the gist of the original’ (Cheng, 1977: 68). His disregard of authenticity with regard to stylistic and grammatical equivalence as well as his use of classical language in his translations of Western texts already attracted criticism in the China of his own time. Contemporaries, as for example Fu Sinian, identified above all his translations of Thomas Huxley as examples of his disrespect for the original. The critic and scholar He Lin differentiates between Yan Fu’s early translations which were based on the ‘sense for sense method’ which was considered to be too free and the ‘literal method’ of the later period which was much closer to the text and was therefore less open to criticism (Fan 1999: 33; Editorial Board 1984: 119). Although readers not familiar with the subtleties of classical Chinese rhetoric were unable to appreciate his translations, Ya Fu had good reasons to use this method because his readers were predominantly educated in the classical tradition. This problem surfaced again with great vehemence at the introduction of the vernacular in China in the course of the May Fourth Movement in 1919. Moreover, it was the educated elite in China that absorbed Western learning and thought initially and helped to promote and implement it subsequently. The second outstanding literary translator of the late Qing period was Lin Shu (1852
1924). Lin Shu, an accomplished poet and novelist (and painter), made a name for himself in 1898 as the translator of Alexander Dumas’ La Dame aux Camelias. Within a short time, well over 150 translations of Western literary works followed (Zhang, 1992: 291
323; Luo, 1984: 187; Fan, 1999: 27). The most important authors were the French novelists Hugo, Dumas, Balzac, the English writers Defoe, Fielding, Swift, Scott, Dickens, Lamb, Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, the Spanish novelist Cervantes, the American authors Harriet Beecher Stowe and Washington Irving and

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31

the Norwegian playwright Ibsen. His translations of Scott’s Ivanhoe, Dickens’ David Copperfield and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin have become Chinese classics and have attracted a huge readership and exerted great political influence. A similar interest in political fiction among intellectuals also led to the translation of Sir Thomas More, Bulwer-Lytton, Alexandre Dumas (father), Victor Hugo, Jules Verne and Shakespeare as well as the Russian nihilists in the early Meiji era (1880
1890) in Japan. Despite his success in raising interest in Western literature among his readers, Lin Shu’s approach to translation also generated considerable criticism due to his often arbitrary way of manipulating (adding and deleting material) original texts. As Lin Shu had no knowledge of Western languages, he had to rely on the textual interpretation of his assistants before he could put the respective Chinese translation down on paper. This was, of course, the method already widely used in the early translation of Buddhist scriptures. While he showed little deference for the original texts (he reduced Cervantes’ Don Quixote by almost half), he also enriched his translations with extensive commentary and interpretative observations. Zheng Zhenduo highlights his achievements to Chinese culture as follows: At a time when China had been forcibly opened to the outside world for about a half a century, Chinese people still knew little about the rest of the world and Lin’s translations served as an eye-opener. Although some Chinese were misled into thinking that China was weak because it lacked a modern arsenal, shipyards, railways, and other material things, the Chinese remained proud of their literary heritage and a long list of prestigious historians, essayists, poets and playwrights. Little did they know that there were equally worthy authors, writers and poets in the ‘‘barbarian world.’’ Novel writing had met with the contempt of Chinese men of letters for thousand of years until Lin, a scholar with classical education, began to translate Western novels in elegant Chinese. Lin asserted that some Western authors were comparable to China’s Sima Qian, a great historian of the West Han Dynasty. (Luo, 1984: 712f) His unique ability to recreate the characteristic stylistic and linguistic features of Western writers without knowing their language also earned the praise of leading contemporary Chinese writers, such as Mao Dun and Zheng Zhenduo (McDougall & Louie, 1996: 50f). Guo Moruo not only admitted Lin Shu’s influence on his own writing, but also claimed that some of his translations even surpassed the original (McDougall & Louie, 1996: 50f). Without doubt, the great tradition of Chinese literary

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translation owes a great deal to Lin Shu’s genius as the translator of great Western works of literature, which at the same time influenced Chinese literature, as writers became aware of literary possibilities hitherto unknown in China. Eventually, many of Lin Shu’s translations into classical Chinese had to give way to translations into vernacular Chinese. Social unrest and the growing political influence of the anti-feudal forces under the leadership of Sun Yatsen motivated many Chinese students and intellectuals of the time, engaged in studies in Japan, to return to China in order to fight for the abolition of the feudal system and the establishment of a republic. Many of them had become acquainted with Western thought while in Japan (and Europe) and some of them had even translated Western texts into Chinese. The most distinguished among them is probably Ma Junwu (1882
1939), who spent some time in Japan and Germany and was also familiar with the respective languages and English. He translated John S. Mill’s On Liberty, Herbert Spencer’s The Principles of Sociology, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (from Japanese) and literary works by Byron, Schiller and Goethe into Chinese (Ma, 1995: 384f), which opened a challenging new dimension to the Chinese mind.

Early 20th Century China: Break with the Past While the proclamation of the Republic in 1912 did not bring about immediate social change, the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 together with the growing influence of the intellectual and political May Fourth Movement with its radical advocacy of Western values such as democracy and science (Mr D and Mr S in Chen Duxiu’s famous statement in the magazine New Youth of January 1919) (Wang, 1996: 116) and the renunciation of traditional Chinese politics and thought (Confucianism) in search of a bright future, marks a historic watershed with far-reaching national consequences well beyond the literature and translations of the 1920s and 1930s. Three major aspects stand out with regard to translation: the promotion of vernacular Chinese as the target language at the expense of classical Chinese, the acceptance of literary translation as a legitimate mainstream activity in the literary scene and the growing interest in translating literatures of other cultures, which largely replaced traditional Chinese literature as the foundation upon which the new writing was built. The emphasis on the vernacular led to the decline of classical Chinese in literary translation and the accessibility of literature to a much wider reading public as a prime motivating force. Hand in hand with the linguistic shift of emphasis went the ideologically based focus on realism and naturalism in literary representation, which led to the translation of

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Western writers such as Zola, Flaubert, Maupassant, Daudet, Rousseau, Goethe, Hegel, Nietzsche, Galsworthy, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Irvin Babbitt, Dos Passos, Henry James, Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, Ibsen, Strindberg, Mickiewicz, Peto¨fi and many others as documented by David Pollard (1998: 79
126). The second half of the 1920s showed a conspicuous decline in interest in translating Western (English and French) literature and a marked increase in translations of Marxist-Leninist works under the leadership of translators such as Wu Liping, Bo Gu and Xiong Deshan. In 1938, Li Chunfa, Guo Dali and Wang Yanan completed their three-volume translation of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Naturally, the translation of Marxist literature was a government priority of enormous proportions (Ma, 1995: 384). Parallel to political-ideological works, leading Chinese writers and supporters of the May Fourth Movement also began to study and to translate post-revolutionary Russian literature and criticism, usually from English or Japanese versions. Writers like Lu Xun and Guo Moruo helped to set the trend toward greater Chinese interest in Russian literature, while Mao Dun focused on Soviet critics and thinkers at the expense of English and French sources. Between 1926 and 1930, Lu Xun published translations of Gogol, Dostoevsky and Andreyev in several magazines and in the series Weiming congshu (Unnamed Series) (Cheng, 1977: 63ff). While Soviet authors were dominant, American, German, English, Japanese and Korean writers were also represented. Lu Xun also introduced Tolstoy, Turgenew, Chekov, Gorky and other Eastern European authors like Henryk Siekiewicz (Cheng, 1977: 64
72). What is often not sufficiently appreciated in historically oriented translation research is the fact that a great deal of Western literature and culture in translation actually came into China via Japanese translations, or what Cheng Qingmao calls ‘Japanized Western Theory’ (Cheng, 1977: 63). The background for this can be found in Japan’s modernization efforts since the Meiji Restoration (1868), which mesmerized Chinese intellectuals who saw China stagnating in the Confucian backwaters of conservative politics and obsolete rites and moralities and had left China to study ‘Western civilization’ in Japan, that is, engineering, medicine, economics, politics, education and military science and other technological skills essential for the restructuring of China. Major Chinese writers like Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Yu Dafu and Guo Moruo, who controlled the Chinese literary and cultural scene and the remarkable translation efforts after their return to China, initially became involved in literature while studying non-literary subjects. Also, most Chinese intellectuals accepted the stereotypical notion that modern Japanese literature and culture was nothing more than the

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successful imitation of the West, or in Zhou Zuoren’s words ‘creative imitation’ (Cheng, 1977: 63
72). The translations of Japanese literary works were, therefore, mainly designed to facilitate the speeding up of China’s intellectual and political modernization process, which also greatly influenced the choice of texts selected for translation and admission into society (while screening out others), foreshadowing the comprehensive ideological and political interference in the decades to come. The emphasis on vernacular Chinese in translation made literary texts accessible to a rapidly growing readership outside the traditionally privileged and educated elite. This process was overshadowed by restrictions imposed by national and state interference in the name of nationalism and led to the dominance of a government generated and controlled official discourse and the impoverishment in the growth of modern Chinese language. Mao Zedong had foreshadowed this in his famous ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature’ (Zai Yan’an wenyi zuotanhui shang de jianghua) as early as 1942, but the actual implementation of his ideas took place in 1949 with the founding of the PRC, when strict control over translation (and the study of foreign languages) was imposed by the government, which lasted for well over 20 years. Without doubt, the translation activity of leading Chinese poets and writers also raised the level of literary translation at the time of the May Fourth Movement and the years thereafter. To some extent, virtually all leading Chinese writers (Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, Mao Dun, Lao She, Ba Jin, Cao Yu, Ai Qing, Yu Dafu, Ding Ling, Dai Wangshu, Shen Congwen) had some knowledge of foreign languages (due to their studies overseas) and produced literary translations that also helped to generate interest in literary translation among the educated classes and a heightened translation activity. Another hallmark of Chinese translation practice emanating from the May Fourth Movement is the specialization in a foreign language and the careful selection of suitable authors and texts. The great translator Fu Lei (1908
1966), for example, translated French literature only (Balzac, Romain Rolland) and Zhu Shenghao (1912
1944) spent most of his life translating Shakespeare’s plays into Chinese. Zhang Guruo translated Thomas Hardy, Zhou Xuliang John Galsworthy, Dong Qiusi Charles Dickens, Yang Bi William Thackeray, Ge Baoquan Anatol Pushkin, Feng Zhi Heinrich Heine, Ji Xianlin Indian epics, Fu Donghua Theodore Dreiser, Yang Jiang Cervantes and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (Yang, 1992: 48). Parallel with the growing interest in literary translation was a heightened awareness of theoretical issues concerning literary practice. Fu Donghua translated Aristotle’s Poetics in 1926, Zhu Guangqian Plato’s Dialogues, Yang Zhouhan Horace’s Art of Poetry, Qian

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Xuexi Longinus’ On the Sublime, Zhu Guangqian Croce’s Aesthetics, Vico’s New Science, Lessing’s Laokoon, Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann and Hegel’s Aesthetics. Shorter critical essays by leading Western thinkers (e.g. T.S. Eliot, Paul Vale´ry, I.A. Richards) were translated into Chinese and published in Cao Baohua’s Modern Poetics (1937). By the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, most significant theoretical works of Western and Russian schools of thought had been translated into Chinese and helped to shape critical thinking and scientific research in China. At the same time, Chinese works of literature had been made accessible to Western readers by such outstanding Western translators as Herbert A. Giles, James Legge, W.J.B. Fletcher, Witter Bynner, Amy Lowell, Shigeyoshi Obata, Ezra Pound and above all, Arthur Waley (The Analects of Confucius, The Book of Songs and Wu Cheng’en’s epic novel The Journey to the West, though in abridged form). Some of the great classics of Chinese literature, however, have been translated into foreign languages (above all English) by translators whose mother tongue was Chinese. Yang Xianyi and his English-born wife Gladys Yang are undoubtedly the most accomplished and versatile among them. They translated Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil’s Eclogues and the medieval epic the Song of Roland into Chinese, and such Chinese classics as Lyrics of Chu, Records of the Historian, and the classical Chinese novels The Scholars and A Dream of the Red Mansions into English. Anthony C. Yu’s monumental four-volume translation of Wu Cheng-en’s epic novel The Journey to the West ought to be mentioned in this context. At the National Conference on Literary Translation in 1954, Shen Yanbing (commonly known as Mao Dun, 1896
1981) officially reaffirmed the importance of translation of foreign literature for the enrichment of Chinese culture and society and the need to build on past achievements (Shen, 1984: 501
507). However, subordination of all cultural (literary) activity to political and ideological priorities led to strict government control with regard to the selection of material suitable for translation, with conspicuous emphasis on Russian and Third World literature up to the time of the Cultural Revolution (1966
1976), when official translation activities in China came to a standstill with the exception of translations exclusively ‘for internal distribution’ (neibu cankao), that is, for high-ranking cadre elite. Significantly, Xie Tianzhen is correct in calling the period of the Cultural Revolution an ‘absolutely unique phenomenon in both Chinese and world history’ (Xie, 2000: 1) underscored by China’s opening its doors to the world and the programatic desire and readiness for global interaction on a commercial, industrial, financial, intellectual and artistic level since the 1980s and 1990s and the bold new visions of Chineseness and a bright

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future for its people. In the light of the massive exposure of China to foreign influences on an unprecedented global scale, facilitated still to a large extent by translators (despite growing reliance on visual expression), the concern articulated by China’s political, cultural and intellectual leaders with regard to the potential erosion of traditional Chinese cultural and human values by Western (material) concepts and ideas is timely and legitimate with regard to national identity and cultural sovereignty and independence.

Conclusion From the brief historical overview of Chinese translation presented above, it should become obvious that Chinese translation traditions have their very roots in cultural interaction and openness, which determined translation practice and thought over centuries despite dialectic tensions of resistance to cultural openness and innovation. The present pressures exerted on China, particularly from the Western world, in all spheres of life are, therefore, not unique. The need for cultural openness and scholarly interaction with what Zhu Chunshen calls ‘the big world’ (Zhu, 2000: 2
9) is widely accepted in the scientific community and translation studies seem to be at the cutting-edge of this development and emerging as an exemplary model for cultural innovation and change in general: ‘What Chinese translation studies need most right now is openness and a thorough scientific method of deduction. We are all anticipating this macro breakthrough in our ways of seeing in translation studies and a scholarly transformation in order to find our own position in international translation research’ (Zhu, 2000: 9). References Bassnett-McGuire, Susan (1980) Translation Studies. London/New York: Methuen & Co. Ltd. Chen, Fukang (1992) Zhongguo Yixue Lilun Shigao [A History of Chinese Translation Theory]. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. Chen, Kenneth (1972) Buddhism in China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cheng, Ching-mao (1977) The impact of Japanese literary trends on modern Chinese writers. In M. Goldman (ed.) Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era (pp. 63
88). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dazangjing (Tripitaka) (1975) Taipei: Xinwenfeng Publication Co. DeFrancis, John (1984) The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Eitel, E.J. (1904) Handbook of Chinese Buddhism (2nd edn). Tokyo: Sanshusha. Eoyang, Eugene Chen (1993) The Transparent Eye. Reflections on Translation, Chinese Literature, and Comparative Poetics. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Fan, Shouyi (1999) Highlights of translation studies in China since the midnineteenth century. Meta 44 (1), 27
43.

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Gemet, Jacques (1972) A History of Chinese Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giles, Herbert A. (1930) A History of Chinese Literature. New York: Grove Press Inc. Hart, Roger (1999) Translating the untranslatable: From copula to incommensurable worlds. In L.H. Liu (ed.) Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (pp. 45
73). Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press. Hung, Eva (1999) The role of the foreign translator in the Chinese translation tradition, 2nd to 19th century. Target 11 (2), 223
243. Hung, Eva (2001) Cong An Shigao de Beijing Kan Zaoqi Fojing Hanyi [An Shigao and his role in early Chinese translations of Buddhist sutra]. Zhongguo Fanyi 22 (3), 52
58. Liu, Lydia H. (1995) Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity*China, 1900
1937. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Liu, Lydia H. (ed.) (1999) Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press. Luo, Xinzhang (ed.) (1984) Fanyi Lunji [A Collection of Essays on Translation]. Beijing: Commercial Press. Luo, Xuanmin (1997) Literary translation and comparative literature: An interview with Professor Andre´ Lefevere. Tamkang Review 27 (1), 103
119. Lu¨, Cheng (1979) Zhongguo Foxue Yuanliu Luejiang [An Outline of the Origin of Chinese Buddhism]. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Co. Ma, Zuyi (1984) Zhongguo Fanyi Jian Shi*Wusi Yundong Yiqian Bufen [A Brief History of Translation in China*before the May Fourth Movement]. Beijing: Chinese Foreign Press. Ma, Zuyi (1995) History of translation. In S-W. Chan and D.E. Pollard (eds) An Encyclopaedia of Translation: Chinese-English, English-Chinese (pp. 373
387). Hong Kong: Hong Kong Chinese University Press. McDougall, Bonnie S. & Kam, Louie (1996) The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century. London: Hurst. Mungello, David (1985) Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology. Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa, No. 25. Stuttgart: Steiner. Nida, E.A. (1993) Language, Culture and Translating. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. Nida, Eugene A. (1995) Dynamic equivalence in translating. In Chan Sin-wai & David E. Pollard (eds) An Encyclopaedia of Translation: Chinese-English, EnglishChinese (pp. 223
230). Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Pollard, David E. (ed.) (1998) Translation and Creation. Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840
1918. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Pym, Anthony (1998) Method in Translation History. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Qian, Zhongshu (1979) Guanzhui Bian [Essays on Ideas and Letters]. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Co. Ronan, Charles E. and Oh, Bonnie B.C. (eds) (1988) East Meets West: The Jesuits in China, 1582
1773. Chicago, IL: Loyola University Press. Spence, Jonathan (1984) The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. New York: Viking Penguin. Steiner, George (1975) After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London/ Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

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Sun, Changwu (1988) Buddhism and Chinese Literature. Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Press. Tang, Yongtong (1996) Han Wei Liang Jin Nanbeichao Fojiao Shi [A History of Buddhism during the Han, Wei, Western and Eastern Jin, and Southern and Northern Dynasties]. Taipei: Luotuo Publication Co. Venuti, L. (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Waley, Arthur (trans.) (1952) Monkey [Xiyouji]. London: George Allen & Unwin. Wang, Kefei and Fan, Zhouyi (1999) Translation in China: A motivating force. Meta 44 (1), 7
26. Wang, Ning and Xu, Yanhong (1996) Introductory remarks. Perspectives: Special Issue (Chinese Translation Studies) 4 (1), 7
12 Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1958) Philosophical Investigations (G.E.M. Anscombe, trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Xie, Tianzhen (2000) The Distorted World: On Literary Translation During the Cultural Revolution. Paper presented at The XVIth Congress of International Comparative Literature Association. Pretoria, South Africa, 13
19 August. Xiong, Yuezhi (1994) Xixue Dongjian yu Wan Qing Shehui [The Dissemination of Western Learning and late Qing Society]. Shanghai: Shanghai Peoples’ Press. Xiong, Yuezhi (1998) Degrees of familiarities with the West in Late Qing society. In David E. Pollard (ed.) Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1940-1918 (pp. 25
36). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Xu, Jun (1999) Re´flexions sur les e´tudes des proble`mes fondamentaux de la traduction. Meta 44 (1), 44
60. Xue, Suizi and Zhang, Juncai (1982) Lin Shu Yanjiu Ziliao [Reference Materials on Lin Shu Studies]. Fuzhou: Fujian Peoples’s Press. Yang, Yan (1992) A brief history of Chinese translation theory. PhD thesis, University of Texas at Austin. Zhang, Qiong (1999) Demystifying Qi: The politics of cultural translation and interpretation in the early Jesuit mission to China. In L.H. Liu (ed.) Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (pp. 74
106). Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press. Zheng, Zhenduo (1984) Lin Qinnan Xiansheng (Mr Lin Qinnan). In Luo Xinzhang (ed.) Fanyi lunji [A collection of essays on translation] (pp. 184
192). Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan (Commercial Press). Zhu, Chunshen (2000) Zou-chu Wuqu, Ta-jin Shijie* Zhongguo Yixue: Fansi yu Qianzhan [Out of the error zone and into the big world* Chinese translation studies: Reflections and a view for the future]. Zhongguo Fanyi 21 (1), 2
9.

Chapter 2

Chinese Translation of Buddhist Terminology: Language and Culture CHI YU CHU

Introduction One of the fundamental problems faced by early Chinese Buddhist translators, and perhaps by all translators of all times, was how to describe new phenomena using an old language. Shi Fayun (1088
1158), a monk scholar of the Song dynasty stated that, ‘Translating means replacing: to replace what we do not have with what we do have’ (Shi Fayun, 1994: 626a). Here, ‘what we do have’ refers to the ‘old’ Chinese language and ‘what we do not have’ is the ‘new’ phenomena of another land expressed in another language. One language is usually used by one nation, while phenomena may be unique to one nation (nationality), and can also be shared by the whole human race (universality). What is unique to one nation, when translated into another language, is what we call the ‘new phenomenon’ to the readers of the target language. The language into which we translate is the ‘old language’. The conflicts between the old and the new, or between language and phenomena, are the obstacles that must be overcome in translation. This does not imply that no conflicts arise when translating universal phenomena. Phenomena need to be described using languages. Since languages are national, and since different peoples tend to have different attitudes towards and attach different feelings to the same phenomena, they may have different ways of describing such phenomena. These differences in attitudes and feelings can arise due to differences in living environments, social structures, political systems, religious beliefs, philosophical ideas, ways of thinking, and in conventions and customs among nations. Sometimes, even the same expressions may contain different implications or arouse different associations. 39

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Almost all translations involve phenomena that are new to a particular people, particularly between cultures that are as isolated from each other as the Chinese and Western cultures. In order to convey such new phenomena, changes need to be made in the target language, so the result of translation is the creation of a new language, in the sense of new structures or lexical items. The language the translator uses is still ‘the old language’. Creation takes place during the process of translating, and concerns various levels, mainly syntax and lexis. How to create new words in translation is what the Buddhist translators termed the problem of ‘fanyi mingyi’, or literally, ‘translation: name and meaning’, which is the topic of this chapter. The issue of fanyi mingyi is, in fact, a reflection, in the field of translation, of an ancient philosophical debate on (the relationship or contradiction between) ‘name and substance’, or ‘ming shi’, similar to the semiotic concepts of the ‘signifier and signified’. Apart from its more philosophical significances, ‘name and meaning’ is a big problem that the practitioner simply cannot avoid when creating new words. Fanyi mingyi includes two issues: (1) whether to convey the sound (transcription) or the sense of the original words when translating new phenomena; and (2) if translating the sense is adopted, what procedure should be used. Transcribing sounds also involves different procedures, but it is not nearly as complex as translating meanings. Since transcription conveys only the sound, not the sense, of a word, in ancient China it was called ‘bu fan’ or ‘not translating’. The procedures for translating meanings fall into two major categories: to render the overt, or literal, meaning and to convey the covert, or suggested, meaning. Examples of the translation, from English to Chinese, of the overt meanings of words are: jisuanji (computing machine) for ‘computer’, chaoji shichang (super-scale market) for ‘supermarket’, lietou (hunting head) for ‘headhunting’ and so forth. When used for the first time, these Chinese words, or calques, tend to be either meaningless or misleading without explanations. When translating the covert meaning of the same English words, the Chinese versions would be diannao (electric or electronic brain), zixuan shichang (select-yourself market), rencai kaifa (human resources discovering). Although, on the surface, these are not exact ‘equivalents’ of the original, they are transparent and function well in Chinese. Another way of translating the covert meaning of a word is to use a phrase or clause or even a full sentence to explain the meaning of a foreign word, a process that is variously called ‘paraphrasing’, ‘adapting’ or ‘rewriting’. In the translation of technical terms, however, since long phrases or clauses are difficult to repeat, this method is rarely used, and was not used at all in Chinese translations of Buddhist classics. There is

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yet another procedure in rendering the covert meaning of a word: to use an ‘old’ target language word or expression that is not equivalent but analogous to the original, in order to make the new term more comprehensible and more acceptable to readers of the target language. This is what Eugene Nida calls ‘dynamic equivalence’. It is a convenient method, as it does not require the creation of ‘new’ linguistic items. In the early Buddhist translations, this analogical method was referred to as geyi or ‘matching the meaning’. In the following sections, we will address the issue of the ‘name and meaning’ as reflected in the theory and practice of the translation of Buddhist canons, analyze the evolution of Chinese ideas on translation, focusing on the conflicts between foreign ideas and the local language and culture, and ways of compromise. At the same time, we will examine the language used by ancient Buddhist monks when discussing problems of translation.

Foreign Language and Alien Creed There is a little story in the Buddhist scriptures that tells of the Buddha’s language policy. One of the versions goes: Two bhikkhus (Buddha’s disciples) went to the Buddha and said to him that because the Buddha’s disciples all came from different areas and spoke different languages, ‘as their words and sounds differ, the language they use is not standardized, which may cause damage to the orthodoxy of the Buddha’s teachings’. They suggested that Sanskrit be used to unify the different languages. The Buddha replied, ‘Our Buddhist canons do not give emphasis to the beauty of the language. As long as the meaning is not lost, I will be content’ (Ji Xianlin, 1991a: 36).1 In another version of the same story, the Buddha also said, ‘How stupid you are. It would be destructive to mix the language of an external creed into the Buddhist scriptures. . .. Let them read the texts in the languages and with the accents of their habitual use in their own countries’ (Ji Xianlin, 1991b: 54). This story tells us that: (1) the Buddha allowed his followers to use different languages in their studies (and hence to translate the Scriptures), which would facilitate the spreading of his teachings; (2) Buddhism did not emphasize beauty of language in its sacred texts; (3) the Buddha did not recognize the authority of Sanskrit and believed that using it would help to destroy Buddhism. This ban on Sanskrit was imposed as a form of resistance against the then orthodox state religion of Brahmanism, which used Sanskrit as its official language (Ji Xianlin, 1991b: 54). Later, of course, when Buddhism gradually grew in status and

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influence and Brahmanism declined, this restriction was lifted and Sanskrit scriptures appeared. These three points are particularly meaningful in the study of Buddhist translations. It should be noted here that the Buddha allowed his disciples to use the languages of ‘external nations’, but not those of ‘external creeds’.

Name and Meaning Buddhism was introduced into China during a period when magic arts and Daoist stratagems were widely popular. Since Buddhism was only practiced at sacrificial ceremonies and rituals, it was naturally understood to be a school of magic arts. The earliest recorded translator of Buddhism was Parthamasiris (fl. 148
172 AD) from Parthia, known in Chinese as An Shigao. According to the ancient records, Parthamasiris was extremely well informed about the secrets of life and death, and was endowed with the ability to predict the future, to heal, and to communicate with animals and birds (Kang Senghui, 1995: 244). This well-nigh divine ability is reminiscent of the highest state that followers of Laozi and Zhuangzi would have dreamed of achieving by cultivating their minds and bodies all their lives. It appears that, from the very beginning, Buddhism was tied up with Daoism. Many factors had been responsible for the mutual influence of Buddhism and Daoism. Here, we only examine issues of translation. The monk scholar Shi Dao’an (312
385) said of Parthamasiris’s translations, ‘Parthamasirs’s versions accentuated the source without embellishment, only they were sometimes incomprehensible at first glance’ (Shi Dao’an, 1995: 254). These translations were ‘incomprehensible’ because they were too literal. Modern scholars have classified Parthamasiris as the earliest literalist. His versions ‘stick to the original structure with repetitions and inverted word order, and some of the technical terms he created are rather vague in meaning’ (Lu¨ Cheng, 1979: 285). The creation of terms involves the ‘name and meaning’. Here is a typical example of a term whose meaning is not vague. The most influential sutra during the Han dynasty was Aˆna˜pa˜na (a˜na means exhaling and apa˜na inhaling). It is a method of serene meditation or a breathing exercise practiced to enter into the contemplative state of the mind. Patharmasiris did not simply translate its surface meaning as ‘breathing’ or ‘inhaling and exhaling’. Instead, he rendered the term as ‘anban shouyi’ (an being a transcription of a˜na, ban of apa˜na, and shouyi (guarding the mind) being additional information about the suggested meaning or
for lack of a better word
function). His purpose was to

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render both the sound and the sense. Of the three ways of translating technical terms
to convey the ‘sound’, the ‘overt meaning’ and the ‘covert meaning’
he chose the first and the last, which is both literal and free, or ‘simple’ and ‘sophisticated’, as the ancient monks put it.2 Later scholars described his translations as ‘clear and lucid in purport, sincere and straightforward in style, articulate but not flowery, simple but not uncouth’ (Shi Huijiao, 1992: 5). This kind of approach is seldom used nowadays. A more common method would be to give a transliteration and add a generic term, like tanke (for ‘tank’) followed by che (vehicle) as an explanation. Problems arose from the word shouyi created by Parthamasiris. As the Chinese historian, Tang Yongtong (1997: 10) pointed out: The so-called shouyi is a Chinese Daoist idea about nourishing life. The ‘‘Xuntian zhi dao pian’’ in Chun qiu fan lu [the chapter on the way of following nature in the work of Heavy frost of spring and autumn] states that: ‘‘Those whose minds [yi] are weary are disturbed in spirit [shen], those disturbed in spirit are low in energy [qi or ‘‘breath’’], and those low in energy will not last long.’’ It also says, ‘‘A gentleman stops evil in order to pacify his mind, pacifies his mind in order to tranquilize his spirit, and tranquilizes his spirit in order to nourish his energy.’’ Pathamasiris’s ‘shouyi’ was perhaps derived from Laozi’s and Zhuangzi’s ‘shouyi’, or ‘guarding the One’, an exact homophone to ‘guarding the mind’ in Chinese except in tone (‘guarding the mind’ being pronounced shouyi4, while ‘guarding the One’ is pronounced shouyi1). Laozi had the idea of ‘ying po bao yi’ (Dao de jing, Chapter 10) meaning, ‘When carrying your bodily soul, [can you] embrace in your arms the One [and not let go?]’3 (Lau, 1963: 66). The idea is that the soul of the body and the soul of the mind, or form and spirit, should be combined as one. Zhuangzi also said, ‘The way to purity and whiteness is to guard the spirit [shen], this alone; guarding it and never losing it, and you will become one with spirit’ (Zhuangzi ‘Keyi’).4 In another chapter of Zhuangzi, when asked about the Perfect Way to long life, Master Guangcheng5 said, When the eye does not see, the ear does not hear, and the mind does not know, then your spirit [shen] will protect [shou or ‘‘guard’’] the body, and the body will enjoy long life . . .. I guard this unity [yi, or ‘‘the One’’], abide in this harmony, and therefore I have kept myself alive for two thousand years, and never has my body suffered any decay. (Watson, 1968: 119
120)

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The so-called shouyi1 or ‘guarding the One’ simply means to guard the spirit and the body in order to achieve the unity, the One (later, the Daoist religion further developed this phrase to mean ‘to guard the essence (jing), energy (qi), and spirit (shen)’), in order to achieve immortality. It describes life-nourishing meditation achieved through breathing exercises. Parthamasiris’s shouyi4 and the Daoist shouyi1 are similar in surface meaning, as are their forms in practice, both being to sit in meditation and to regulate the breath so as to expel impurities from the mind. But their ultimate purposes and underlying philosophical thinking are entirely different. The advantage of such a translation is its familiarity and acceptability to Chinese readers, even though it is a ‘false friend’ in that it is only apparently of the same thought, but different in heart. Shouyi4 is the Buddhist term for abstracted meditation. The term yi4 or mind refers to ‘the basis of all sufferings and the arch-enemy of true enlightenment’, that is, to nothing that is desirable (Xie Fu, 1995: 245). The aim of shouyi4 is to try to stop (the impurities of) the mind from emerging. A proper translation into English would be ‘guard the mind against thoughts’, or more literally, ‘to guard against the mind’ (compare Laozi’s ‘embracing the One and not let go’ and Zhuangzi’s ‘guarding it and never losing it’), not ‘to guard the mind. This latter sense was acquired by misinterpreting the literal meaning’ (Tang Yongtong, 1997: 100). Parthamasiris considered that he had created a new language (a new linguistic item) and introduced a new phenomenon, but his Chinese readers understood the term in the sense of the Daoist shouyi1, which was still in the old (Chinese) language and referred to the old (Daoist) phenomenon. The result was that the Buddhist body was infiltrated with Daoist blood. The idea of shouyi4 was later borrowed by religious Daoists to develop their own theory of shouyi1. This is the mutual complement between Buddhism and Daoism that people talk about today. Lokaksin (fl. 160
180), from Central Asia, was in China at about the same period as Parthamasiris. His translations are even more ‘simple’ than those of Parthamasiris. He followed the Indian way of thinking and even moved the original syntax into the Chinese language. One prominent feature of his renderings is that they are ‘overly simple with excessive use of foreign sound’ (Zhi Mindu, 1995: 270). Foreign syntax coupled with transcriptions naturally brought more difficulties to readers. In creating some new terms, Lokaksin, like Parthamasiris, also opted for the method of ‘matching the meaning’ when he chose to provide the sense. For example, he used daoxing (cultivation of the Dao) for pa˜ramita˜ (a kind of Buddhist wisdom), and benwu (root [being] nothingness) for tathata˜ (the highest truth or reality) (Lu¨ Cheng, 1979: 290). The evolution

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of the connotations of benwu is similar to that of shouyi. The word was created by Lokaksin for the Buddhist text based on Laozi’s concept of ‘nothingness being the root of the ten thousand things’, and was later to be further developed by the Daoist religion (Tang Yongtong, 1997: 103
104). Other more popular examples are sheng (the Chinese metaphysical term for ‘saintliness’) for prajna˜ (the highest Buddhist wisdom), wu (the Daoist ‘nothingness’) for su¯nyata˜ (emptiness), wuwei (the Daoist term for ‘non-activity’) for upa˜ya (way or means). For a time, various interpretations of Lokaksin’s texts circulated in China. The Chinese interpretations were inclined towards Daoism, but those of the communities of immigrants from Central Asia still ‘preserved its purity, which was instrumental in the later rectification of misunderstandings of Buddhist thoughts caused during their dissemination’ (Lu¨ Cheng, 1979: 290). This confirms our assumption that the foreign translators themselves did not understand their versions according to the covert meaning, or the Daoist interpretation, of the Chinese words. Being the earliest ‘simple’ translators, both Parthamasiris and Lokaksin venerated the Buddhist texts without embellishing (which can also mean ‘improving’) them. They endeavored to retain the original sentence structure, often against Chinese syntactic rules, apparently with the intention of ‘foreignizing’ the Buddhist teachings, for fear of destroying their ‘foreignness’ or ‘sacredness’. Lokaksin, in particular, who did not refrain from using transcription, perhaps the most thorough method of foreignization, represented the extreme of foreignization. But, in treating some of the Buddhist terms, both translators resorted to domestication to various degrees. In other words, in linguistic form, they tried to register the differences by keeping away from the norms of the target language, but culturally, in terms of semantic content, they involuntarily domesticated Buddhist concepts with Daoist ideas. Thus, neither foreignization nor domestication would appear to be an adequate description of their translation strategy. The problem of such an ostensible contradiction between intention and result actually arises from the way the translators treated the problem of the ‘name and meaning’; and such a treatment was born out of their view of translation. The inference that early Buddhist translators regarded translation as a purely linguistic (transfer) problem and neglected the national or cultural attributes of language may be drawn from our above analysis of their translations. They cherished the innocent belief that the same content could simply be clothed in different languages. The Buddha had probably been aware of cultural problems when he forbad the use of languages of ‘external creeds’ in order to avoid cultural conflicts. But the languages of ‘external

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nations’ are not totally devoid of cultural problems. Therefore, it would be reasonable to believe that the terms used by Buddhist monks in their discussion of translation problems, such as ‘simple’ versus ‘sophisticated’ translation, ‘direct’ versus ‘indirect’ translation, and ‘source’ and so forth, referred only to language or linguistic form, not to its cultural content. Such a view of translation prevailed for about 250 years till the arrival of Kumarajiva, and it was not until the Song dynasty that a more accurate theoretical description of translation problems was provided. The next important translator was Zhi Qian (fl. 223
253), whose background was slightly different from that of Parthamasiris and Lokaksin. Of immigrant forebears from Central Asia, Zhi Qian was the third generation of his family to be born in China and his first language was Chinese. Although he was a student of Lokaksin, his understanding of the Buddhist texts differed from that of his predecessors. In the first 250 years of the movement to translate Buddhist texts, Zhi Qian was the only important ‘sophisticated’ or ‘sense’ translator. From childhood, he had read Chinese classics, including the Daoist classics. At 13, he devoted himself to the study of foreign language books and was proficient in six (Indian and Central Asian) languages. His knowledge of the Chinese language and literature was by far superior to that of his predecessors. Apparently discontented with the unintelligible, inelegant translations with their inverted word order, he retranslated and polished some of the existing versions. His translations were described as ‘elegant and sophisticated and procuring the holy message indirectly’ (Shi Huijiao, 1992: 15). Buddhist texts are verbose; the same message would be repeated many times in different forms, which was incompatible with the succinctness of classical Chinese. Zhi Qian removed some of the repetitions in order to accommodate the Chinese style, for which his versions were criticized as being ‘incomplete’. Thus, in terms of linguistic form, Zhi Qian intended to domesticate the Buddhist sutras. ‘Sophistication’ (elegance and brevity) is the main feature of his translations. In contrast to Lokakson’s versions, Zhi Qian’s contain the least amount of ‘foreign sound’. Buddhist texts are full of difficult concepts that are unfamiliar in Chinese culture. Transcribing them all would make the sutras even more difficult to understand. Zhi Qian minimized the use of transcriptions to such an extent that ‘even dha˜ranı¯ (a generic term for Buddhist charms), whose sound should be preserved, was translated’ (Lu¨ Cheng, 1979: 294). He also used a large number of Daoist and metaphysical concepts that were analogous to Buddhist ideas. If Parthamasiris and Lokaksin had inadvertently blurred the distinction between Buddhism and Daoism, then Zhi Qian knew what he was doing. It should

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be pointed out that even though Zhi Qian deliberately used Daoist concepts in his versions, his ‘mistakes’ were innocent in the sense that his learning was very much influenced by the school of Buddhism in which Buddhism and Daoism were deemed to be inseparable. He even believed that the Buddha had been a Daoist priest in his previous life (Tang Yongtong, 1997: 95
97). Such a belief led him to render Sakyamuni as ‘Capable Confucian’. Later critics did not like his elegant style (because the Buddha had not laid emphasis on the use of beautiful language): Zhi Qian’s translations, though beautiful in style, are confused with respect to the central theme. The result is that the monastic ideal is distorted by his undue elegance of language, and the true taste dulled by the extravagance of style. (Shi Sengrui, 1995a: 308) Zhi Qian’s style may deviate from that which the Buddha originally had in mind, but it alone should not be accountable for the distortion of the central theme. The divergence of his versions from the original originated from his understanding of Buddhism. If he was wrong, he was wrong not in style but with respect to his interpretation or his treatment of the ‘name and meaning’. Monk-scholars criticized his ‘sophisticated translation’, without realizing that they had attacked the wrong target. It was not until Kumarajiva’s arrival that they became aware of their misconceptions. As Shi Sengyou (445
518) stated, Zhi Qian’s translations ‘held up the [communication of Buddha’s] message by using the method of matching the meaning’ (Shi Sengyou, 1995: 533). Kumarajiva (fl. 223
253), an Indian monk born in Central Asia, came to China during the Posterior Qin period (the House of Fu). Actively engaged in translation for 15 years, he was one of the greatest translators in the history of the Chinese tripitaka. His translations, some of which are still being used today, have been highly regarded by scholars of all ages. He retranslated a large number of sutras and ‘removed over half’ of the content. Like Zhi Qian, he was also a ‘sophisticated translator’. His assistants described his translations as ‘following the Chinese convention with respect to the style of language, but without deviating from the meaning of the source’ (Shi Huiguan, 1995: 305). ‘The language, though brief, is straightforward; the themes, though approached indirectly, are manifest, so that the profound mysteries [of the original] are clearly revealed’ (Shi Sengzhao, 1996: 310). Comparing these remarks with those on Zhi Qian, we find that both translators were ‘sophisticated’ and that both ‘procured the holy message indirectly’, but that the results differed widely. Zhi Qian distorted the central theme with his elegant style and rendered the Buddha’s words

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‘incomplete’ by leaving out repetitions, but Kumarajiva’s omissions served to highlight the central theme, and his indirect translation brought out the meaning more clearly. Ancient monks never questioned this discrepancy between the results using the same approach when they discussed strategies of translation. The views of modern scholars seem to be that Zhi Qian’s ‘sophisticated translation’ was immature (Liang Qichao, 1998: 155). This impresses one as if good translation depends on the balance achieved in the spectrum of the ‘simple versus sophisticated’ strategy. The crux of the issue is, in fact, still the problem of ‘name and meaning’. As Shi Sengrui (371?
416?) said of the translations before Kumarajiva’s time, ‘the name and meaning were not treated with proper care . . . had we not met the great master [Kumarajiva], Chinese Buddhism would have gone under’ (Shi Sengrui, 1995b: 292). Because terminology was not translated well, the Chinese sutras were on the verge of breaking away from the original canons altogether. Kumarajiva corrected some of the misleading translations of Buddhist concepts: [W]here the name and meaning [in Chinese] did not match, he made corrections according to the original meaning . . .. [W]here the sounds were wrongly transcribed,6 he changed them according to Sanskrit pronunciation; where the Chinese words were inaccurate, he altered them according to Chinese dictionaries. For those words whose meaning could not be carried across, he simply transcribed them, so his translations are full of Sanskrit sound. (Shi Sengrui, 1995b: 293) The most important factor contributing to such a highly acclaimed translation by Kumarajiva is the appropriate handling of the ‘name and meaning’. It was after Kumarajiva that Chinese Buddhism could free itself from the influence of Daoism and get on its own track. As Liang Qichao (1998: 133) remarked, ‘It was with Kumarijiva that Chinese Buddhist studies started laying a solid foundation and developing systematically’. And it was also thanks to him that translation studies in China gradually matured. Kumarajiva was the first translator to give up the method of ‘matching the meaning’. During the early development of Chinese Buddhism, monk masters often resorted to Daoist and metaphysical ideas in their lectures to explain certain difficult concepts for which there were no Chinese equivalents. In their translations, we find that ‘matching the meaning’ was only used to render certain terms, which seldom went beyond the level of words. In other words, like transcription, it was one of the procedures for dealing with the ‘name and meaning’. As pointed out earlier, while trying to faithfully present the holy texts by looking for

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syntactic resemblances to the original, the early translators overlooked the importance of technical terms. This is the very factor that caused the Chinese Buddhism to go off its intended track. The one basic problem was that the translators were confused about language and culture, the issue as the basis of translation. After studying Kumarajiva’s translations, the Song monk-scholar Shi Zanning (919
1001) concluded that one can use the language of the Chinese classics in translation, but only if ‘it does not involve classical allusions or the teachings of philosophers and historians. . .. Kumarajiva’s version of the Diamond Sutra can be said to have struck a balance and retained the natural flavour of the Sanskrit language’7 (Shi Zanning, 1987: 55
56). Kumarajiva was successful just because he did not use culturally charged terms such as allusions and the teachings of philosophers and historians. The issue of ‘name and meaning’ had caught the attention of scholars in the earliest extant discussion on problems of translation, but it took over 700 years for the Chinese to distinguish between linguistic problems and cultural problems.

Reflection Now we are ready to examine some of the terms used to describe translation strategies, both ancient and contemporary. Ancient Chinese theorists used the terms ‘simple’ versus ‘sophisticated’ translation, which, as we have demonstrated, are relevant only in terms of syntax, not of lexis, the latter of which carry most of the culture content. The early Chinese translators, guided by the principle that ‘simple translation is closer to the source’, stuck to the original syntax even to the level of the word, without realizing that it was the words that went against their original intention. In the competition between the two languages and cultures, foreign texts gained dominance in terms of syntax, but lost to the Chinese culture on the level of words. Let us examine the contemporary lexicon. Take Lawrence Venuti’s ‘foreignizing’ and ‘domesticating’ translation, which we have adopted in the above analysis, as an example. Revering the original texts, a foreignizing strategy would deliberately break target language conventions and sacrifice fluency in order to emphasize the ‘foreignness’ of the foreign texts (which the early Chinese translators did with syntactical structure); while domestication would aim to produce a target language text that reduces ‘strangeness’ to a minimum in order to conform to the target reader’s taste (which some of the Buddhists did in terminology). Other binary pairs, such as Julien House’s ‘overt translation’ and ‘covert translation’, Peter

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Newmark’s ‘communicative translation’ and ‘semantic translation’, and the even broadest ‘faithful translation’ and ‘free translation’ are inadequate to describe the strategy adopted, consciously or unconsciously, by the Chinese monks. I wish to make two points here: (1) in discussing translation strategy, syntax and lexis may be separated; (2) from the Chinese experience, we find that if we want to draw a line between linguistic and cultural issues, the so-called cultural issues often arise at the lexical level, and as for the cultural issues at syntactical level, current studies are still rather vague, at least in Chinese language researches. Perhaps the study of translation strategy still needs be informed by both, or the combination of, language studies and cultural studies in this area. Notes 1. Presumably, the dialects spoken by Buddha’s disciples were considered substandard, hence Sanskrit was deemed more beautiful. 2. ‘Simple translation’ and ‘sophisticated translation’ are the two terms used by ancient monks to describe strategies of translation. They are similar to, but more complicated than, the ‘literal translation’ and ‘free translation’ that we use today. The simplest definitions of these would be that ‘simple translation’ reveres the authority of the original and allows minimum intervention, while ‘sophisticated translation’ sanctions ‘improvements’. For a more detailed explanation of the terms, see Chu (2000: 43
54). 3. Man has two souls, the soul of the body and the soul of the spirit. After death, the former descends to earth and the latter ascends to heaven (cf. Chu Chi Lau, 1963: 66). According to D.C. Lau (1963: 16), ‘the One’ is another name for the Dao or the Way. 4. I am using Burton Watson’s translation (cf. Watson, 1968: 169). 5. Master Guangcheng [Guangchengzi] is a legendary immortal from whom the Yellow Emperor was believed to have learned the Way. 6. Some of the early translations were based on Central Asian languages; hence, the pronunciations were different. 7. For more a detailed description of Shi Zanning’s theory, see e.g. Chu Chi Yu (2000).

References Chu, Chi Yu (2000) Translation theory in Chinese translations of Buddhist texts. In A. Beeby et al. (eds.) Investigating Translation (pp. 43
53). Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Ji, Xianlin (1991a) Yuanshi Fojiao de Yuyan Wenti [Language issues of the early Buddhism]. In Ji Xianlin Xueshu Zhuzuo Zixuanji (The author’s selection of academic works) (pp. 31
42). Beijing: Beijing Normal College Press. Ji, Xianlin (1991b) Zailun Yuanshi Fojiao de Yuyan Wenti [Language issues of the early Buddhism revisited]. In Ji Xianlin Xueshu Zhuzuo Zixuanji (The author’s selection of academic works) (pp. 43
72). Beijing: Beijing Normal College Press.

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Lau, D.C. (trans.) (1963) Tao Te Ching. London: Penguin Classics. Liang Qichao (1998) Fanyi Wenxue yu Fodian [Translated literature and Buddhist canons]. In Foxue Yanjiu Shiba Pian [Eighteen Essays on Buddhist Studies] (pp. 141
170). Shenyang: Liaoning Education Press. Lu¨, Cheng (1979) Zhongguo foxue yuanliu lue jiang [On the Origin of Chinese Buddhist Studies]. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Co. Shi, Dao’an (1995) ‘Da Shi’ermen Jing’ Xu (Preface to the Twelve classes of scriptures). In Shi Sengyou (ed.) ‘Chu Sanzang Jing’ Ji [A Collection of Records of the Translation of Buddhist Tripitaka] (pp. 253
254). Beijing: Zhonghua Book Co. Shi, Fayun (1994) Fanyi Mingyi Ji [Name and meaning in translation]. In Su Yuanlei and Gao Zhennong (eds.) Fo Zang Yao Ji Xuan Kan [Selected Works of Important Buddhist Classics] (Vol. 3; pp. 625
755). Shanghai: Classic Book Co. Shi, Huiguan (1995) ‘Fahua Jing Yao’ Xu (Preface to the Fahua sutra). In Shi Sengyou (ed.) ‘Chu Sanzang Jing’ Ji [A Collection of Records of the Translation of Buddhist Tripitaka] (pp. 304
306). Beijing: Zhonghua Book Co. Shi, Huijiao (1992) Gao Seng Zhuan [Biographies of High Monks]. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Co. Shi, Sengrui (ed.) (1995) ‘Chu Sanzang Jing’ Ji [A Collection of Records of the Translation of Buddhist Tripitaka]. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Co. Shi, Sengrui (1995a) ‘Siyi Jing’ Xu [Preface to the Siyi Sutra]. In Shi Sengyou (ed.) ‘Chu Sanzang Jing’ Ji [A Collection of Records of the Translation of Buddhist Tripitaka] (pp. 308
309). Beijing: Zhonghua Book Co. Shi, Sengrui (1995b) ‘Dapin Jing’ Xu [Preface to the Da pin Sutra]. In Shi Sengyou (ed.) ‘Chu Sanzang Jing’ Ji [A Collection of Records of the Translation of Buddhist Tripitaka] (pp. 291
293). Beijing: Zhonghua Book Co. Shi, Sengrui (1995c) ‘Wei Mo Jie Jing’ Xu [Preface to the Wei Mo Jie Sutra]. In Shi Sengyou (ed.) ‘Chu Sanzang Jing’ Ji [A Collection of Records of the Translation of Buddhist Tripitaka] (pp. 309
310). Beijing: Zhonghua Book Co. Tang, Yongtong (1997) Han, Wei, Liang, Jin, Nanbeichao Fojiao Shi [A History of Buddhism during the Han, Wei, Jin and Northern and Southern Dynasties]. Beijing: Peking University Press. Watson, B. (trans.) (1968) The Complete Works of Chuangtzu. New York: Columbia University Press. Zhi, Mindu (1995) He Shou ‘Lengyan Jing’ Ji [Preface to combining the Lengyan Sutra]. In Shi Sengyou (ed.) ‘Chu Sanzang Jing’ Ji [A Collection of Records of the Translation of Buddhist Tripitaka] (pp. 270
271). Beijing: Zhonghua Book Co.

Chapter 3

Transformer Sinicized and the Making of Chinese Buddhist Parlance FRANCIS K.H. SO

Introduction Toward the close of the Western Han dynasty, China boldly and surreptitiously sent out envoys to a land in the West in quest of the teachings of a wise one. This is commonly or rather legendarily known as ) seeking an answer to his dreaming of a the story of Emperor Ming ( ‘luminous flying deity’ (in AD 64) being introduced by his counselors as the Buddha. His envoy’s subsequent visit to Gandha¯ra ( ), in the northwestern region of India, has brought back not only Buddhist Sanskrit scriptures and other missiological texts, but also, unexpectedly, a new set of thinking that effects a significant turn in China’s cultural history. Since Emperor Ming’s counselors could relate to that ‘deity’, it attests that there has been some degree of familiarity with the life of Buddha among the courtiers. Whether or not they were Buddhists did not really matter. Buddhism, in fact, had spread to the Middle Kingdom in the previous century and was known to some Chinese intelligentsia. The bringing back of Buddhist scriptures obliges the necessity of translating the Sanskrit texts into Chinese. In this early age of translation, it probably meant that some Indian monks who were versed in Sanskrit (legend has it that two named Indian monks returned with the Han envoy, but this is in dispute though the dynastic history book, i.e. Wei Shu », which keeps a record of the legend) had to translate the scriptures « alone or team up with some Chinese advocates or interpreters. Yet, during the agonizing process, these translators must have been faced with the ‘je ne sais quoi’ situation in finding comparable matches between the source language (SL) and the target language (TL). References and previous translation of the texts in other languages would have to be consulted as most translators often do. Ramifications of 52

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this situation are as complicated as the translation of the Bible. Between China, the receptor, and India, the transmitter, the transference and communication of cultural messages were often not direct. Several languages, cultures, ethnic groups and generations of missionaries, initially foreign and later domestic, were involved. However vigorous and faithful all parties wished to bridge the gaps, there were always discrepancies between the source and the target. At this juncture, the translators would have to pay more attention to the transparency of the texts in the TL while maintaining the unique semantic traits of the SL than to make themselves visible or to construct a new culture. Obviously, the obligation of these translators/missionaries is to find means if not alternative means to retain what may be lost during the ‘faithful’ operation of rendering. However, unlike translation among modern Indo-European languages, which have common etymon, cognates, a fund of shared experience and, sometimes, similar word order, the case between Sanskrit and Chinese has none of these. The early eras of translation in China had practically few precedents but the translators’ imagination to rely on and the foolhardy conviction that everything can be translated. To meaningfully investigate the China’s translation scene of this historical period, one perhaps has to look at the larger cultural context of the host country. Before Buddhism was spread to the East, it had already asserted its influence on the periphery of China in the Western Regions. The dominant language in ), a type of medieval Iranian the region in Han times was Sogdian ( language widely used along the Silk Road. On the northern route of the Silk Road that begins from the Gandha¯ra Kingdom, specifically the greater Kabul region, missionaries traversed to such major metropolizes or ), Kucha ( ), Shanshan ( ) and then to kingdoms as Kashgar ( Dunhuang ( ), while on the southern front they linked up Yarkand ), Khotan ( ), Miran ( ) and then to Dunhuang. To make the ( situation a little more complicated, Buddhism in the Western Regions on the northern route was dominantly the Hı¯naya¯na sect ( ), while that ). At least that was the on the southern route, the Maha¯ya¯na sect ( evangelization situation of Buddhism during the first three centuries AD. ) dynasty during the Han times, this From Gandha¯ra, or the Kushan ( religion spread to such kingdoms as Parthia ( ), Bactria ( ) and ), all of which used some forms of the medieval Iranian Sogdiana ( language. Buddhist texts were inevitably recorded and translated into these languages before they were massively rendered into Chinese. Among other things, besides Sanskrit, we have Pali, Kushanese (medieval Iranian), Parthian, Bactrian, Sogdian and other intermediary languages, as

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well as different versions of Buddhist sutras to deal with. Implicit to the reading of the sutras, there was the higher criticism and explicatory commentaries to be applied to before one could study the texts in depth. Furthermore, since Kucha is the stronghold of Hı¯naya¯na Buddhism before the latter reaches China, a good number of texts pertaining to Hı¯naya¯na Buddhism are codified in Kuchean, which is one dialect of the Tocharian language, just as that found around Shanshan (in the vicinity of Lop Nor) is another Tocharian dialect. Many Sanskritists and archaeologists argued that this Tocharian language, unrelated to all other Indo-European languages, was the mother tongue of rulers of the Kushan dynasty, though the official language of the dynasty was a form of the Iranian language. The adoption of Tocharian in the proselytization of Buddhism, though not massive, would be evidenced in subsequent Chinese adoption of the Buddhist parlance. Needless to say, Khotan being Kucha’s counterpart in disseminating Maha¯ya¯na Buddhism exports Khotanese texts to ), Loyang ( ) and other major Chinese cosmopolizes. In Chang’an ( contrast to Tocharian, Khotanese is a form of eastern medieval Iranian language. Hence, when translation of Buddhist texts started in the first few centuries AD in China, the situation was very complicated. However, since most early translators were native speakers of the SL, the translated texts in the TL would show lacunae, cruxes, unidiomatic phrases, paradoxes, illogical readings, faulty syntax, segmented arguments, cultural gaps, awkward turn of expressions, misguided contextual usage, etc. These are ) in the late 4th some of the major reasons that motivated Fa Xian ( ) in the early 7th century to travel as century AD and Xuan Zhuang ( pilgrims to bring back authentic scriptures from the Buddhist land.

Methodological and Procedural Considerations True, translation can never be an exact art. Nevertheless, Fa Xian and Xuan Zhuang would be future translators and they went on pilgrimages not only to sharpen their eventual translation skills, but also to quench their romantic thirst for the linguo-cultural satisfaction of reaching the horizon of the source of enlightenment. The travel experience, or rather the exotic association of thoughts, fantasizing, relaxation, brainstorming, creative imagination and freedom from the didactic situation to the extent of distracting the travelers’ vision may be beneficial for reorganizing a good translation (Gentzler, 2001: 67). In that sense, having an outlandish experience may be fruitful for phrasing the TL and such a translation probably manifests what gets lost with some traces for reconstruction rather than a repetition of thematic and stylistic contents

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in another system of thinking. The translation may be a segment of the text, but it certainly reflects the global proposition ‘divided up into smaller, single, transportable semantic units’ (Gentzler, 2001: 68). With this backdrop in mind, I shall demonstrate philologically how certain Buddhist terms came to pass with some backward calculations, which eventually formed a translation pattern if not yet a systematics. In other words, this shall be an explication of the process rather than an expose´ of the result of translation. Since this is an attempt to reconstruct the empirical stages of deciphering, codifying, decoding and encoding processes that took place in the minds of the ancient translators, no definitive explanation is claimed. In fact, one can say that these are ‘educated guesses’ as most reconstructions are and hence phrases that reflect a modest tone of probability will appear. However, between hard facts and speculated truth, this writer tries every possible means to strike a happy medium. The data I choose in the following discussion are all ), a terms collected in Yang Xuanzhi’s Loyang qielan Ji ( book published shortly after AD 547. It was a time when Buddhism was well received by various social strata in China and when translated terms from Buddhist Sanskrit had been more or less established if not codified. The ups and downs of Buddhism as a religion and as a social institution through the pining of Yang Xuanzhi makes clear that whatever is recorded in that book has withstood the test of time and such expressions are all the more to be treated as tenable and generally acceptable. In fact, at the time of the publication of Loyang qielan Ji, major translators of Buddhist texts, clergy or laymen, had already contributed their share of works. Hence, whatever data are found in the book are largely the consolidation of previous endeavors unless one wants to argue that Yang wills to impose his idiosyncratic translation of the Sanskrit terms into Chinese or that he privileges certain Buddhist sects by adopting their set terms to make them more visible than others. But such speculations cannot be verified and so we have to concede to the assumption that the parlance at issue is one that has been commonly accepted. Hence, using the linguistic data from Loyang qielan Ji, I shall first demonstrate how the SL Buddhist terminology was rendered to suit the Chinese linguistic convention. In other words, the scriptural SLs are shown to adopt the Chinese mode of signifying in order to yield a comprehensible translated text. This is especially prominent on occasions of transliteration. Second, and as an extension of the first point, I shall randomly sample and demonstrate how some of the Buddhist terms form generic terms and eventually their parlance.

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Modes of Early Scriptural Translation Before conducting a language analysis of the Loyang qielan Ji data, it is a good idea to review the repository fund of scriptural translation in that , AD 344
413), the early age. Prior to the coming of Kuma¯rajı¯va ( great Kuchean Buddhist translator and missionary, the most celebrated domestic Buddhist scriptural translator was Dao’an ( , AD 312
385) whose practitioner’s comments on translating Sanskrit into Chinese have become a piece of monumental documentation. In his ‘Preface to the ), he lists five faults Maha¯prajn˜a¯pa¯ramita¯ sutra Scroll’ ( ) and three counts of difficulties of deviation from the original ( ( ). They are as follows:

First, Sanskrit adopts a reverse kind of word order and when translated into Chinese, it creates a loss in the original. Second, Sanskrit scripture is plain in style while the Chinese are fond of ornateness. To appeal to the Chinese readers, the translated scriptures could not but be polished. This is the second deviation from the original. Third, Sanskrit scripture is elaborate, especially in chants and odes. They may run three or four times over and again without being tired of it. When translated, the repetitions are often deleted. This is the third deviation from the original. Fourth, the Sanskrit texts have summation passages, similar to the finale passages of the Chinese rhyme-prose. They make reference to or repeat previous passages with little variants. Hence, sometimes there are a thousand and five hundred words deleted in the translation. This is the fourth deviation from the original. Fifth, though the narration of an event is complete, it is reiterated in ramification. The repetitive words in later occasions are thus deleted in the translation. This is the fifth deviation from the original. (Dao’an, 1973: 52) The three difficulties include (1) the original sutra was attuning to the customs and mores of former times and to have it suit the contemporary Chinese taste poses the first difficulty, (2) to render the unfathomable

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wisdom of the Buddha to fit the secular conventions a thousand years later poses a second difficulty, and (3) the Buddhist sutras have been discreetly compiled by the Arhats and now they are discretionarily translated by humdrum earthlings poses the third difficulty (Dao’an, 1973: 52). Altogether these five faults and three difficulties account for as many syntactic hurdles as social conventions in translating Sanskrit texts during the Six Dynasties. The three counts of difficulties are not only trailblazing observations, but their subsequent adaptations also serve as the criteria for centuries of translators at various Buddhist scriptoriums. For that matter, whatever Dao’an discussed will not be repeated in the following investigation.

Patterns of Transliteration in Light of Historical Phonology We shall begin with the title of Yang Xuanzhi’s book. Basically, the lexicon qielan ( ) is a translation from Sanskrit samgharama, which ˙ zam karagriha/ can also be spelt sangha¯ra¯ma (or more authoritatively zankaragriha). From the SL, one immediately derives the ˙ rule that sometimes the labial /m/ in Sanskrit may be simplified to become the alveolar /n/, even if they are not considered interchangeable sounds. That rule can be verified by the Sanskrit equivalent in Pali, which is spelt sangha. Seemingly, at this juncture there is no correlation, phonetically, phonemically or semantically, between the two languages at issue. But is actually an abridged version of the previously translated term , as used by Fa Xian in his travelogue Foguo Ji (also known as Fa Xian Zhuan ) written after his return from India in AD 414. , one obtains Using modern Mandarin Chinese to transcribe sengqielan. Except for /seng/, which is close enough in pronunciation to the original /sang/, the other syllabaries are still far-fetched. Yet, if one adopts the reconstructed ancient sounds of , as used by Bernhard Karlgren in Grammata Serica Recensa, one comes close to /*kalam/ or / kalam/. To further testify the phonetic transcription of this term, the offers tremendous help: Kangxi zidian

As quoted from Guangyun ( ), Jiyun ( ) and Yunhui ( ), the character qie ( ) is transcribed as /*g’ ioˆg/ g’ i@u/ k’iu/ /*ka/ ka/ kia/ , ultimately yielding a sound of /g’ ia/ or as quoted from Zhengyun ( ) /*g’ u/ g’ iu-/ ku¨/ /*nga˚/ nga/ ya/ , yielding a phonetic symbol of /*g’a/ g’a/ ka. What must be iterated, though philological common sense, is that Guangyun was the rhyme book of the Tang period (AD 618
907),

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Jiyun, the rhyme book of the Song period (906
1127) and Yunhui that of the Jin and Yuan periods (1115
1368). These sourcebooks contain what linguists would consider the medieval period of sound development of the Chinese language, while Zhengyun that of the Ming period (AD 1368
1644), either considered to be late medieval or early pre-modern. Hence, for a lengthy period of over 700 years from the Tang to the Yuan, was pronounced either as /g’ia/ or /g’a/ in Karlgren’s symbols. What is not quoted in the Kangxi zidian is the phonetic transcription of the character to be found in Yupian , a rhyme book of the Liang period (AD 502
557). Two possible reasons may explain the phenomenon. One is that while Fa Xian’s book on the travels to the Buddhist kingdoms was a much earlier one, Yang Xuanzhi’s account of the Buddhist temples and monasteries, though some 100 years later, was more popular and generally accepted. Yang’s book would appeal to the general readership and hence his adoption of the Buddhist terms reflects more of the sociolinguistic situation of the Loyang speech. But, at the time his book was published, the Yupian had hardly seen the light of the day. Furthermore, the word is noted to have been coined as a translated term rather than a traditionally evolved one. Therefore, there is no such record of its sound in the Liang period to be incorporated in Kangxi zidian. The other reason is that by the Liang period, had already been established as a social term, yet, the word lexicographers and sociolinguists of the time were too conservative or somewhat behind the times to collect new terms and expressions. Hence, the Yupian did not record that lexicon, therefore its citation is conspicuously absent from the Kangxi dictionary. In either case, the register of the rhyme book manifests that the word was a newly coined one, not yet catching the attention of the lexicographers before the Liang period. If this hypothesis stands, there is no point searching for the archaic sound of as spoken in the Chang’an district before AD 600 as periodized by Bernhard Karlgren. Since the character is a relatively nascent one, it should have come , as noted above, and is a derivative of translation from from the term the Sanskrit. Combining the philological data, one arrives at the medieval sound of either /s3ngg’ialam/ or /sengg’alam/, a transliteration close enough to the original with some modifications. The source word sangha¯ra¯ma is in fact pronounced with a silent /h/. Thus, we have in the TL a sound that substitutes the /r/ with the /l/ phoneme, the final labial /m/ consonant is preserved and it is only changed to the final alveolar /n/ in modern times. The final syllable of the SL is dropped from the TL. Though we may not readily come up with some universal linguistic laws in the translation of the Sanskrit word sangha¯ra¯ma, a few prominent rules can be deduced from the end product of the medieval or late ancient

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expression of , reconstructed as /s3ngg’ialam/. (1) Since in the Chinese language there is no such phoneme as silent /h/, the original sound is entirely omitted in the translation. Thus, translation is an inevitable process wherein something gets lost or is deliberately suppressed. This view can easily be concurred by Dao’an though he is more concerned with syntax than phonetics. (2) While both medieval and modern Chinese have the /r/ and /l/ phonemes, the /l/ sound tends to be an easier one than the /r/ sound for phonic reproduction. Hence, in transliteration the tampered Chinese sound is lopsided to take up the /l/ phoneme. Such a phenomenon of substitution is also clearly shown in another eastern language, e.g. Japanese. One may draw the conclusion that the palatal /l/ sound is more favorable to the Chinese tongue than the trilling /r/ sound, particularly in translation. Translation into the Chinese, like that in other languages, has the tendency to make the sound simple or the meaning as transparent as possible. In general, this is a process of simplifying information and data, sometimes at the expense of distorting the source. (3) Though often there may be an obvious sound shift from /m/ to /n/ following a common convention in many languages (including Sanskrit), which betrays a significant linguistic and anthropological issue, the final consonant /m/ phoneme prevailed in medieval Chinese as defined by linguists. Working backward from dialectology, one notices that in some other modern Chinese dialects, e.g. Cantonese, Fukienese (Taiwanese) and Hakka, there is still the final /m/ sound in words. But it has altogether disappeared from modern Mandarin Chinese. The reconstructed sound / sengg’alam/ proves that at the time of the transliteration, the Chinese spoken tongues in Chang’an or Loyang have not yet dissipated to replace the final /m/ with the final /n/. This piece of evidence confirms that the contemporary ‘official’ tongue of the northern dialect or broadly speaking predecessor of Mandarin Chinese has not yet experienced the ‘big vowel and sound shift’ in China Proper. Had the situation taken place already, the translators would have introduced the final /n/ to replace the final /m/ as in modern Mandarin Chinese, which pronounces /lam/ as /lan/. That subsequent change would be a crucial and political issue in translation. As the case shows, the transliteration was a fairly close sound imitation of the original, assuming the changing form from /ram/ to /lam/. (4) Since /m/ has assumed the final consonantal position in the minted word /sengg’alam/, the original /-ma/ ending in Sanskrit is scrapped, thereby reducing one syllable in the TL. To some extent, such a practice suits the nature of the Chinese language, which in its ancient and medieval form tended to be words of monosyllable. Polysyllable has never been the rule of word formation in ancient China. When unavoidable to become

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polysyllabic, new words abide by the rule to make the sounds as few and simple as possible. Proper nouns, especially, tend to be truncated or fragmented to follow the Chinese mode. While segmentation in the Chinese phonetic experience, like in other languages, is arbitrary, the translation of foreign terms in abortive manner is uniquely Chinese so as to reduce the overwhelmingly polysyllabic nature of the SL. Typically, bodhisattva is (pusa), s´arı¯ra(m) is rendered as (sheli) or in an transcribed as unusually overwhelming case Maudgalya¯yana [Maudgalatutra] is truncated to become (mulian). Likewise, ka¯sa¯ga is translated as (Jiasha, i.e. cassock). Some of the original subtlety has to be sacrificed to match the characteristics of the Chinese language, although new features in the Chinese language are also created. Even at this point, the above four terms affirm some underlying principles of language acquisition and translation. When the first portion of the longer word bodhi(sattva) is simplified to become the /pu/ phoneme, it follows a very common pronunciation law in substituting the initial /b/ with /p/ that are sounds of different manners but of the same place of articulation. This universal phenomenon is shown in languages that allow initial /b/ and /p/ to be interchangeable. For instance, the calling of father can either be addressed as ‘baba’ or ‘papa’. In fact, historical phonology tells us that the voiced /b/ of medieval Chinese has changed to the aspirated /p/ in modern Mandarin Chinese. Forming backward, a modern /pu/ should have a medieval /bu/ configuration, which shows an obvious relation to the Sanskrit bodhi. For the second portion of the word, when sattva is rendered as /sa/, again, some familiar rules have been adopted. /Satt/ is a phoneme with a ‘stop’ feature and when turned into Chinese, ideally, it should retain the linguistic ‘stop’. However, modern Mandarin Chinese has lost the ‘stop’ feature that is still preserved in other dialects. Barring the ‘stop’ feature, /sa/ is an authentic transliteration of /sat/. Following the paradigm of treating the final syllable /-ma/ in sangha¯ra¯ma, the /-va/ ending in sattva is dropped from the TL. Such a pattern recurs in the translation of the name of the great Maha¯ya¯na Buddhist translator Kuma¯rajı¯va, where the final /-va/ syllable is clearly dropped. It can therefore be said that certain rules and conventions in translating a polysyllabic language into Chinese have been observed and every attempt has been made to present the target term to sound like a natural Chinese one. To look at the transcription of bodhi from other possible SL, this case in Chinese translation is even more obvious. The Sanskrit word has a Gandha¯ri (language of Gandha¯ra) equivalent of bosa (Lin, 2000: 365). Now if /b/ and /p/ are interchangeable, bosa in medieval Chinese should be rendered posa, which is very close to modern Mandarin

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Chinese pusa. The case thus explains that, besides following a set pattern of transliteration, the Buddhist term bodhisattva may most probably be translated into Chinese via a medium language Gandha¯ri rather than directly from Sanskrit. Since Gandha¯ri is the official language adopted by the Yueh-chih (Tocharian) people, the role played by this language medium during the transmission of Buddhism is more likely to have taken place. Likewise, according to the codified pattern, the Sanskrit s´arı¯ra(m) has obviously been simplified to become sheli in which the /s´/ is approximated to become the /sh/ in Chinese sound and the /r/ is replaced by the /l/; the latter rule has been noted previously. Maudgalya¯yana, too, follows the set pattern of transliterating bodhisattva to keep the ‘Maud’ and ‘lya’ syllables, but drop other sounds to yield the ultimate form ‘Mulian’. Similarly, the Chinese version for ka¯sa¯ga sticks to the rule of transliteration by dropping the final /-ga/ sound, ˙which coincidentally reflects the same principle as applied to the English equivalent. Etymologically, the English ‘cassock’ comes from Middle French casaque, which is derived from Persian kazha¯ghand that is related to Sanskrit ka¯sa¯ga. If ka¯sa¯ga is a cognate of its Old ˙ Persian equivalent that predates the Persian kazha˙¯ghand, its modern English derivative ‘cassock’ obviously is a truncated form of transliteration that ) has adopted. To reconstruct the uses the exact principle that Jiasha ( ) for is /kaRa/ or /kasa/ scene a bit: the medieval Chinese sound ( (Li & Zhou, 310, 311), which clearly demonstrates that /kasa/ is a truncated transliterated form of the original ka¯sa¯ga. Whether or not ˙ is a communication translation should be called a science, it definitely process that exerts influences both on interpretation and in shaping up linguistic rules in the TL. Linguistic rules denote the phonetic and phonemic constituents of the Chinese language. These are areas that ancient Chinese scholars did not pay particular attention to, nor were they proficient at them before the Six Dynasties, or rather before systematized translation of the Buddhist texts began. The ‘Preface’ to the Kangxi Zidian (dated 1716) has a precise observation delineating the situation:

Down to the Han Dynasty Mr. Xu [Shen] then pioneered to make the first dictionary Shuowen Jiezi. Yet it emphasizes the semantic part but slights the phonetic part. Hence, people said that Han scholars learn the language but not the vowels and consonants. As to scholars of the Six Dynasties, they learn the four tones but not the seven manners of

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articulation. The transmission of the seven manners began in the Western Regions, using 36 characters as rhymes, listing vertically the 4 tones and horizontally the 7 manners. Henceforth, all phonetic sounds of the Middle Kingdom are summarized and ready [for analysis]. The Chinese Linguistic Rules for Translation Evidently, the Buddhist translators over the centuries concurred to follow certain rules and regulations of the TL and special features of pronunciation of the SL, which means, in theory, they could heighten the phonological dimension of the Chinese language. Yet, they have chosen to be discreet and stay on with the Chinese practice of language use. Indeed, the act of ‘translating consists in producing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent to the message of the source language, first in meaning and secondly in style’ (Nida, 1959: 19). But the early Buddhist scriptural translations, while exhausting the close at hand devices, have deviated somewhat to handle the equivalents in sounds. If ‘a good translation should not reveal its nonnative source’ (Nida, 1959: 19), the transliteration approach will have to bend its rule to avoid directly accommodating both the foreign and brand new elements. One example is the attempt to bring up the Chinese language to confront with gender in language use though the Chinese language remains much the same despite the efforts. A Buddhist monk is technically translated as ‘biqiu’ ) from the Sanskrit bhiksu and a Buddhist nun ‘biqiuni’ ( ( ) from ˙ are usually replaced by the more familiar bhiksuni. But these two terms terms in daily speech that seemingly avoid the identity of gender. Typically, is a better known term than . While preserving part of the transliteration, the more familiar Chinese term is formed by retaining the /ni/ constituent indicator to shape up the coinage and thus sounds like an indigenous word. Despite the attempt, the TL Chinese seemingly stays unshaken to accommodate the male and female genders in its noun formation. When translators encounter difficulty in tackling the polysyllabic SL or find translating the meaning more rewarding they would translate and interpret. Some such practices are seen in the tackling of Avalokitesvara, rendered into Chinese as (Guanyin), and transliterated into Japanese as Kannon. This rule is followed closely in translating the Brahmin Master of Middle Way, Nagarjuna, into (Longshu), and again transliterated into Japanese as Ryuˆju. In both cases, the Chinese and Japanese names are a semantic translation rather than a transliteration of the original proper names.

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While there is hardly any equivalent between the Sanskrit and Chinese names and the technical terms, instead of translating, the early translators attempted to transcribe. As it has been universally understood that no two languages can exhibit identical systems of organizing symbols into meaningful expressions, the Buddhist translators took the liberty of resorting to the translation of sound, leaving the meaning part to another round of critical work by another group of scholars. Thus, after the phonological configuration, the Kangxi lexicographers continued to gloss on the word /g’a/ from its ancient and medieval trappings, with ties to phonetic aids:

According to Sanskrit writings, naga is dragon, khasga is rhinoceros, sankaragriha (sangha¯ra¯ma) is park for the multitude. When translators opted the word park, they chose the implanting meaning of it. Today, it is construed as the living quarters of the Buddhists; hence Buddhist . clergy are called With that, Kangxi zidian enriches its gloss on the word , giving it the semantic dimension and backing up its ancient pronunciation by quoting from Sanskrit sources. The quotation in Kangxi zidian thus presents what Nida would call ‘gloss translation’, in that ‘the translator attempts to reproduce as literally and meaningfully as possible the form and content of the original.... [This permits] the reader to identify himself as fully as possible with a person in the source-language context, and to understand as much as he can of the customs, manner of thought, and means of expression’ (Nida, 1964: 159). Though the quoted word is pronounced as /qie/ in modern eras, the Kangxi zidian verifies that it should sound like /g’a/ or /ka/ when the Buddhist texts were first introduced. Besides, this character is inferred to have been coined to facilitate the transliteraso established, the term (cf. tion approach. With the character sangha in Pali) was formally recorded and codified and other combinations of that word followed suit. Additionally, from other commentary and glosses, including the annotation to Yang Xuanzhi’s own preface (’Loyang qielan Ji’ Jiaoshi 8), one gets to confirm that Kangxi zidian’s wording of ‘park for the multitude’ denotes a quiet place of cultivation for the Buddhist clergy, or the shamen ). This latter term, also surfaced in Loyang qielan Ji, again, is a ( transliteration made commonly accepted into the Chinese speech.

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The original source of shamen, of course, comes from Sanskrit sraman a. Its counterpart or rather translation in Pali is samana, yet its Tocharian˙ B version, as used in Kucha, is samane and its Tocharian A dialect is saman. Pali is the Prakrit, or vernacular tongue, of the Buddhist scriptures generally used in the Peshawar area, the Kabul river valleys and the Tarim Basin, which means the popular speech of Sanskrit spoken in a wide area. The vernacular equivalent of sraman a is thus rendered to be ˙ an obvious advantage pronounced as samana. The latter utterance has because the original /sr/ sound is difficult to pronounce, and the new word has been simplified by dropping the /r/ in the cluster form. When the less tongue-twisting sound is introduced to Kucha, the stronghold of Hı¯naya¯na Buddhism, the phonemic structure is further softened to ) and Qocho become samane. Yet further east of Kucha in Karashahr ( ( ) where Tocharian A is used, the sound or rather the word becomes saman, keeping the somewhat fricative /sh/ sound of the original tongue, but dropping the softened final ending. The same holds true in Khotan, where the word is also translated as saman. Coincidentally then, the Tocharian A and Khotanese translation for /sraman a/ is spelt as saman, one of which could be a loan word from the other.˙ Such multiple translation variants or obvious transformations of the original would have to take place over a period of time. Nevertheless, when sraman a was ˙ to be translated into Chinese, the first translators must have thought about how they should proceed while consulting existing translation models and works. In this case, the geographical locations of the various kingdoms where Buddhism was transmitted or rather the route of its evangelization offers some reasonable and, in fact, concrete clues to the original picture. When one reconstructs the historical route, the topography in sequential order will be: northern India, Peshawar and Kabul river plains, the western end of the Tarim Basin, Kucha, Karashahr, Qocho, Chang’an and Loyang. Typically, this forms the northern route of the Silk Road and was favored by the early Buddhist missionaries. The part that connects the western end of the Tarim (Kashgar) to Khotan forms the southern route of the Silk Road. Indeed, Kucha, Karashahr and Qocho were known to be Buddhist kingdoms that exerted great religious influence on China after the Han. The ultimate articulation of the Buddhist lexicon saman demonstrates that all the TLs involved tend to become easier, more eloquent, melodious and simple than their intricate Sanskrit form. When the Chinese term shamen ( ) is codified, one can be quite sure it has followed the adoption of the Tocharian A dialect saman because the two words are closest in phonological value. Happily, is Zhou Zumo’s annotated edition of Loyang qielan Ji also asserts that

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a translated form of the Tocharian saman (‘Loyang qielan Ji’ Jiaoshi 26). The Sanskrit sound sraman a has been all but given up. On this word ˙¯naya¯na Buddhism of Karashahr and Qocho alone, one may say that Hı exercised more influence on China than Maha¯ya¯na Buddhism of other lands where Sanskrit might be widely used. Haphazardly, an intermediary plays a more effective role than the original source in this translation event. Translation, however faithful and precise one wishes it to be, has to yield to the power of the transmission agents and it may never be a direct process. It is a complex cultural issue and more often than not a political one too. There is no doubt about the early translators’ knowledge of the Sanskrit, but when they opted for the Tocharian A version of the term as their model of translation, they made a hard decision. They did not prioritize fidelity over eloquence simply because when they realized that they failed to transform the Chinese language to be more receptive to polysyllabic words, they had to sinicize their translated version. On the surface, these translators have created a non-existing term in the TL by paying due attention to the internal rules of it. It has been a choice between fluency and foreignization. But there are deeper layers of significance to the phenomenon. Generally, many translation theorists affirm the ‘subjective ability of the translator to derive an equivalent text that in turn influenced the literary and cultural conventions in a particular society. Polysytem theorists presume the opposite: that the social norms and literary conventions in the receiving culture (‘‘target’’ system) govern the aesthetic presuppositions of the translator and thus influence ensuing translation decisions’ (Gentzler, 2001: 108). Such was the awareness encountered by the ancient scriptural translators at various Buddhist translation centers in the Six Dynasties. Now it becomes clear that if the early translators were mere translators, they would try to transcribe the /sr/ sound in the TL, since they are dealing with a Buddhist canon. All proper measures of fidelity and authenticity would have to be observed. In a sense, in translating, they have already secularized the sacred text and all undue sidetracks have to be avoided. However, if the Sanskrit /sra/ could be rendered into /sa/ in Pali, Tocharian B and Tocharian A, there is no reason why it could not be treated likewise in Chinese. The obsession of profanity should be ruled out. Besides, the Chinese tongue dictates that /sa/ is a more melodious sound than /sra/. Hence, there is a built-in requirement in the TL that mandates the translators to deliberate their choice of form and format. Besides, when Buddhist texts were translated in the first few centuries of the first millennium, Chinese culture was a dominant one in its

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neighboring kingdoms. The Buddhist translation, therefore, would be positioned as a secondary activity during the cultural communication within a receptive polysystem. It ‘attempts to find ready-made models for translation result in translations that conform to preestablished aesthetic norms in the target culture at the expense of the text’s ‘‘original’’ form’ (Gentzler, 2001: 118). From Vocabulary to Parlance Thus far, only the phonological portion, which is weak in Chinese language studies but strong in its ‘Western’ counterpart, has been discussed in the translation. When the Buddhist term shamen was first introduced there would be some footnote or comments to follow suit and for some reason it took Wei Shu to explicate its semantic level, making the term historicized and canonized:

All those who abide by its laws, then they shave beard and hair, abandon their passions and depart from family, form master-disciple relationship, observe codes and rules, live together peacefully, regulate their mind and cultivate tranquility, beg to sustain themselves, are called shamen or sangmen, since the two words have close enough sounds. Altogether they are called /seng/, the clergy. This is from the foreign [Sanskrit] tongue. (‘Shilao Zhi 10’, p. 3026) The Wei Shu quotation of gloss completes and affirms the translation of sramana. But one tree does not make a forest, nor does one word form a ˙ While the monks regulate the mind and cultivate equanimity, they speech. have to cherish the Buddhist concept of void or emptiness, s´u¯nyata¯, which when translated into Chinese becomes kong ( ). This time, however, no transliteration is necessary because there is the similar notion in the TL. From kong another term kongmen ( ) i.e., priory or monastery is formed, is contextualized to signify joining a whereby the expression religious order. Two things are now made clear. One is the forming of and (Sanskrit generic vocabulary via translation, such as, viha¯ra, Gandha¯ri viyara) and eventually . The men in shamen is basically a transliteration, but the men in the other terms above becomes a generic unit to shape the vocabulary. Thus formed, these terms become complementary and mutually explicating. When incorporated into the Chinese

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lexicon, they become localized and thus foreign words are made naturalized. This is only possible by means of an intricate endeavor via scriptural translation. The other thing is the widening of the semantic dimension of the Chinese language, which gives it an imaginative realm heretofore not existing in the mind of the TL speakers. From the notion of void (or emptiness but not nothingness), there derives the missiological (ru¯pa is s´u¯nyata¯, s´u¯nyata¯ is ru¯pa), generally saying of construed as the world of reality is void and void is reality. Here then we have not only mere translated terms, but a translated speech, a parlance that carries its own logic and cosmology and has since been accepted into the language use of the TL. The correlation can go on for many more examples. The important point to be noted is that through many intermediaries and approaches, the Chinese language has acquired a polysystem that it has not hitherto possessed or been aware of. In other words, translation has brought to the TL an innovated form of nomenclature, taxonomy, rhetorical tropes, fiction-making and even perception to know the abstruse. The translated Buddhist texts have prompted the Chinese to understand a higher metaphysical power
perceiving the fluidity and mutual interflow between void and reality. Several centuries of cumulative translation of Buddhist texts, therefore, have deepened the Chinese language to conform to certain phonetic, semantic and syntactic features, not to mention cultural patterns of thinking. When one reflects on the stages of or rather traces of translation of the Buddhist scriptures, one finds that translation of sounds precedes the translation of meaning when no equivalents are found in the TL. Often, the meaning parts come later and are finally consolidated in either the lexicographical texts or historical texts. The result strongly indicates that such translation had not been marginalized, but streamlined with the dominant culture. Furthermore, primordial age transliteration probably means that the communicative process between the SL and the TL was largely conducted orally, which allowed little time to think about the best resolution. When ) focusing himself on the 19th century examples, specifically Yan Fu ( and Lin Shu ( ), Andre´ Lefevere contends that Chinese translations have ‘tended, on the whole, to stay closer to the interpreting situation. It has, consequently, attached comparatively less importance to the ‘‘faithful’’ translation that became such a central notion in the thinking on translation that arose in the West’ (Lefevere, 1988: 15). A similar contention can also be applied to the early Buddhist translations, which often started out as interpretation in teamwork and only later were the texts done as translations. With the benefit of receiving assistance from

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native Chinese speakers and literati, practically all translations would have to conform to rules governing the Chinese language. One typical example is the translation of Pan˜cavim s´ati-sa¯hasrika¯-prajn˜a¯-pa¯ramita¯ sutra ˙ , also known as . Shi Sengrui ( ), otherwise known as Sengrui (AD 353
420), a scribal assistant of the above translation project, delineates graphically the assiduous process conducted at the beginning of the 5th century Chang’an. In AD 403, Kuma¯rajı¯va, using the Sanskrit sutra as his source text, began to translate it orally into Chinese. While explicating the lexical significance of terms in both languages, he also checked the Sanskrit original against various old Chinese translations. At the same time, he asked his cleric assistants to test the expressiveness and fluency in the TL. Shi Sengrui was one of the 500 clergymen to review the accuracy and idioms of the translated text before they penned it. When the task was complete, they further checked the Chinese translation against the commentaries of the sutra. Whenever they found infelicities in the transliteration, they would revise them according to the Sanskrit original. If there were errors in the Chinese names, they fixed them according to the lexical level of the language. Only when all were set would they finalize the version and copy it down (Shi Sengrui, 1973: 53). Clearly, the final products of the translation, whether in the form of a word, term, title or expressions, show features of adjusting to the customary conventions of the Chinese language. The Sanskrit texts, however unique, have to go through the tempering stages or sinicization. One reason that Kuma¯rajı¯va had to retranslate the said sutra, among other texts, is that previous versions, which he had consulted and compared with, either could not reveal the meaning properly or were unintelligible. The new translation would now have to address all these lapses and to proffer something readable in the Chinese language.

Conclusion By the time Yang Xuanzhi wrote his Loyang Qielan Ji, another 150 years had passed. By then, the Buddhist terms were quite established and sufficient practical experience of translation had formed a repository for latecomers. In other words, acceptable rules and paradigms for dealing with the Sanskrit translation were available in his time. Exactly because of this empirical common fund that included deletion of syllables from the SL, later generations found it very difficult to reconstruct names from Chinese back into Sanskrit, though there are patterns and phonetic modes to rely on. Yet, as far as the

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missionary purpose of passing on the correct contents is concerned, early Buddhist translators have contributed their share to shape a new vista in the Chinese visionary world, the medium of which are known to be the Buddhist translation parlance and many such idioms have ultimately made their way to form popular expressions in the Chinese daily speech as well. References Bower, Reuben A. (ed.) (1959) On Translation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ) et al. (comp.) (1975) Kangxi Zidian [The Kangxi Chen, Bangyan ( Dictionary]. Hong Kong: Zhonghua Book Co. Dao’an ( ) (1973) ‘Maha¯prajn˜a¯pa¯ramita¯ Jing’ Chao Xu [Preface to the Maha¯prajn˜a¯pa¯ramita¯ Sutra Scroll]. In Dazhang Jing [Tripitaka] (Vol. 55, p. 52). Taipei: Xin Wenfeng Publishing Co. Fa Xian ( ) (1985) Fa Xian Zhuan Jiaozhu [Annotated and Edited Text of ‘Biography of Fa Xian’] (Zhang Xuan ( ) annot.). Shanghai: Shanghai Classical Books Co. Gentzler, Edwin (2001) Contemporary Translation Theories (rev. 2nd edn). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Karlgren, Bernhard (1972) Grammata Serica Recensa. Stockholm: Museum of Far East Antiquities. Lefevere, Andre´ (1998) Chinese and Western thinking on translation. In S. Bassnett and A. Lefevere (eds.) Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation (pp. 12
24). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. ) (1999) Hanzi Gujin Yinbiao Li, Zhenhua and Zhou, Changji ( [Ancient and Modern Pronunciation Dictionary of Chinese Characters] (rev. edn). Beijing: Zhonghua Book Co. ) (2000) Gudao Xifeng: Kaogu Xinfaxian Suo Jian Zhongxi Wenhua Lin, Meicun ( [West Wind on Ancient Silk Road: Jiaoliu Recent Archaeological Findings on Chinese and Western Cultural Exchanges]. Beijing: Joint Publishing Co. Luo, Yin ( ) (2001) Han Wei Liangjin Banruoxue Jing Lun Fanyide Kaocha [An investigation of the translations of the prajn˜a¯pa¯ramita¯ Sutra and their commentaries of the Han and the Six Dynasties]. Hua Fan Daxue Diwuci Rufo Huitong Xueshu Yantaohui Lunwen Ji [Proceedings of the Fifth Confucianism and Buddhism Symposium at Hua Fan University] (pp. 275
292). Taipei: Department of Philosophy, Hua Fan University. Monier-Williams, M. (1899) A Sanskrit-English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon. Nida, Eugene A. (1959) Principles of translation as exemplified by Bible translating. In R.A. Bower (ed.) On Translation (pp. 11
31). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nida, Eugene A. (1964) Toward a Science of Translating: With Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translating. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Poggioli, Renato (1959) The added artificer. In R.A. Bower (ed.) On Translation (pp. 137
147). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Shi, Ciyi ( ) (ed.) (1989) Foguang Da Cidian [Foguang Dictionary of Buddhism] (8 vols). Taipei: Foguang Publishing Co. Shi, Sengrui ( ) (1973) ‘Dapin Jing’ Xu [Preface to ‘Maha¯prajn˜a¯pa¯ramita¯ Sutra’]. In Dazhang Jing [Tripitaka] (Vol. 55, pp. 52
53). Taipei: Xin Wenfeng Publishing Co. So, Francis K.H. ( ) (2002) Xiyu Shidi Shiming [A Compendium of Historico-Geographical Terms of Turkestan [Western Territories]]. Kaohsiung: National Sun Yat-sen University Press. Soothill, William E. and Hodous, Lewis (comp.) (1971) A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms: With Sanskrit and English Equivalents, a Chinese Index and a Sanskrit-Pali Index (rev. Shih Shengkang, Lii Wu-jong, Tseng Lai-ting). Kaohsiung: Buddhist Culture Service, Foguang Publishing Co. Yang, Xuanzhi ( ) (2000) ‘Loyang Qielan Ji’ Jiaoshi [Annotated ), annot. and ed.). Edition of ‘Loyang Qielan Ji’] (Zhou Zumo ( Shanghai: Shanghai Bookstore. ] [Chronicle 20, ‘On Buddhism and Taosim’] Zhi 20: Shilao Zhi 10 [ (1974) In Wei Shu [Dynastic History of Wei]. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Co.

Chapter 4

The Art of Misreading: An Analysis of the Jesuit ‘Fables’ in Late Ming China SHER-SHIUEH LI

A Theoretical Beginning The present study is a sequel to my essay that shows my first interest in the Jesuit use of European ‘fables’ in late Ming China (see Li, 2000). A few words about ‘fable’, therefore, may be necessary before I begin my discussion. By the word, I mean both the ‘beast fable’ in an Aesopic sense, and the kind of ‘human story’ or narratio-fabulosa invented for moral and rhetorical purposes, as Isidore of Seville (d. 636) and Teodosius Marcrobius (fl. 400) have qualified in their classification of ‘fable’ (Migne, 1864: 121; Marcobius, 1952: 85). My previous essay deals primarily with the Jesuit appropriation of European fables from medieval tradition as evangelical exempla in China, and tries to argue that the Jesuit use affected traditional interpretations of these fables as missionaries omitted part of the traditional interpretation, or added new aphorisms, in order to transform a moral message into its spiritual counterpart. Most of the fables I have examined in my earlier study point to this constructive outcome of Jesuit hermeneutic re-working, having, at most, insignificant changes in the plot’s ‘original’ patterns. Despite the aforesaid positive results, the ability of fable to accommodate itself to missionary culture underscores its structural undecidability. This structural characteristic is especially significant when fable is , 1577
1628), in used as an evangelical genre. Nicholaus Trigault ( his «Kuang Yi» ( ) in 1625 transformed the Aesopean ‘De Vento et Sole’ into the sinicized story of ‘The North and the South Winds in Contest’ (Ge, 1986: 282
283). If this vignette in Chinese is indeed ‘Aesopic’, as I have argued in my first essay (Li, 2000: 242
243), then there is no fixed plot structure in any fable. Changeability or pliability is itself the changeless inner-structure of any given fable. In this sense, a fable is 71

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always subordinate to the ‘place’ it is told. In the case of ‘The Horse and ; hereafter Man’ that Matteo Ricci tells in his «Jiren Shi Pian» ( JRSP) (Li, 1965: 163), the ‘place’ to which it pertains is the person named Ricci and the European tradition of pastoral literature that he brought to China. By the same token, it is Trigault and the Chinese linguistic culture in which he was living that brought about his (or Aesop’s) ‘Aesopic contest’ between the winds. Indeed, missionary fables are the most proper exemplification of Foucauldian e´nonce´ (Foucault, 1972: 79
87). Numerous as those fables that stick to the European traditions may be, there are many more in the Chinese exempla of the Ming Jesuits that have reshaped, to a greater degree, the classical kind. For this group of fables, one may ‘misread’ Harold Bloom’s speculations about literary influence among Romantic poets for a theory from a different perspective. The development of literature, for Bloom, counts on sustained revolts by later individuals or generations against the previous ones. The content of these revolts comprises nothing but ‘relationships between texts’, which further entail ‘a critical act, a misreading or misprision’. The traditional idea of ‘inheritance’ is here turned to mean adjustment, re-discovery or re-estimation, from which arises the more positive action of revision or, in a sense, even creative ‘miswriting’ (Bloom, 1975: 3
6). As I have shown in my previous study, Jesuit missionaries, from Ricci to Aleni, showcase a cohesive dissatisfaction with the traditional interpretations of bygone fables, especially those interpretations made in the ancient world. Their employment of fable is therefore a critical act, an actual kind of ‘misreading’ in the Bloomian sense
though not necessarily a ‘misprision’. The only difference is that, while the poets in Bloom’s theory ‘revolt’ against their predecessors because of a personal, oedipal necessity, the Jesuits of the Ming allegedly ‘misread’ for the sake of the ‘higher’ or even ‘eternal’ truth of the Christian gospel. They did not even ‘believe’ in the notion of ‘misprision’, because Platonic and Christian allegorizers always feel justified to misread for the sake of truth. The relationships between texts reflect, in turn, a strong interest in exegetical revisionism, ‘a re-aiming or a looking-over-again, leading to a re-esteeming or a re-estimating’ that aims at religious or, more precisely, theological correctness (Bloom, 1975: 3). As a species of folkloric tale for which it is hard to locate the textual origin, Aesop’s or Aesopic fables have been undergoing an unremitting process of being both ‘misread’ and ‘miswritten’ ever since the appearance of their earliest known transcriptions. As Bloom does for poetic misreading, I venture a formula for Jesuit appropriation of fables: they were misread and thus miswritten to the point that, contrasted with their counterparts discussed previously,

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they can be designated as ‘stories re-told’. Although by this term I do mean morphological variants taken from their antique antecedents, I must note that in this chapter I place more stress on the Jesuit tales of thorough invention, always under the compositional guidance of classical fables and sometimes developed from Christianized ideas originally ingrained in Greco-Roman civilization (cf. Pelikan, 1971: 27
41). While fables ‘re-interpreted’ may retain their traditional forms to a crucial or large degree, those that have been ‘re-told’ by the Ming Jesuits may have undergone a substantial translation in structure, mostly re-fashioned to leave no traces of the ‘originals’. In such cases, the word ‘re-told’ is simply a euphemistic expression for ‘re-plotting’ or ‘re-fabricating’ and, hence, ‘re-fabulizing’. In the Ming history of the Society of Jesus, the impulse to remanufacture came even before the reproduction of standard fables from Europe, always as the result of a desire both to illustrate and to ) (hereafter abbreviated as illuminate. In Ricci’s «Tianzhu Shiyi» ( TZSY), the Jesuit compendium that inaugurated the use of written exempla in this period (Li, 1965: 351
636), one of the most obvious ) to examples is Ricci’s fabrication of a ‘Confucian comparison’ ( construe this world as a temporary test of human works. Ricci narrates first of all what had happened in the year the comparison is supposed to have been made: ‘The present year is the year of examination; on the exact day of examination, the scholars attending the examination looked wearied and burdened, whereas their attendants seemed unhurried and ). Appearances to the contrary, at ease’ ( when ‘the examination was over, it became clear who was to be honored and who was inferior’ ( ). All the details about this ‘supposed fact’ are first of all directed to its secular dimension in a rhetorical question: ‘How could it be possible that [on the day of examination] the officials in charge of the event treated the attendants ) with kindness and the scholars with harshness?’ ( Under this camouflage, however, is again the religious point Ricci intends to make: ‘As I see it, the Lord of Heaven has also placed man in this world to test him and to determine the level of his conduct’ Li, 1965: 427
428; Lancashire & ( Hu, 1985: 141
142). He thus brought up again, through an argumentum, the typical Christian idea of this world as an ordeal designed to precede a better life in the world beyond. Obviously this ‘Confucian comparison’ is a later, topical extension of such classical fables as ‘The Dog with the Scrap of Meat’ and the ‘Three Friends’ in the «Kuang Yi», which I have discussed in my earlier study

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(Li, 2000: 251
265). It is a fable ‘re-told’ in the sense that it was apparently invented with the two Aesopic apologues as its models. A re-told fable may re-signify morally, but in most cases like the ‘Confucian comparison’, the act of re-telling is done only to impart existent topoi in Christian thought. Hence, fabulaic re-creations from the traditional apologues discussed in a previous paper share with the apologues a common concern with the spread of Christian faith, and both forms have in this sense already combined to trigger a new type of tradition worthy of treatment. A large part of what I will discuss in this chapter can be qualified in Bloomian terms as the corollary of ‘literary influence’. With what I have talked about thus far, however, I hasten to indicate that by the term ‘influence’, I do not necessarily mean the transmission of images and plot-structures from earlier to later authors. The fables to be dealt with here reveal instead a more psychological aspect of the term ‘influence’: their writers try to transcend the traditional forms of classical fables so as to convey with more strength the Christian teachings in a hope that the religious tradition of China can be re-shaped. In the following section, therefore, I shall go to Jesuit structural misreading and the concomitant re-fashioning of interpretation by furthering, first of all, Ricci’s point, found in either his fable or his lyric, that epitomizes the partial argument of the renowned fable the ‘Three Friends’, the plot of which is generally supposed to have generated in the 15th century the English morality play Everyman (Li, 2000: 259).

Misreading the Reading As one reaches the end of Ricci’s re-telling of the ‘Three Friends’ in JRSP, one finds that Ricci continues this pseudo-Aesopic tale with a beast fable. The beast fable he chooses is known from Ben Edwin Perry’s translation of Babrius as ‘Deflation Necessary’ (Perry, 1965: 106
107). Curiously, Ricci relates the story in a way that is too peculiar to allow an easy identification of Babrius as its source:

(Li 1965: 163) A wild fox, having been hungry all day long and looking like a sack of bones, tried to steal food from a chicken coop, but the door was closed and he could find no way to get in. While he was moving around, he found by chance an opening [under the door], which

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could just accommodate his body. He was so covetous [of the food] that he lay prostrate [on the ground] and squeezed himself in. Several days later, as he, being full, was attempting to return, he found himself unable to crawl out through the opening because he had become so fat that his belly bulged. Lest the owner should find him, he could not but starve himself for several more days until he resumed his original skin-and-bones appearance. He then left. (My translation) In Babrius’s version of the fable, before the fox begins to enjoy the provisions, there is first a quite different description: ‘An ancient oak tree had a hollow in its roots, and there a goatherd’s ragged pouch was lying, full of yesterday’s bread and meat’ (Perry, 1965: 107). Compared with Ricci’s Chinese fable, Babrius’s preface is flat in its narration. Ricci is more skillful in that he opens his apologue with suspense that paves the way to the story in prospect: the fox had been so starved for a long period of time that one knows some event must follow to release the dramatic tension thus created. The punch lines show up in no time: the fox was emaciated enough to squeeze into the narrow opening. Again, such a rewriting evokes anticipated additions to the ‘original’ so that the new piece can become an organic whole. Ricci has gone beyond Babrius by creating a vivid drama of psychology for his fox, tersely displayed in his desire and his subsequent desperation to reach the food. The food in this exemplum is turned from careless leftovers to carefully raised poultry. That is to say, the fox in this version is committing theft in human terms. He is unable to get out of the coop, not because his belly had swollen large from one meal, as with Babrius’s beast, but because he had spent several days with a vast supply of food. While Babrius’s fox finally escaped with the jeering help of another fox, the Jesuit animal escapes by his own devices. Unlike the two versions of the Ming ‘Three Friends’ found in the JRSP (Li, 1965: 160
162) and the «Kuang Yi» (Ge, 1986: 162), in which plot nuances do not alter the story itself, Ricci’s changes from the details of Babrius’s fox story are significant enough to have led him to abandon the Greco-Roman framework of the fable. Despite his changes, I argue that Ricci’s fable of the wild fox, or the exemplum tradition he uses, still follows the Babrian line of Aesop. I make this inference because most of the versions of this fable, later than that of Babrius, stem from his text. Except Jacques de Vitry’s sermon-book, as far as I know, no European collection of sermon stories contains this narrative. Even the version made use of in de Vitry may have been derived from sources related to Babrius. In Thomas Frederick Crane’s

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reconstructed fable by de Vitry, a lean wolf falls into the dilemma by following a fox through a narrow opening into a storeroom (Crane, 1890: 74). This represents a semi-dramatized structure similar to the apologue of Babrius, in which two animals are presented. Also subverting the classical plot, Ricci’s one-character play, the result of his thorough renovation of the existent versions, may yield what Jacques Derrida would call ‘deferred meanings’ to the Aesopic tradition (Derrida, 1981: 8
9). As such, the first line in Ricci’s interpretation of the fable would have baffled Babrius: ‘How smart ( ) the fox is!’ Not only is the fox for Ricci not at all like his flustered counterpart in Babrius’s apologue, who evoked nothing but laughter from his kind; he is also representative of wisdom. This association may startle those familiar with the Christian exemplum tradition since the New Testament and the Physiologurs (Curley, 1979: 27). The fox is therefore a human exemplar, ) deserving ‘our imitation of his wisdom’ so as to ‘benefit us’ ( (Li, 1965: 163). With the Christian apologetics of JRSP in mind, one may ask, what kind of wisdom can one get from the experience of Ricci’s fox? How can this wisdom help one ‘benefit’ oneself? The answers to these questions motivated Ricci to re-tell the story. To borrow the well-known adage inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi, variously ascribed to the Seven Wise Men, the aforesaid wisdom is in reality a kind of ability to ‘know thyself’ (Guthrie, 1961: 343b; Collins, 1996: 87
113). In Ricci’s context, however, the advice is already Christianized, as had been done in Thomas a` Kempis’s Imitatione christi (1418?), a Christian classic to be translated into Chinese somewhat later than the publication of JRSP (cf. Fang, 1969: 1871
1883). A parallel example, however, had already appeared several years before the Chinese version of Thomas’s work; it was found in Alfonsus Vagnoni’s ) culture-crossing introduction to Athens in his «Tongyou Jiaoyu» ( ( , c. 1628), whose source has yet to be investigated:

(Zhong 1965: 1:296) Athens was an ancient city in which converged all branches of knowledge and thus gathered together from the four seas all those who aspired to be erudite. [For teaching purposes,] a two-story hall was established there: the upper level was [decorated] with an inscription that read ‘‘Obey the Lord of Heaven,’’ while the lower one had one maxim ‘‘Must know thyself.’’ (My translation)

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Whereas zhiji ( ) (know thyself), as a noun, is a familiar term in Chinese, referring to one’s alter ego, the Greek and Christian infusion of meaning in Vagnoni’s text puts both duty and capacity on the self (Yu, 1997: 236
237). What is more significant in this Jesuit twist, the and ), in designation of the upper and lower levels of the hall ( the Chinese linguistic symbolism, implies a certain idea of priority and hierarchy. As a result, the Greek idea of knowing oneself appears to mean human ‘understanding’ ( ) of ‘his own’ ( ) position in the universal ), suggested in chain of being. By the extension of this logic, zhiji ( the fable of the wild fox, refers to the animal’s clever ‘recognition’ ( ) of ‘his own’ ( ) situation in the given story. In this light, the drastic metamorphosis in plot structure of the fox’s approaching the food from ‘by chance’ in Babrius to ‘through pilferage’ in Ricci becomes more significant religiously. The fox, in Ricci’s explication, had to ‘return’ what had not belonged to him by starving himself, so that he could escape from the chicken coop. Similarly, man has to leave behind him all his gains before his departure from this world, symbolized in the fable by the chicken coop. Side by side with this reading stands a second meaning to the new fable: man’s necessary fear of the possessor/creator of the world. Reluctant as Ricci’s fox might have been, he was wise enough to ‘return’ his booty lest the owner of the hen house should discover his theft. If this is the case with an animal, should not man, especially the rich, be wiser and more alert to the justice of his possessor/creator and thus restore whatever he has unjustly taken (stolen?) from the world? Before one can ‘obey the Lord of Heaven’, one must entertain fear of Him; this fear comes as the result of ‘one’s recognition of what one is’ ( ) in the universe. ) In the above premises, part of a cento from the «Xiqin Quyi» ( would ring aloud in the fable of the wild fox: with nothing man comes, and with nothing he shall leave (Li, 1965: 288). Possibly, Ricci is prompted to relate this idea through a tale by his familiarity with the classical Chinese teaching that ‘human life is like a white pony running through a crack ( )’ (cf. Li, 1965: 119). From this simile, Ricci compares human entry into this world with the fox’s entry into the chicken coop by squeezing through the tight opening ( ) under its door: like the animal, ‘the son of man was born into the crack in ). And like the animal again, life with nothing’ ( he begins to become ‘wealthily chubby by accumulating riches’ from ), riches he does not own (Li, 1965: 163). the world ( Part of the motif in the ‘Three Friends’ appears once more here: the

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riches gained imply what the first friend, at least, signifies allegorically. Like the first friend, who does not go with the scholar to see the king, ‘the wealth one has accumulated can hardly go with one to leave the world when one is dying’ ( ). Consequently, Ricci pinpoints the lesson drawn from his new fable in a question: ‘Why don’t we learn from the wise idea of the fox and facilitate our departure [from the world] by giving out our riches?’ ) (Li, 1965: 163
164). For Ricci, ( the fox is wise because he possesses the Christianized ability to ‘know thyself’. To the best of my knowledge, the only medieval re-working of Babrius that bears a faint similarity to Ricci’s fable is found in the Fasciculus morum, a 14th century preacher’s handbook. The Latin structure of the story in this book, however, produces a description rather than a narrative. I quote Siegfried Wenzel’s translation, which adheres strictly to the original: ‘[A] fox who has secretly entered the larder and eaten more than his fill so that in his fullness he cannot get out through the hole by which he entered must either throw up what he has eaten or else be caught by the dogs and torn to pieces and killed’ (Wenzel, 1989: 339). No one would dispute the fact that the Franciscan author of this illustrative depiction also would have had in his mind the traditional apologue, either in Aesop or in de Vitry’s re-working of it as an exemplum in his Sermones vulgares. He resembles Ricci, however, merely in that the story condensed into his statement involves only a fox and his sneak entry into the larder. The lack of plot development in this statement makes me hesitate to argue for Ricci’s link with it. Presuming that this link could be verified, there is yet another problem to be solved: the use of the hole and the dog images can hardly convey Ricci’s allegory of life as transitory and as being under the control of a true owner or its creator. In other words, Ricci’s apologue of the wild fox is composed with the ) as its guiding principle. In Christian commonplace ‘Know thyself’ ( terms of fiction making, this is a contrasting movement to the formation of the fables discussed in my previous essay. Ricci grounds his tale on Babrius, or its Latin derivatives, with such bold imagination that, morphologically, he has translated his model into a new tale. Speaking of fabulaic signification, Arnold Clayton Henderson (1982: 46) points out that one may ‘generate many a meaning from fable... provided only that the meaning is good and the method sound’. To his observation, I add another in the reverse direction: the Ming Jesuit may manufacture a number of fables out of one idea so long as the fables are structured with adequate room for further associations of the idea.

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The ‘further associations’ of the primary idea in the fable of the wild fox may, in the long run, be made with a Stoic commonplace that had been appropriated by Christianity hundreds of years before Ricci finished his JRSP: ‘Man Is But the Guest of the World He Dwells in’, as he puts it in one of the chapter titles of the book. A guest is called a guest because he has been away from home and has stayed in a place that he does not own. In this way, there appears in Christian thought the dialectic between man’s temporary dwelling and his real/eternal home. The Ming Jesuits have revealed this topos through some of the fables examined thus far; Ricci goes further, not only with particular chapters in his JRSP, but also with his partial rendition of Epictetus’s Encheiridion: ) (Li, 1965: 321
349). Epictetus’s likening of one’s «Ershiwu Yan» ( relationship with wealth and spouse to that of a traveler with his inn is fabulized nowhere more humorously than in Ricci’s fabrication in JRSP of the experience of an Italian hermit named Giacomo ( ) (cf. Ning, 1992: 209
230). Giacomo is said to have been entrusted by an acquaintance with escorting four chickens home, but as the friend returned, he found them lost. Asked where they were, Giacomo led his friend to his ). Astonished, the friend asked again, ‘It was my home friend’s tomb ( which I asked you to take them to. Why did you leave them in my tomb?’ ) Giacomo answered simply, ‘That is your lod( ging, while this is your home’ ( Li, 1965: 139
140). Giacomo’s unusual identification of the grave as the home carries with it a philosophical reflection upon the nature of human existence in the mundane world; this reflection is embodied in his use of the character yu ( ) to define the generally supposed ‘home’ ( ) of every individual. The yu, however, implies more than the lodging translated in the foregoing quotation, for it connotes transitoriness, mutability, lack of belonging, unreliability, subjectlessness and lack of autonomy. On the other hand, Giacomo’s ‘home’ suggests all the qualities contrary to the yu, particularly a sense of eternity and substantiality. Where but the tomb can one find such a place in this world, since man is mortal and hence subject to change? The fable of Giacomo brings to light the importance of the idea of memoria mortis. ‘This world’, to use Ricci’s argument, ‘is but a temporal ; Li, 1965: 130); the residence for the human being’ ( life one leads here is a troped quest for an eternal home. Ironically, the only way to ‘go home’ is via death. Baptized alongside the Christianization of Epictetus, in 1645 the last idea also found its way in proverbial form into Aleni’s «Wushi yanyu» ): while living, one lodges; upon dying, one returns [home] ( ). In his imitation of Ricci’s Ershiwu yan, Aleni refers to an (

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‘ancient’ as the author of his Stoic maxim. In view of Epictetus’s cultivation of mental tranquility for worldly mutability, one may argue that by the ‘ancient’, Aleni must have meant Epictetus. Two other ideas from the Encheiridion that were Christianized in Ershiwu yan are the sinicized topoi of life as a banquet and life as a drama (Li, 1965: 537
538). Guests will have to leave when the party concludes, and actors step down from the stage as the play ends. Neither is an eternal ‘home’ but, rather, a temporary ‘lodging’. Should one be able to control one’s desire with stoicism and to handle the loss of one’s spouse and wealth with mental composure, as if they have been ‘restored’, one ‘will be worthy of the banquet of the gods’ (Oldfather, 1996: 495). Man is, after all, neither the host who serves the banquet nor the author who creates the characters in the play. Four years after Ershiwu yan, ‘spouse’ and ‘wealth’ would be ‘misread’ as the first two friends in Ricci’s version of the ‘Three Friends’ in JRSP. This misreading allowed a thematic connection with the fable of Giacomo. The worthy guest in ‘the banquet of the gods’ would also be Christianized in Chinese into one ‘invited by God to His banquet in ) (Spalatin, 1975: 36; Li, 1965: 339). With these Heaven’ ( future consequences, the dialectic between ‘tomb’ and ‘lodging’ had been played on, and transmuted into, a statement by Ricci a bit earlier than the misreading of the Giacomo fable: Our real home is not in this world but in the one we go to after death... We should start our real undertaking there. This world is the world of birds and beasts; this is why all the varieties of birds and beasts look as if they bow their heads towards earth, while men as heavenly creatures look up to the sky. Those who deem this world as their home are no better than birds and beasts.

Only through the tomb can man escape from this world of birds and beasts and return to his real home. Here, Giacomo’s ‘theory’ points to a religious paradox: now that home equals death, one’s daily ritual to ‘go home’ amounts to a repeated practice for one’s final journey to death. In what sense, then, could this world really differ from the other one? As Jacques Gernet suggests, the Christian concept of Heaven or Paradise was beyond Ming comprehension in general, given the Chinese lack of either Gnosticism or Platonism in their native culture (Gernet, 1985: 193
247; cf. Sun, 1992: 246
251). Ricci and his fellow Jesuits, on the

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other hand, follow Roman orthodoxy in their view of a transcendental world, which can be proved through human reason endowed by God. In the related chapter of his TZSY, Ricci argues in both Platonic and scholastic fashion that the wise man will have no need to delay belief in something until he has seen it with his physical eyes. What reason brings to light is even more real than what is seen with one’s own eyes. What ears and eyes hear and see is frequently in error, but what reason has determined cannot be in error. (Lancashire & Hu, 1985: 323; Li, 1965: 546
547) To support this ‘logo’-centrism, Ricci tells a similitudo-like fable in the TZSY, the pioneering work of Christian apologetics in Chinese:

(Li 1965: 163) [W]e who are surrounded by things constantly seen with our eyes cannot understand this truth which cannot be seen with our eyes. It is like [the following story: Once] an expectant woman who had been incarcerated in prison gave birth to a child in a dark dungeon. The child knew nothing of the light of the sun and the moon or of the goodness of mountains, rivers, and people until he had grown to maturity. Only the light of a large candle served as his sun and the light of a small candle as his moon. The few people he saw in the prison were the human race to him. He could think of nothing better than this, and perhaps even felt that the sufferings he experienced there were happiness. Consequently, he did not think of leaving the prison. (Lancashire & Hu, 1985: 343, with modification) An emplotted embodiment of the typical Christian view of ‘life as imprisonment in, and death as a release from, a dark dungeon’ (Sun, 1992: 238), this invented narrative apparently was unprecedented ) famous metaphor of throughout Chinese history until Lu Hsun’s ( ) in the early Republican period (Lu, 1981: 419; Li, the ‘iron house’ ( 1996: 35
54). Being an exemplum for the seen as false, this fable simultaneously puns on the Christian distinction between this world and the other one, being a narratio-fabulosa isomorphism of Trigault’s ‘Dog with the Scrap of Meat’. Although Ricci’s story is faintly similar to a tale in de Vitry taken

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from Barlaam and Iosaphat or the Vitae patrum, in which a prince was brought up in a cave with his nurses for 10 years and knew nothing of worldly things (Crane, 1890: 39, 169
170; Damascene, 1967: 451ff), thematically it models itself on Plato’s allegory of the cave. Jonathan D. Spence (1988: 159) suggests this latter relationship in his Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, but he fails to go further into the morphological similarities and semantic nuances between Ricci and Plato. Like Ricci, Plato (or his Socrates) asserts at the outset of his fable that what he is to tell functions as an analogical instance for his sentiments in the Republic, implying a possible lack of realism in the logic of his story. There is no need for him to inform his audience of what crime those prisoners in the cave have committed. Like the son of the imprisoned woman, they are simply said to have been raised in the subterranean cavern and, therefore, ignorant of the world outside, apart from the shadows reflected on the wall through ‘a fire at a distance behind them’ (514b). The cave dwellers even go so far as to take the illusory images as being the real world. To twist with certain truth Plato’s words in Book X of the dialogue, these images are in fact ‘imitations’ of the world (Strang, 1968: 19
34). Thus taken, the Platonic prisoners’ view of illusion as real is no different from the dog’s conviction of the rouying ( ) (shadow of the piece of meat) as substantial in Trigault’s fable referred to above. By the same token, Ricci’s image of the dungeon is a projected ‘shadow’ of the Platonic cave resulting from textual misreading. The latter is not literally a prison, but it must be treated as such because the men dwelling there have had ‘their legs and necks fettered from childhood’ (514a), just as the son of the imprisoned woman in the Jesuit fable has been brought up in the dungeon since birth. I surmise Ricci’s translation of the cave into the ‘dungeon’ is motivated, first of all, by Plato’s unconscious identification of his cave with the ‘prison’ (517b), and then by the previously indicated comparison of this world to a ‘dark dungeon’ in Christian tradition itself. The son’s mistaking the light of a large candle for the sun and that of a small one for the moon corresponds to the cave men’s illusion of the reflected images on the wall as ‘the light of the stars’, ‘the moon’ and ‘the sun’ (516b). Just as Plato’s ‘men’ are Man, so Ricci’s ‘child’ in the dungeon is a synecdoche of mankind in this world. The other people in the jail, including his mother, along with the candles in his cell, mingled to form the only world he knew. Aside from this, he was completely ignorant of any other reality. Plato’s shadows are an irony of substantia, whereas Ricci’s actual persons and events in the dungeon are shadowy projections from the outside world. With these double images, Ricci’s fable turns out to be a sophistic form of religious

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rhetoric through which he tries to tap the latent truth of the false. The first level of this truth receives a stronger accent in his preface to the TZSY: A foolish man who thinks that what his eyes cannot see does not exist, is like a blind man who does not believe there is a sun in the sky because he does not see the sky. However, sunlight really exists. Even if your eyes cannot see it, is the sun not there? (Lancashire & Hu, 1985: 61; Li, 1965: 368) This expository ‘promythium’, encapsulated in the form of a simile, is ironically abstruse in its implication. As I have noted in my previous study (Li, 2000: 262), early Jesuits put Deus into Tian ( ) meaning the ‘sky’ or ‘heaven’. Ricci’s defense for the existence of Tian hence suggests a more desirable apology for the existence of his God. Furthermore, the light, in particular that which is emitted by the sun, is traditionally symbolic of the first two personae in the trinity of God, as can be attested in Henri Crouzel’s commentary on Origen: The Father is the Light of which the Son is the reflection: this light acts through the medium of the Light which is the Son. ‘‘In thy light do we see light’’: for Origen that means: ‘‘we shall see the Light that is the Father through the Light that is the Son.’’ (Crouzel, 1989: 126) In this ‘light’, and in view of Ricci’s frequent analogy in his TZSY (e.g. Li, 1965: 380) of such absolute realties as nous and logos (both translated as li ( ) in classical Chinese) either to sunlight or to the light, one is certain that God is of paramount importance in Ricci’s reasoning. To Ricci, it is indeed foolish to deny the Father or the Son merely because one does not see God with naked eyes. In this light again, the above quoted ‘promythium’ from Ricci’s preface equals the fable through which its moral is drawn, while the fable is itself a fictional upaya employed to illustrate the Christian doctrine implied also in a fabricated comparison. Such subtle makings of twofold fiction reveal Ricci’s true intention for what should be suggested in his fable of the child in the dungeon. For Plato, truth certainly fails to lie in ‘the shadows of the artificial objects’ (515c), which are instead mimeses of reality. In spite of the Ming Jesuits’ reluctance to use the Platonic ‘imitation’, they describe the human world as the ‘impression’ of Tianzhu or God. Since it is to Him that one ought to return, one has to look beyond this world and aspire

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to His sphere of a higher significance, which is aptly allegorized in the world beyond the prison of the child. One can imagine that should the child learn of the genuine sun in the world beyond, he would stand up and walk towards the ‘light’, leaving behind the candles in the dungeon, as one of Plato’s prisoners was supposed to have done. When the child’s eyes are filled with the beams from the light, his vision will be blurred, just as Dante’s is in the presence of God in the Commedia (Lancashire & Hu, 1985: 91; Li, 1965: 394
395; Ciardi, 1970: 551). Where the light reaches in Ricci’s fable are those good mountains, rivers and people. For Plato, this is ‘the intelligible region’ or that of ‘the known’, where resides ‘the idea of good’, ‘the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful’ (517b
c). For Ricci, this world should, in the first place, be taken as that of human beings, the traces of God, and then reconceptualized to allow its transposition into the realm of Paradise: ‘If a person wishes to conjecture the circumstances of Heaven, he ought to ). observe this world and all creatures’ ( This person would therefore admire more the other world utterly void of evil, ‘a place of perfect blessedness’ ( ) (Lancashire & Hu, 1985: 340; Li, 1965: 559
560). A deft conflation of the Platonic region of the known and the Biblical sphere of God as depicted in Revelation 21:9
22:5, this world beyond the dungeon further constitutes the ) of man (Li, 1965: 1090). This accounts for why ‘original home’ ( Ricci posits in great confidence that if the imprisoned woman should explain to the child the beauty, nobleness and grandeur of the sphere beyond, ‘he will then realize how small are the lights in the prison, how painful are the shackles on his hands and feet, and how narrow and ) (Lancashire & filthy is the prison’ ( Hu, 1985: 344; Li, 1965: 561). Having gained the knowledge of his ‘hometown in heaven’, one is certain, he would hurry ‘with food’ to head there. The assumption in the last sentence of the above paragraph is made by Ricci himself, but this time in JRSP (Li, 1965: 224). What is significant here is that, while Ricci demonstrates his point in deliberative rhetoric, he argues by exemplum, actually by a familiar fable possibly culled from the classical lore of Aesop’s tales. I stress the word ‘possibly’ because a careful reader of Babrius would find that Ricci, like Horace (65
8 BCE) in his letters in verse (Kraemer, 1936: 308), quotes this apologue out of context and re-tells it as if his audience should have already been so familiar with the full-length story that he could omit part of it:

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(Li 1965: 224) Once a fox, the smartest among beasts, passed by a lion’s den by chance. He stood at a distance from the cave and yet was so frightened that he ran away from it immediately. He did so because he saw the tracks of many beasts going in but none coming out. (My translation) Appearances to the contrary, this is also a typical fable re-worked and loaded with new meaning. Babrius has it that the lion was not able to hunt for food because of his old age, so that he tried to get it by wit. He went into a cave where he lay down and played sick to trap the other animals that came in to visit him. His effort failed in the end when the fox saw through his trick just as Ricci’s fox did. The shrewdness embodied in the fox teaches Babrius’s lesson: ‘Fortunate is he who is not among the first to stumble, but has learned by observing the calamities of others’ (Perry, 1965: 132/133). What Ricci has read from this fable, however, is the Christian vision of life after death or life in the Christian ‘hometown in heaven’. Ricci is able to make this connection precisely because of his capability of dissociating his fable from its traditional context. The expression ‘by chance’ ( ) with which the Jesuit raconteur describes how his fox went to the lion’s den legitimizes his erasing the fabulaic background that Babrius and his followers provided. A new but abbreviated fable is thus formed on the old, for ‘any tale element’ can, as V. Propp (1996: 78) has concluded from his observation of folktales worldwide, ‘evolve into an independent story, or can cause one’. No explanation is given of why there were inward tracks of other animals in the cave, but this is the only structural flaw that Ricci has made. Whether ingenious omission or careless lapse, the reader’s dislike soon gives way to admiration of the fox’s cautious observation of the danger ahead. Despite this, the focus quickly moves from the fox to a more spiritual issue through a comparison Ricci makes as part of his epimythium: ‘Death is to man what the lion’s den [is to the fox]’ ( ). Mortality is the first message in the fox tale. What, then, is the second message? The logic Ricci follows is essentially paradoxical. He says that there is no doubt that since man fears death, he sticks more to life. But men of benevolent character and moral integrity are not afraid of mortality, nor do they indulge themselves in the love of life because they believe in the existence of the hall in heaven. It is a matter of

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course that those who are wicked are afraid of death and fond of life, for they are destined to go to hell. (Li 1965: 224) What this causality highlights, i.e. the eschatological reward for deeds in this world, actually subverts Ricci’s first message, for what matters in this light is not death, but where death would lead. Ricci understands well that, since ancient times, few have been able to return from Death and that also since then nothing has been known about what happens after death. Given this ignorance of the details after death, who would wish to die? By this logic, Ricci tries to convince his audience that, if people knew what would happen after death and how wonderful paradise is, none but the wicked would dread parting with life in this world. This conclusion, along with its vehicle, is one that takes shape as the result of a larger figure in the text of JRSP. Ricci says Let me make an analogy: Man is by nature attached to his hometown. But if he has seen others return with joy from another town, he would like to go there with food. Because since the ancient times those who have been to the town have never returned, who would readily agree to go unless by absolute necessity? (Li, 1965: 224) As can be expected, this analogy will be narrativized in the context of the cautionary story of the cautious fox. But what echoes the point of the analogy in Ricci’s re-told apologue of the animal? As the shrewd fox saw, none of the bestial tracks entering the lion’s den came out again; so, too, in human life none can return from Death, here allegorized by the invisible lion. Interestingly, given Ricci’s sophistic argumentation, those inward tracks might equally not deter the fox from entering into the cave in the long run. They did prevent him from going to the den, but this may have been the result of his momentary lapse of thought. As the smartest beast of all, the fox is comparable with those ‘men of benevolence and moral integrity’, the cream of human society, and will be able to see in the tracks the traces of what elsewhere in JRSP Ricci calls the ‘holy city’ ( ; Li, 1965: 231) by following the religious insight of those men. The fox will thus be free from thanatophobia because he will be smart enough to realize that death is the only entrance to the ‘city’ or ‘the hall in heaven’, two equivalents to the ‘hometown in

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heaven’ or one’s ‘original home’ in Ricci’s symbolism of Christian paradise. Thus seen, the lion’s cave, even if it is not paradise itself, may have been taken as the passage to it in Ricci’s subconsciousness. The re-told fable by the Italian Jesuit has therefore re-moralized its Urtext: the new fable not only suggests that those deceased beasts in the cave might not have fallen victim to the lion, the animal often paralleled with Christ in the Christian bestiary tradition (Curley, 1979: 3
4), but also implies their re-birth through death. Read this way, the story actually has re-shaped its prototype even to the point that the ‘calamities of others’ might have been transformed to mean redemption through suffering. The fable hence ends up as a delicate and paradoxical reflection on the right way human beings, Christians in particular, should take to ‘go home’, to their ‘original home’ in heaven. It would have taken Ricci’s audience little imagination to see that the ‘right way’ not only signifies leading a virtuous life in this world, but also encourages defiance of thanatophobia. The premise for escaping such a fear lies in the awareness of this world as a dungeon and the other one as a paradise in which the worldly guest or traveler can enjoy a life of eternal blessing. Once the audience begins to ask for elucidation of the latter belief, they have in fact returned to the fable of the dungeon in the TZSY, already discussed above. Seen from this perspective, the Jesuit fables with these motifs seem to have given the Ming Chinese a fictionalized pageant comparable to the Hebrews 11:13
16 lesson on the deaths of well-lived paradigmatic figures of unwavering faith since Abel and Abraham: All these died in faith. They did not receive what had been promised but saw it and greeted it from afar and acknowledged themselves to be strangers and aliens on earth, for those who speak thus show that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land from which they had come, they would have had opportunity to return. But now they desire a better homeland, a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

Rereading the Ontology In view of the above fabulaic connection with the New Testament, one question may be raised to close the present essay: except Emmanuel , 1574
1659) Shengjing Zhijie ( , 1638), which is in Diaz’s (

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essence a loosely translated work of Biblical exegesis, why had the Ming Jesuits not employed the parables of Jesus to preach Christian doctrines by the end of the dynasty? Whether taken from a religious perspective or a rhetorical one, within the family of European exempla, the parables are undoubtedly the best vehicle for the teachings of Jesus contained in the Bible. Not only were none of the parables translated for missionary purposes, the Jesuits, besides direct quotations from the Aesopic lore in the medieval tradition of the cautionary stories, even went so far as to create new fables on the old, by way of Bloomian morphological ‘misreading’. The reply to the above question, therefore, involves the particular concept of influence already discussed at the outset of this chapter. In fact, the lack of Jesuit use of parable, apologetically or evangelically, concerns the distinct nature of the genre of parable as opposed to that of fable. By modern standards, the story of a parable, while teaching a theological lesson, could happen in actual life, whereas the animal or vegetable characters in fables are, at most, human exemplars instead of humans themselves (Cuddon, 1977: 251
469). Although these are outstanding differences, I do not think that they are crucial in the Jesuit decision to preach with fabulaic exempla. Considered from the Jesuit fables I have analyzed thus far, even including those under scrutiny in my previous essay, I propose that the reasons are twofold. The first is that parables are what the Psalms broadly term ‘dark sayings’ (78:2), uttered to lay bare what Matthew calls ‘the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven’ (Mt 13:11). Although Jesus told these secrets in parables for the crowds (Mt 13:2
3), one finds in the gospels that he did not do it with an overt purpose to be understood (Mk 4:12). Without adequate explanations, the crowds could hardly understand these dark and therefore obscure stories. This may account for why, despite the high frequency of Jesus’s use of parables, in most cases he had to explain them after delivery (e.g. Mt 13:18
23 and 36
43). Sometimes, even though he explained his parables, later exegetes felt the need to clarify ‘for him’ his points in his own ‘parabolic exegesis’ (Wailes, 1985: 43
64). One has to notice that the crowds in the gospels shared with Jesus the same cultural background, having been immersed in the Judaic tradition of the day. Given the fact that not even the contemporary Jewish crowds were able to appreciate Jesus’s parables, how could the Ming Jesuits expect that the Chinese, a people of a thoroughly different cultural stock, would understand Jesus’s stories? To ensure their missionary success in China, the Jesuits had to find a way out of traditional Christian pedagogy by deviating from Jesus’s style of preaching. They needed to ward off

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Jesus’s influence, even consciously, so as to locate a substitute for parable with an even more effective power of proselytism in China. , 1897
The Ming Dynasty was a period that Zheng Zhenduo ( 1958) has argued is characterized by ‘the revival of fable’, re-creating its much earlier bloom in pre-Qin times (Zheng, 1973: 1207
1210). People of the Ming were too familiar with Confucian and Daoist fables to neglect new members of the genre by various fabulists of their own time, ranging , 1311
1375) through Zhao Nanxing ( , 1550
1627) to from Liu Ji ( Feng Menglong ( , 1574
1646). Working in a period whose literary climate was saturated with the fable, it is not surprising that the Jesuit missionaries would re-call European fables from the medieval pulpit. One additional point even more relevant to my concern in the present chapter needs to be mentioned: inasmuch as Aesopean fables are either baseless in their contents or elaborated with uninhibited association, the kind of cultural background required for the understanding of Jesus’s parables failed to play a comparatively important role in the Ming appreciation of the fables. In other words, I believe that it is because fables are more universal than parables that they were the genre widely used by the Ming Jesuits. Bracketing multifarious fables in religious Daoism, one finds that the Ming Chinese had learned much concerning the close tie between religion and fable from Buddhist jataka stories (cf. Sun, 1988: 15
23). It was not difficult at all for them to see through the veil of fable in terms of its spiritual signification. Ever since Phaedrus, to the best of my knowledge, the formal traits of classical fable had included promythium and epimythium, two conspicuous features that finally converged in the moralitas of the later Aesopic texts. I have suggested that the fable is not as ‘dark’ as the parable; its moralitas helps even more in the shaping of its transparency, thus making the fable more accessible to the Ming Chinese. For all that, one must realize that, although the Jesuits could cull material from the fabulaic line of medieval exemplary literature, the late Ming Dynasty was neither Western antiquity nor the European Middle Ages. Once the spatial and temporal contexts had changed, the Jesuits certainly had to adjust even the form of a traditional Western fable by excluding, not only Jesus’s, but also Aesop’s, influences. This change involves the second difference between fable and Jesus’s parable, namely, a fable is formally open-ended and thus undecided, as I have pointed out earlier. It is because of this undecidability that fable lacks autonomy. For this reason, it can be re-interpreted over and over again almost without restriction. It is also because of this undecidability that fable is deprived of its subjectivity, and is therefore structurally subject to change. The

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Jesuits have long been praised for their cultural accommodation to China (Mungello, 1985: 44ff; Dunne, 1960: 269
302; Gernet, 1985: 24
30), which, in a sense, finds its literary expression also in the morphological expediency the Jesuits employed to re-tell European fables. The story of the North and the South Winds in contest, which I have touched upon earlier in this chapter, has obviously been sinicized, while the two fox fables, to whose discussion part of this chapter has been devoted, are typical examples of structural re-working to meet the needs of fabulaic Christianization. Such formal flexibility in fable can hardly occur in Jesus’s parables. In Christian belief, Jesus is the incarnate son of God, the Word in the form of flesh, according to the Gospel of John (1:14). In Genesis, the Word is the prime mover by which the world was brought into being and, according to Exodus, the Word is the legislator from which the JudaicChristian ethics known as the Decalogue took shape (34:10
28). In a word, the Word is the absolute power of the universe, the authority through which God reveals Himself. John’s link of Jesus with the Word, in this light, is what leads Jesus to be enshrined at the peak of the Christian chain of being. This logos-Christology sounds somewhat paradoxical, however, in the sense that the Word of God in Genesis may have to encompass what Jesus would have said in the gospels. Theologically, Jesus’s words are not necessarily the impetus to the formation of the realistic world (Norris, 1980: 1
31). What is more paradoxical is that, insofar as Jesus’s words have been promoted to the Olympus of Christian theogony, they are as authoritative as God. Jesus’s parables, as one of the major forms of his words in the gospels, are therefore culturally paramount and theologically transcendent. God could transform Himself into Jesus, but can man transform Jesus’s parables morphologically? If yes, I do not think that there would have appeared in the history of Biblical interpretation what is understood today as parabolic exegesis. I would argue that Jesus’s parables are part, if not the centrality, of Western logocentrism whose legitimacy Derrida has been questioning since the 1960s (Derrida, 1976: 74ff; Culler, 1982: 92ff; Payne, 1993: 139ff). Parables are, therefore, structurally a priori and part of the Urground of divine authority. No transfiguration, under any circumstances, could be made in the transmission of these parables. However much parabolic exegetes may vary from one another, they are not allowed to re-fashion a parable in the manner that the Ming Jesuits used with Aesop’s or Aesopic fables.

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I agree that later exegetes are entitled to re-interpret Jesus’s parables, but here I hasten to make the point that the Jesuit activities of reinterpreting classical fables were not done on the same footing as the exegetes’. In a sense, the hermeneutic workings of parabolic exegetes ever since the early medieval period could have made their efforts in a way similar to the Jesuit re-interpretation of Aesop’s or Aesopic fables that I have treated in my former essay. These exegetes worked on an Urground, rather than on a fluid text. In addition, they were theoretically not allowed to digress from what Jesus had intended to say in his parables. They were not even ‘re-aiming’ at a new context in the Bloomian sense of the verb. This, however, was not the case with Jesuits’ re-interpreting of the European fables through the act of retelling in the Ming Dynasty, as is noticeable in the two fox stories dealt with in this chapter. The Jesuits did ‘re-aim’, not only in the sense that they re-wrote the traditional form, but also in the sense that they recontextualized the fable. What is legitimate for fable may be illegitimate for parable. The involvement of the concept of authority in Jesus’s parable accounts in a great part for the Jesuit preference of classical fable to Jesus’s parable as an evangelical genre. From what I have discussed thus far, I think that one should have formed a clearer picture of the nature of the Jesuit fables re-told. These apologues, whether they be narratio fabulosae developed from Platonism such as the tale of the dungeon, or Aesopic fables like the Christianized fox stories, were re-worked on the foundation of structural and thematic ‘misreading’. They have been twisted away from their ‘originals’ and reapplied for different purposes from their purposes in classical antiquity. Paul once said that he hoped people in this world could, to borrow Ricci’s Chinese quotation in JRSP, ‘gain their endless, great happiness ). The with their momentary, light works’ ( Jesuit elder, however, turns this wish into spiritual advice by replacing part of the words therein: he hopes that people should not ‘create endless, great misery for themselves with their momentary, light ) (Li, 1965: 254). Ricci introduces pleasure’ ( his linguistic play with a sophisticated, humble expression in Chinese, i.e. ganzhuan qiyu ( ), meaning ‘I venture to trope his words [for my own purposes]’ (Li, 1965: 254). In view of what I have discussed so far in this chapter, what Ricci and his Jesuit fellows ventured to ‘trope’ in the Ming Dynasty was more than Paul’s line. Such re-told fables as those of the dungeon and the fox were precisely the creative results of the above Jesuit ‘tropics’.

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References Ai Rulue (Giulio Aleni) (1645) [Fifty passages and their morals]. In Wu Xiangxiang ( ) (ed.) (1984) (Vol. 1; pp. 363
409). Bernard, H. (1937) Matteo Ricci et son Temps (1552
1610) (Vol. 2). Tianjin: Hautes E´tudes. Bloom, H. (1975) A Map of Misreading. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bloom, H. (1982) Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. New York: Oxford University Press. Brandeis, A. (ed.) (1900) Jacob’s Well: An English Treatise on the Cleansing of Man’s Conscience. London: Paul, Trench, Tru¨bner. Brown, R.E. (1990) The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. Englewood, NJ: Prentice Hall. ) (1996) «Zhongguo Gudai Yuyan Shi» ( ) [A History of Chen, Puqing ( Classical Chinese Fables] (enlarged edn). Changsa: Hunan Education Press. Ciardi, J. (trans.) (1970) The Divine Comedy. New York: W.W. Norton. Crane, Thomas Frederick (ed.) (1890) The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry. London: David Nutt. Cuddon, J.A. (1977) A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Culler, J. (1982) On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Curley, M.J. (trans.) (1979) Physiologus. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Damascene, St. J. (1967) Barlaam and Ioasaph (G.R. Woodward, trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology (G. Chakravorty Spivak, trans.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (1981) Positions (A. Bass, trans.). London: Athlone Press. Dunne, G.H.S.J. (1960) Generation of Giants: The Stories of Jesuits in China in the Last Decades of the Ming Dynasty. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Fang, Hao ( ) (1967) «Zhongguo Tianzhujiao shih renwu zhuan» ( ) [Biographies of Prominent Figures in the History of Chinese Catholicism] (Vol. 1). Hong Kong: Gongjiao Publishing Co.; Taichung: Guangqi Publishing Co. Fang, Hao (1969) «Zun Zhu shengfan zhi zhongwen yiben ji qi zhushu» ) [Translations and annotated versions of the Imitation ( ) of Christ in China]. In the author’s «Fang Hao liushi zidinggao» ( [Collection of Fong Hao’s Papers: Finally Selected at the Age of Sixty] (Vol. 2). Taipei: Student Book Co. Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (A.M. Sheridan Smith, trans.). New York: Pantheon. Ge, Baoquan ( ) (1986) «Tan Jing Nige Koushuo, Zhang Geng Bichuan de ) (Aesop’s fables: orally transYishuo Yuyan» ( mitted by Nicholas Trigault and transcribed by Zhang Geng). «Zhongguo Bijiao Wenxue» ( ) [Chinese Comparative Literature] (Vol. 3; pp. 282
283). Gernet, J. (1985) China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures (J. Lloyd, trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamilton, E. and Hungington, C. (ed.) (1961) Plato: The Collected Dialogues. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Henderson, A.C. (1982) Medieval beasts and modern cages: The making of meaning in fables and bestiaries. PMLA 97 (1), 46.

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Holy Bible, The (1984) New York: American Bible Society. Kempis, T. (1952) The Imitation of Christ (L. Sherley-Price, trans.). New York: Dorset Press. Kraemer, C.J. Jr. (ed.) (1936) The Complete Works of Horace. New York: Modern Library. Lancashire, D. and Hu, S.J. Kuo-chen (trans.) (1985) The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven. St. Louis, MO: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, in cooperation with Taipei: The Ricci Institute. Li, Ma dou ( ) (1595) «Tianzhu Shiyi» ( ) (The true meaning of the Lord of Heaven). In Li Zhizao ( ) (ed.) (1965) (Vol. 1, pp. 351
636). ) (1608) «Jiren Shi Pian» ( ) (Ten chapters from a strange Li, Ma dou ( man). In Li Zhizao ( ) (ed.) (1965) (Vol. 1, pp. 93
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54). Taipei: Maitian Publishing Co. ) (2000) «Gushi Xinquan* Lun Mingmo Jesu Huishi suo Li, Sher-shiueh ( Yijie de Yishuoshi Zhengdao Gushi» ( ) [Stories reinterpreted: An analysis of Jesuit fables in Ming China]. «Zhongwai ) [Chinese-Foreign Literature Monthly] 29 (5), 238
277. Wenxue» ( Lu, Hsun ( ) (1981) «Zixu» ( ) [preface]. In «Lu Hsun Quan Ji» ( ) [Complete Works of Lu Hsun] (Vol. 1). Beijing: People’s Literature Press. Marcobius, A. (1952) Commentary on the ‘‘Dream of Scipio’’ (W.H. Stahl, trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Metzger, Bruce M. and Murphy, Roland E. (eds) (1991) The New Oxford Annotated Bible (new revised standard version). New York: Oxford University Press. Migne, J.P. (ed.) (1864) Patrologiae Latinae (Vol. 82). Paris: Excudebat Migne. Mungello, D.E. (1985) Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. New American Bible, The (1970) New York: Catholic Book. Ning, Xi ( ) (1992) «Zhongguo Yuyan Wenxue Shi» ( ) [History of Chinese Fables]. Kunming: Yunnan People’s Press. Norris, R.A. Jr. (ed. and trans.) (1980) Introduction. In the author’s The Christological Controversy (pp. 1
31). Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. Oldfather, W.A. (trans.) (1996) Encheiridion. In Epictetus (Vol. 2). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pelikan, J. (1971) The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Vol. 1). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Perry, B.E. (trans.) (1965) Babrius and Phaedrus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Propp, V. (1996) Morphology of the Folktale (2nd edn) (L. Scott, trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Spalatin, C.S.I. (1975) Matteo Ricci’s Use of Epictetus’s Encheiridion. Gregorianum 56 (3), 551
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422). Wailes, S.L. (1985) Why did Jesus use parables? The medieval discussion. In P.M. Clogan (ed.) Medievalia et Humanistica (New Series Vol. 13, pp. 43
64). Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld. Wenzel, Siegfried (ed. and trans.) (1989) Fasiculus Morum: A Fourteen-Century Preacher’s Handbook. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. ) (ed.) (1984) «Tianzhujiao Dongchuan Wenxian San Bian» Wu Xiangxiang ( ( ) [The Third Collection of Catholic Works Transmitted to the East] (Vols. 4
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3106). Xiangxiang ( Yu, Anthony C. (1997) Rereading the Stone: Desire and the Making of Fiction in Dream of the Red Chamber. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zheng, Zhenduo ( ) (1973) «Yuyan de Fuxing» ( ) [Revival of fables]. In the author’s «Zhongguo Wenxue Yanjiu» ( ) [Studies on Chinese Literature] (pp. 1207
1210). Rpt. Taipei: Minglun Publishing Co. ) (Nicolas Standaert) et al. (1996) «Xujiahui Chanshulou Zhong, Mingdan ( Ming-Qing Tianzhujiao Wenxien» ( ) [Ming-Qing Catholic Works from Xujiahui Library] (5 vols). Taipei: Fanji Publishing Co.

Chapter 5

The Cultural Politics of Translating Kunqu, the National Heritage YEUNG JESSICA

Introduction There is an uncontested first rule for any translation task: Know Thy Text. Gayatri Spivak used the most beautiful image of love and seduction for translation that a translator must ‘surrender to the (original) text’. This requires very ‘intimate’ reading. ‘To surrender in translation is more erotic than ethical’ (Spivak, 2001: 400). To know a text requires not only intimate, but also extensive reading, not only of the text to be translated, but also of the web or webs of texts into which the text in question is woven. A text is never only a text, it is always at the same time an intertext. Meaning is not generated exclusively within the text, but also around the text. Texts voluntarily and involuntarily join discourses. Instead of imagining the translator as the conscientious dictionary-digger working in solitude in a medieval cave, or a single-minded maiden faithfully waiting on the sole master, it might be more apt to think about her/him as a modern house-wife/husband who fanatically takes detailed care of the most minute family chores on a daily basis, while at the same time, scouting around, her/his antennae bristling to find out what is happening in the world; since it is the knowing, not the naı¨ve, who can protect the innocence of the text. After the compelling ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies, it is almost impossible for any responsible translators not to look at the text to be translated and the translated text as cultural products, and thus see herself/himself as an active participant of cultural production in the society. To know a text is not only to ask how it reads, it is also necessary to inquire into what it is and what it does.

To Know Kunqu For a translator of kunqu ( ), the question ‘what is your text’ is a tricky one. To start attempting to answer the question, one would get into 95

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an enormous pool of highly technical information regarding the conventions. Kunqu is the oldest existing regional form of xiqu ( ) (often known as ‘Chinese opera’ for the convenience of understanding by non-Chinese), which is generally believed to be a direct descendent of shuochang ( ) (a mixture of folk story-telling in the singing form), ritual and court dance, circus and acrobatic plays. All these forms were practiced in extensive geographical areas. Similar elements of performance combined and interacted with the particular material conditions of the lives in the various regions, which resulted in the great heterogeneity of regional xiqu. Xiqu is in fact a generic term. This term encompasses a considerable degree of heterogeneity among regional variations. It emphasizes the historical dimension of transformation, manifesting itself at various stages of development in forms such as zaju ) of the Yuan Dynasty and chuanqi ( ) of the Ming Dynasty. ( Like all other theater forms, the possibility of full-scale production is very much affected by financial considerations. It is known that by the 11th century, it had already been a common practice to stage xiqu as collective entertainment among merchants, and also have it organized for clients and official connections. Kunqu, the regional form of xiqu originated and practiced then in the Jiangsu Province, benefited greatly from the connection between commerce and art/entertainment. From the 15th century onwards, Jiangsu and its neighboring provinces specialized in the production of high quality silk. The wealth of Jiangsu merchants was a powerful support for the aesthetic achievements of kunqu. Its mellow and refined music styles and its neat and meticulous choreography were able to develop into a high degree of sophistication. Librettos of extremely high literary value were written. Many of them were canonized and said to be among the pinnacle of achievements of classical Chinese literature. One very famous example is Tang Xianzu’s ) «Mudanting» ( ), based on which Cyril Birch produced his ( English translation Peony Pavilion in 1980, which has, in turn, established itself as one of the key texts of literature in Chinese studies in western academia. But kunqu was known in the west much earlier than Birch’s translation of Peony Pavilion. Sinologists, including A.C. Scott, already published on ‘Chinese opera’ in the first half of the 20th century. The first kunqu ) in performance abroad was staged by the maestro Mei Lanfang ( his extensive tour to America, bringing a repertoire including both kunqu and jingju ( ) (the regional xiqu originated in Beijing, still often called ‘Peking Opera’ today as it was at the height of the colonial era in China in the late 19th and early 20th century). Mei’s enormous success in America,

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and subsequently in Moscow, was taken as a manifestation of the glory of traditional Chinese culture. The distinctive aesthetic system of traditional Chinese theater became a convenient site to assert a tradition and a cultural autonomy that have been crucial to Chinese nationalism throughout the 20th century up to now. During this process, xiqu has become a trope for ancient China, and has taken on an aura of antiquity, which seems to justify an intrinsic and essential value of the art form itself. In 2001, kunqu was listed by UNESCO as an ‘Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity’. It would not be surprising if we were to see kunqu soon taking over the status of ‘national opera’ from jingju. That would mark a displacement of the heart of Chinese nationalism from the present political center to an imaginary historical China. After all, the recognition of jingju as the ‘national opera’ was but a cultural metonym of the early 20th century movement of nation-building (Yu, 1992). To laud kunqu in place of jingju as the national icon would be a timely shift of the hard-line nationalism of the anti-colonial era onto a cultural nationalism, which disguises the divergence among the Chinese diaspora and the many conflicting ideological stances within the so-called greater cultural China. The idea of a cultural China (spanning the vast geographical regions of a number of countries in southeast Asia and including all the Chinese diaspora beyond Asia) carries much less material reality than China the nation. To emphasize the shared ‘cultural roots’ allows the imagination of a pre-colonized and pre-globalized unity. It involves an active construction of a monolithic cultural past through kunqu and by buttressing Chineseness in the past. It by-passes many political issues, including the popularity of the Chinese Government today, the contested sovereignty of a number of regions within the Chinese boundary and other related problems. Through xiqu, this idea of the cultural China is received in vivid colors, sharp shapes and forceful singing, lending ‘cultural China’ some kind of body and texture.

The Use of History When analyzing the use of what he calls an antiquarian sense of history, Nietzsche says, This history of his [the antiquarian man’s] city becomes for him the history of himself . . . thus with the aid of this ‘‘we’’ he looks beyond his own individual transitory existence and feels himself to be the spirit of his house, his race, his city. (Nietzsche, 1983: 73)

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Nietzsche does not think much of antiquarian history because it promotes unquestioning conformity with the nation and is uncritical. It is regressive. In the case of kunqu and Chinese identity, it locks China in the ancient. From the hegemonic capitalist perspective of a west that emphasizes progress, this Chineseness, which is identified with the ancient (as opposed to the modern), is undesirable. In hindsight, this kind of ‘self-ancientization’ was at first a way to articulate difference and autonomy during the colonial era. But it was a bad strategy, because this definition of Chineseness is constructed in accordance to the model set down by the Occident. It has reinforced the dichotomy of the modern versus the ancient, the progressive versus the backward, etc. The Other has collaborated in the project of Othering. Arif Dirlik calls this ‘selfOrientalization’, and claims it is a part of the practice of Orientalism because ‘[h]ow EuroAmerican images of Asia may have been incorporated into the self images of Asians in the process may in the end be inseparable from the impact of ‘‘Western’’ ideas per se’ (Dirlik, 1997: 111). This historic-political dimension of kunqu constitutes complications when one deals with kunqu texts, no matter whether in production, translation, criticism or study; because one is no longer dealing with the texts only, she/he is handling a national heritage, the content of which involves a lot of sentiments. Whether they are pilgrims of national heritage or consumers of cultural tourism, the audience of kunqu performances and the readers of librettos alike are often overwhelmed by the heavy historical and political associations. The paratextual significance easily overwhelms the attention on the text itself. Kunqu becomes a three-dimensional visual trick. The distracted eye on the spectacle travels through the time tunnel and lands on some remote past embodied in kunqu. The text is received through the mediation of its historic aura and significance of the image of China’s past.

The Power Relations in Translating Kunqu Having defined kunqu as texts caught in these webs of cultural and political meanings, where does this leave the translator of kunqu? Inevitably, the translator now has to position herself/himself not only in the library among bookshelves, but also within the power relations to which the production and reception of kunqu (scripts and performances) are pertinent. The power relations around kunqu are facts. It is no good saying that one is only concerned with the literary aspect of a text and situate oneself outside or above these politics. As a matter of fact, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, the translated text once placed in

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the public sphere would be recuperated into these discourses. The position of the ‘outside’ is simply unattainable. Ignoring these politics is to give up any little control one might have over one’s own cultural production. If the translator sees herself/himself as an agent of cultural production striving for some degree of autonomy, she/he might start by asking herself/himself: why am I translating this kunqu text? What cultural functions will my translation achieve? For a non-Chinese person, reading a kunqu script or watching a kunqu performance is encountering the Other. To translate is to represent. To represent something in a certain way so that it can comfortably fit into another mental framework, or prison house of language, is appropriation. This is the necessary evil of translation, unless one goes for extreme foreignization, then the translation risks obscurity, which could also be fetishized as exotic. Of course, this is not to say that translation is necessarily evil. Eugene Eoyang (2003: 73) describes translation of post-colonial literatures as ‘a two-edged sword: while it undoubtedly confers access, and attracts a substantially wider world audience, it also imports evaluation criteria that are not necessarily appropriate to the indigenous text’. Not to mention translations ‘define the world in terms of the target language. . . It recognizes as reasonable what makes sense on its own terms. It reverses the polarities of the native and the foreign’ (Eoyang, 2003: 85). Ethnic arts could suffer most seriously in this kind of dislocation. The aesthetic and signification systems fully substantiated by their cultural and material backgrounds could lose meanings when dislodged and isolated, eventually becoming no more than exotic. Having fully recognized the issue of exoticism, Ovidi Carbonell is, however, much less pessimistic than Eoyang. He expects a translation to ‘make sure that individual agency is not cancelled out and institutionalized by the social structure where the foreign text, object, or person is going to be reinscribed’ (Carbonell, 2000: 52). The agency in question should not refer only to the artist, but also to the translator. I do not believe any bona-fide translator of kunqu would be happy to find that her/his labor of love is turned into yet another highly consumable exotic item only to feed the global literary and theater markets. But, the other side of the coin is equally messy; the translator of kunqu also needs to avoid joining the uncritical discourses of what Nietzsche criticizes as antiquarian history, of cultural nationalism, and of exhibitionism of a ‘cultural superiority’. All these are forms of coercion suppressing different ideological stances within the ‘Chinese community’. How does a translator of kunqu situate herself/himself within these discourses and power relations? A translator surely cannot change the world. But looking at one’s own work as, however humble, an instance of praxis and social

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formation, and possibly an immanent critique within the structure, might not be such a laughable idea. What can a translator of kunqu do to produce a textually, culturally and politically adequate translation? First, there is the need to distinguish two types of kunqu translation. One could translate the libretto as literature, or one could translate in the form of surtitles for the theater audience. Translated kunqu published on the page is for armchair reading. It affords a much more comfortable appropriation of the text into the target culture. Imagine reader Katie. She lives in London and is reading the Penguin anthology entitled Six Yuan Plays at home, probably at the same time eating salmon sushi she has bought from Sainsbury’s. She is impressed with the melancholy images of the bamboo shadows on the gauze window in the quiet autumn night, the dragon sword and the silver goblets. They become concrete and vivid pictures in her mind’s eye, merging together with all other images of the Chinese experience narrated in other English texts available everywhere in London. A remote Chinese world is constructed for her in the English language. The superb quality of the translation disguises the fact that it is a secondary linguistic experience. The shocks and bumps one expects in any crosscultural experience are already absorbed in the translation process by some translator whose existence has escaped her awareness, since she has skipped the Preface, like many people do. The reception process is much less shocking for her than for the translator. After the mediation of the invisible translator, what is left on the page for Katie are the beautiful images. Although these are not items she uses in her daily life, they are not that remote because they are constructed in her mind with lexis and in syntax she is familiar with. This Chinese world is now no more than one of these exotic entities all existing side by side in the globalized world, all rendered accessible in the shopping malls, in the multi-screen cinemas, in the bookshops, all in the face of the ordinary people.

The Multiple Semiotic Reality of Theater Naturally, for the translator of kunqu librettos to be published and read, the poetic quality of the language is the main focus of attention. However, even if we look only on the textual level, kunqu translation for armchair reading simplifies the text. Being librettos, the composition of the language is closely linked to the structure of other elements of performance, primarily the music and movements. If we look at a kunqu piece in its totality, these non-linguistic elements are not ‘in addition’ to the verbal, but constituting parts of the organic whole. Each theatrical

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element operates according to its own convention and produces meanings within its own system of signification. But, at the same time, they are composed with the other theatrical elements in mind. This is the same for the music, and the same for the movement patterns. Each element is written into the composition of the other sign systems. One brief example ) will illustrate this point clearly. In Scene Ten entitled «Jingmeng» ( (‘Interrupted Dream’ in Birch’s translation) of Mudanting, the heroine ) gets up in the morning and sees that spring has come. Du Liniang ( She gets dressed and decides to go to the back garden of her chamber to admire the spring scenery, where she falls asleep and has her fateful meeting with Liu Mengmei ( ) in her dream. Her first aria proper in this scene narrates the numerous small things a lady does to get dressed and tidy her hair. Each description of action she sings coincides with respective movements. The time taken for each movement sequence is built into the music, to which the words are sung. For example, while she is tidying her hair and hair ornaments, she sings, ‘meichuai linghua tou ren ) (Tang, 1984: 43), literary meaning ‘[I] have not benmian’ ( expected the ling-flower [a stock image often referring to a lady’s mirror in classical Chinese poetry] to steal half of [my] face’. Birch’s (2002: 43) translation reads: ‘ . . .perplexed to find that my mirror stealing its halfglance at my hair . . .’. As the player starts singing the line, her left hand is put on the table supporting much of her body weight, so that her body inclines towards the table. Her right arm is raised behind her, conforming to the forward-leaning curve of her body. This figure enhances the appearance of looking at herself in the imaginary mirror on the table. Then, she lowers her right arm as she turns round to look into the hand mirror her chambermaid, at this point, is holding up behind her. At the same time, she raises her left hand from the table to a position above her head. So, the geometry of the body remains, but is shifted to the opposite direction. This movement sequence of the heroine looking at herself from two different angles in two mirrors, each reflecting half of her face, justifies the poetic image of the mirrors stealing half of her face. Although the line consists of only eight words, the musical time is 24 beats. This time is needed to accommodate the complicated movements that are tightly choreographed to the words. In Birch’s translation, the half-face image is changed to a half-glance. It becomes a more idiomatic image in the English language, but it does not coincide with the stage business. Yet, one can easily sympathize with Birch’s decision, if it is understood that from the onset the translation has targeted the armchair reader. The world constructed in the published translation is the ancient mansion with Du Liniang living in it, not the theater stage on which a group of

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players and musicians act. This kind of translation for armchair reading has by-passed the players. It seeks to establish a linkage for the reader with an imagined ancient world, not with the real stage on which players are still enacting this story today. Whether this kind of translation can fully present and exploit the literary value of the libretto is questionable. For a libretto, the quality of the language on its own is only one aspect of its achievement; the other equally, if not more, significant achievement is when the language can facilitate the lyricism of other stage business, in the way that the short line above. A translation for armchair reading, even with Birch’s eloquence, cannot do justice to the full value of the language of a good libretto, simply because the other elements are not present on the page to interact with the words. A translation for armchair reading can never be adequate, regardless of the competence of the translator, it is simply an inherent feature of the genre. Yet, translating kunqu for the printed page was related to the canonization of kunqu script in Chinese literary history. At the same time, privileging the verbal over the non-verbal, in most types of documentation including that designed for the theater, was, in turn, a necessary result of the material conditions of our society until recent decades. The theater is a live art. It happens in time. Once a theatrical act is enacted, it dissipates into the air. Without video recording, one can only grasp what can be recycled: the libretto and the music, leaving out the visual and the kinesic; or one can try to recreate an image of what has happened by constructing an after-image of the performance in the form of a diary, a review or another literary creation such as an essay recounting the viewing experience. Words were the only means of documentation before the electronic and digital age. Circulation is another governing issue that leads to the privileging of the verbal in pre-modern days. Theatrical enactment is also spatial in nature. The accessibility to kunqu is restricted by physical distance. The bulky sets and gear and the large number of personnel in a production made it very expensive, if not impossible in pre-modern times, to travel. What could be circulated was only one element of the performance, the libretto. This situation started to change in the 19th century. The first railway in China was built in 1876. It became possible for troupes to tour more extensively. In the 1930s, Mei Lanfang took the first jingju and kunqu tour abroad. In the second half of the 20th century, touring xiqu abroad became increasingly common. Kunqu, with its reputation of being the oldest and most refined form of all regional forms and listed by UNESCO as a world heritage, is becoming one of the most frequently performed types of xiqu abroad. It circulates in the international theater

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festival circus, belonging in the same category of ‘ethnic art’ or ‘traditional (versus modern) theater’, together with Japanese Noh, or even the Ottoman Whirling Dervishers.

Translating for Surtitles Although kunqu is supposed to be a traditional ethnic theater, it plays very comfortably in modern theaters abroad, built according to the needs of western dramatic conventions. This is not surprising, since from 1908 onwards when the first western style theater dedicated to jingju was built in Shanghai, xiqu has been adapting its form and re-fashioning itself to fit the modernized consumption pattern of theater-goers. Today, the theater business is globalized like any other cultural productions, and surtitling is therefore built in as a necessary part of the performance text, since a globalized market means playing to non-Chinese who need the mediation of translation to understand the verbal text. Surtitling is a logical development in the globalization of theater. The libretto is often translated into English for a general foreign audience, since English is, in practical terms, a lingua franca in many parts of the world. The existence of surtitles implies mediation in communication. It also implies reception as the Other by a foreign audience. Having situated kunqu surtitles in such a politically dubious context, this is not to say that they only function to facilitate consumption of the exotic. On the contrary, surtitles afford more potential to challenge this Othering than a translation in print could. Unlike translating for armchair reading, surtitles are not read in isolation. They are displayed in the theater, interacting with all other theatrical elements, which include the voices of the players uttering the original text. The kunqu translation in the form of surtitles participates in the intertextuality of the various semiotic systems within the single performance text. These signs might complement each other, but each semiotic system can also enter into negotiation with others, qualifying and modifying each other. The translation text, like other semiotic systems at work on stage, can interfere with and complicate the production of meaning in the performance text. Although some of these negotiations might arrive at a synthesis of meanings, some might not. Moreover, the aesthetics of the numerous theatrical elements all speak to the receptors at the same time. The signs do not cancel each other out. The stage set, the properties, the human bodies, the colors, the lighting effects, all spatial and temporal happenings on stage are viewed as components of an experience that has an overall structure.

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This structure is experienced simultaneously in its totality and by its many fragments. On the surface of what John Searle calls the ‘field of consciousness’ (Searle), the co-existence of these signs allows tension among them. Robert Wilson is an example of post-modernist dramatists who have successfully exploited this tension, arbitrating conflicts among signs in order to alienate audiences from and thus interrogate the received meanings of these signs. Kunqu translation as surtitles occupies a very special position in the theater. It is, at the same time, inside and outside the performance text. The translation is supposed to be ‘equivalent’ with the libretto in the source language. On the part of the receptor, the meanings communicated in the translation are woven into those in other theatrical elements. In this sense, the translation is very much an integral part of the performance text. However, as far as the dramatic whole and the theatrical structure are concerned, the performance text is complete without the surtitles. Moreover, while the theatrical illusion creates a secondary reality and refers to an imaginary world situated in ancient China, the surtitles displayed on the digital screen remind the audience of the imminent communication process in the theater. They belong to the primary reality in the auditorium. They break the illusion rather than constituting it. In this sense, the translation stands outside the performance text. The distance it draws from the performance text for the audience is not only dramatic, but also cognitive. The application of technology for displaying the surtitles, which is central to the audience’s theatrical experience since they rely heavily on the help of the translation to decipher other signs, gives rise to an incongruity with the dramatic illusion of antiquity. It hinders the immersion on the audience’s part in this illusion. If this theatrical experience is formative of their idea of China, it disallows an excessive identification of China with the ancient. This alienation effect does not only work on the non-Chinese audience. It also works on the Chinese audience. For the modern Chinese audience, there is another incongruity at work, namely that between the traditional value systems embedded in many kunqu pieces and the value systems of the modern mind. My claim for the value system embedded in many kunqu pieces being traditional is not an essentialization. It is closely related to kunqu’s formal features. The writing of kunqu librettos follows the convention of the genre. The audio and visual integrity of the theatrical form makes it very difficult to break away from this convention. Many stock and cliche´d images have become very much a part of the convention. Librettists often resort to these items. They can be readily assimilated into a consistent set of

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traditional value system signifiers inscribed in the libretto. The modern Chinese audience of kunqu might not subscribe to these traditional values in their daily lives. But their knowledge of the theatrical form interpellates them into ‘appropriate(d)’ subjects and that allows them to enjoy the performance without entering into any ideological negotiations. During this process, their unappropriate(d) autonomy has to be suppressed. One obvious example is the description of women. The metaphors of the peach blossom for female beauty and the willow for female fragility are frequently recycled, even in newly written pieces. These images are still apt for the librettos because the acting for female roles still aspires to the ancient ideal of the delicate female. A modern Chinese audience might accept these images as part of the poetics of the performance and the writing, but it would feel very strange to see them translated as surtitles, often rather literally, into a language to which these images are foreign. Although not intended to do so, the translation defamiliarizes these received images and the ideologies they embody. This creates a distance that is potentially critical. It opens up a space in which certain values are exposed to be highly ideological. The receptor of the translation could be inspired to reflect on certain received ideas that otherwise would go unnoticed. One might argue that translations of librettos published in book form can also achieve the same function. My answer to this argument resorts to common sense: except in very special circumstances or for certain specific purposes, Chinese readers do not often read kunqu in translation. But kunqu audiences have the surtitles flashing in front of them, above or on stage (depending on the position of the display box). Even if they do not pay attention to every line, the surtitles are registered in their consciousness, probably in a less intensive manner, or at the ‘periphery’ of their ‘field of consciousness’ (Searle), to apply Searle’s terms again.

Intertextuality at the Reception End So far, I have focused on the direct relationship between the translation and the audience. Yet, the model of reception is much more complex. What is discussed above is only one point in the intertextuality in the reception of the text. To analyze the meaning generated by the English translation for an English-speaking audience, we must situate this reception in the intertextual web of her/his home culture (or more apt, her/his globalized home culture). Like it or not, the reception of kunqu by the western audience has to start in a context plagued with the imperialist relationship in which Orientalism has been and still is a

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dominant approach to Asia. However, it is not the only discourse. Within the ‘west’ there is a heterogeneity of responses to the Orientalist attitude. In arts and literature, progressive works that question such a position are not lacking. Let’s return to the example of the image of traditional female beauty and its stock metaphor of peach blossom. For an English audience who grew up in the 1960s, the expression ‘peach blossom’ repeatedly flashing on the surtitles display could be associated with the highly popular radio comedy Round the Horne. Some of the comic sketches in the program feature an Asian mastermind criminal and his two ‘beautiful assistants’ with the names Lotus Blossom and Peach Blossom, both played by gruff male voices. These sketches themselves were spoofs on Orientalist stereotyping texts, such as Sax Rohmer’s Dr Fu Manchu stories. Embodying at the same time the Oriental and the Camp and playing up the stereotypical traits often attributed to them as categories, these two characters push the foreign and the taboo to the extreme and explode it with anarchic humor, to such an extent that they become ironic remarks ridiculing the hegemony. Yet, for the listeners of Round the Horne, these characters, the Oriental and the Camp, are still no more than tropes. But the kunqu audience is confronted with the corporeality of the performers, the very subjects who are being described as peach blossom and lotus blossom. All the flat stereotypes of the Oriental are juxtaposed with the physical reality of these characters in their own context. They express intense emotions with an energy that is real. The theater is a real space rather than a discursive one. Representations including the translation, the house program, the write-ups, or associations with other texts and received ideas of the Orient, all have to enter into negotiation with the physical dimension of the signified. Dialogism is ingrained in the theater.

Translation as a Site of Resistance Once the translator is aware of the intertextuality inside and outside the performance text, it is up to her/him to devise strategies to avoid reinforcing Orientalism; to evoke associations with more progressive texts in order to prompt a more progressive consciousness in the audience; or to engage in a dialogue with the other signs on stage to create a critical distance for the translation text itself, and also for the audience. In order to achieve these, a politically committed translator of kunqu has a lot of practicalities to think about. In present translation studies, drama translation is not a very developed area. Studies and training on film subtitling is not lacking, since the cinema is a major

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cultural industry and offers abundant employment opportunities. Its easy accommodation for mass consumption renders it a power tool of cultural formation. On the other hand, surtitling for the theater is much neglected in the critical discourse. Attention to surtitling for ‘less popular’ theatrical forms, such as kunqu, is almost non-existent. It becomes very difficult for kunqu translator/surtitlers to accumulate experience and critical reflection on the practice. The closest resources that are available to them are the discourses on translating classical Chinese poetry and some other studies on traditional Chinese theater by sinologists. To strive for a textually, culturally and politically adequate translation, one can only rely on one’s own experience, judgment and political awareness at this stage. Yet more analyses and theorizing are necessary if kunqu, and by extension xiqu, translation is to become a critical site of intercultural communication. One might argue that this is not the function of the original text, and therefore is beyond the faithful translation. Some might even argue that an ‘excessive’ political concern in translation studies ‘marginalizes’ the act of translation itself, which is sometimes deemed as a textual activity. Although deconstructionists hold that it is almost impossible to know what an original libretto or a production intends, there is one thing we can be certain about: not many, if any at all, kunqu pieces actually intend to join the Orientalist discourse and allow themselves to be willfully consumed as exotic signs. Yet, probably the way for any form of cultural production nowadays to escape from the forces of the Global Market is to withdraw from the pattern of capitalist consumption. The later ‘paratheatrical activities’ of Jerzy Grotowski, Augusto Boal’s playback theater with people’s theater movements and the circulation of 1989 Tiananmen poetry are some examples. They all take the form of community or cottage activities operating on minimum or zero budget, acting each time on a small number of audience/readers. Kunqu does not fall into any of these categories. Its form requires economic support. It is impossible for it to quit the market. Translation for kunqu is, therefore, also situated within the cultural market. This offers the possibility of immanent critique within the hegemonic structure. Interacting with other signs and drawing on other intertextual progressive elements, it should aspire at least to destabilize within the performance text the hegemonic structure of gazing at Asia. This political awareness is particularly important for theater translator/surtitler, since the theater is a real space, and the people playing on stage are not mere signs, but are real people. Collaboration with Orientalist ideology that interprets them as exotic signs is not a textual, but a personal act. We are not talking about

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reducing a complex China into a simplified idea of the Orient, but fundamentally about dehumanization of these people acting on stage in front of the audience. If the actors’ years of training and hard work on this art form are reduced to nothing more than some consumable exotic goods to feed into the Global Market to gratify and reinforce the Orientalist imagination, it can only be seen as a cruel irony. Carbonell also places the subjectivity of the represented in a very important position in his view on translation. It is based on this concern that he offers his critique of polysystem theory: Hence polysystem theorists focus only on the manipulation of the source text by the target culture, leaving aside crucial questions as to cultural change, hybridization and, especially, the acting of ‘‘agency’’ on the part of the subjects represented in translation
and which are deemed exotic in colonial thinking. Only the application of deconstruction to translation reassesses these issues up to a certain extent. (Carbonell, 2000: 60) Many contemporary critics draw on spatial images that cultural theorists have formulated to imagine a space for critical actions for translators and intercultural communicators. Carbonell (2000: 52
53) borrows Homi Bhabha’s Third Space. Dirlik uses Mary Louise Pratt’s term of the ‘contact zone’ as follows: The contact zone is a zone of domination, because it does not abolish the structures of power of which it is an expression, and to which it serves as a zone of mediation. But the contact zone also implies a distance, a distance from the society of the Self, as well as of the Other. (Dirlik, 1997: 119) If we think about translation this way, we do not see it as a product nor a process, but a site. It is a site where negotiation of meaning, identity and discourses take place. The apparatus in the kunqu theater I have illustrated above might be seen as an actualization of one of this ‘Third Space’, a ‘contact zone’, in which many kinds of politics, including cultural, economic, body and gender, are most crucial since they are not only inflicted on individuals at the discursive level, but also in real terms. By the same token, the presence of translation/surtitles displayed alongside the physical presence of the original text in the form of the players’ voices, articulation and emotive intensity makes the translation and the translator literally visible. As with all other translation activities undertaken by politically aware translators, this visibility of the

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translator is not only a professional venture, but also a strategy that articulates differences and autonomy. References Carbonell, Ovidi (2000) Exoticism in translation: Writing, representation and the postcolonial context. In I. Santaolalla (ed.) New Exoticisms: Changing Patterns in the Construction of Otherness (pp. 51
63). Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. Dirlik, Arif (1997) The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism and the Age of Global Capitalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Dolby, William (1976) A History of Chinese Drama. London: Paul Eleck. Eoyang, Eugene (2003) Borrowed Plumage: Polemical Essays on Translation. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1983) Untimely Meditations (R.J. Hollingdale, trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seale, John The problem of consciousness. On WWW at http://www.ecs.soton. ac.uk/
harnad/Papers/Py104/searle.prob.html. Accessed 8.9.09. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2001) The politics of translation. In L. Venuti (ed.) The Translation Studies Reader (pp. 397
416). London/New York: Routledge. Tang, Xianzu (1984) Mudan Ting [The Peony Pavilion]. Beijing: People’s Literature Press. Tang, Xianzu (2002) The Peony Pavilion (C. Birch, trans.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Yu, Shangruan (1992) Guoju Yundong [The National Theatre Movement]. Shanghai: Shanghai Bookshop.

Chapter 6

Cooperative Translation Models: Rediscovering Ezra Pound’s Approach to Classical Chinese Poetry SYLVIA IEONG

Introduction: Cooperative Models in Translation Activities Cooperative efforts have always played an important role in accomplishing great human deeds, including translation projects of some scale. The significance of academic cooperative efforts exists in the intellectual synergy that transforms individual ideas and contributions into collective creation of new information and knowledge, eventually leading to innovation and growth (http://www.knowledgeforum.com). Cooperative endeavors in translation are common practices, referring to those of translators working together in pairs and groups, sharing information and coming to each other’s aid, thus complementing each other’s efforts to move towards better and better work. Perhaps an added connotation to the term ‘cooperative’ is its emphasis on collaborative efforts to achieve their common goals successfully. In the world of translation studies and in actual practice, some translators have completed their translation tasks single-handedly, while others, more often than not, knowingly or unknowingly, joined hands with others and accomplished prodigious feats by cooperative methods and intellectual synergy. Examples of cooperation abound, found in both the East and the West, past and present. And there are various cooperative models, the most familiar one being what Guo Moruo ( ) and his son Guo Shuying ) called the ‘pair-work’ ( ).1 In their judgment, and most would ( agree with them, the ideal translator for poetry translation is one who not only excels in the source and target languages and literatures, but also a clairvoyant poet himself/herself. Two persons will also make a perfect 110

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pair if one is highly proficient in the source language and has the relevant gift and expertise, or perhaps even better, has the source language as his/ her mother tongue, and the other in the target language and literature. The Jade Mountains could perhaps serve as an exemplar, which was the ) and fruit of an agreeable working model between Jiang Kanghu ( Witter Bynner. Jiang, who was a native speaker of Chinese and obviously more familiar with the source, ran the first round and translated the book into English. Then, Bynner took time to run the second cycle
a process of polishing up and of domestication and naturalization for the target language audience of their time, and finally Jiang went over it again to bring it to some sort of ‘perfection’. ), alias Lin An anecdotal example that springs to mind is Lin Shu ( Qin-nan ( 1852
1924), acclaimed as a miracle in the history of Chinese translation. Lin, though well known for his prolific and highspeed ‘translation’ activities, had no knowledge of the source languages that he translated from, including English, French, Russian and Japanese. He worked face to face with one of his 16 oral narrators, such as Wei Yi ) and Wang Ziren ( ), on a koushu-biyi ( ) model (literally, ( the ‘translator’ uses the pen to ‘translate’ the story while listening to his assistant retelling it from the source language), with Lin using his pen to write down the story in Chinese while listening to his linguistically gifted assistant retelling it from the source text. In Lin’s own words, ‘my hand chased my ears; the pen stopped the moment my oral partner stopped narrating. We thus worked four hours on end, churning out six thousand words a day!’ And just imagine, nearly 200 famous novels were translated from over 90 foreign authors into Chinese in this way and became bestsellers, ferociously read by Chinese readers!2 Even Professor ), a Chinese scholar renowned for his profound Qian Zhongshu ( understanding of Chinese and Western thinking and well versed in Chinese and many European languages, confessed candidly that he was mesmerized by some of Lin’s best translated novels and opted for the Chinese translations, in spite of the fact that he had easy access to the originals (Qian, 1990: 81
120). Very often, a Chinese scholar works out Chinese translations by collaborating with a Westerner or a Sinologist, and vice versa. It is not uncommon to see a conjugal partnership, such as Yang Xianyi ( 1915
) pairing seamlessly with his beloved wife Gladys Yang ( ), so as to take advantage of the ‘native ness’, proficiency and expertise in both the target and source languages and cultures. The couple dedicated the most precious part of their lives and spent most of the 20th century translating numerous Chinese classics into English, and introducing a

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large number of valuable works into China by translating them into Chinese. This pair-work helps to bring out the best of the originals, thus enhancing the quality of cross-cultural communication and greatly benefiting the target language audience. Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (1885
1972) stunned the world of poetry and translation with the publication in 1915 of Cathay,3 consisting of 18 English poems translated from a small corpus of 19 classical Chinese poems discriminatingly culled from some of the best ancient Chinese poets. Cathay immediately became a focus of attention and research in both the West and East, thanks to its success and popularity. The past decade or so has witnessed a renewed interest in Cathay, both as translation and poetic re-creation in the context of more open and widening international communications, scholarship and cultural exchanges. Indeed, today, browsing through the Internet Pound discussion lists concerning Cathay and Ezra Pound, and visiting the ever-changing scenes of the various websites, one finds that the interest is still growing, and so is the literature. ‘Poundians’, ‘Poundites’, ‘Pounders’ or ‘Poundists’ still find the ‘overnight’ success a bit puzzling, one of the reasons being that Pound had little knowledge of the source language. Then, is Cathay Pound’s own single-handed achievement? Is it the product of cooperative ‘pair-work’ efforts? Or is it the culmination of cooperative efforts beyond ‘pair-work’?

Ezra Pound’s Cathay as a Product of ‘Pair-Work’ According to M. Alexander, an authority on Pound studies, for years Pound scholars, both Chinese and Western, were ‘hampered by ignorance of the originals and of Pound’s exact route to them’ (Alexander, 1979: 102; Zhao, 1985: 148). This problem remained, posing quite an obstacle to the study of Pound and his Cathay till the late 1990s, when some thorough and meticulous source researches were carried out.4 The findings emerging from these studies point to the existence of ‘two sources’ and of ‘a detour and shortcut’ as the major stumbling block, revealing a very complicated mode of cooperative efforts that brought about the creation of Cathay. First, it is well known that Pound used the ‘immediate source’ already rendered in English
notebooks and manuscripts of the American Orientalist and art historian, Ernest Fenollosa (1853
1908)
to accomplish his Cathay (Qian, 1995: 55
71). As a result, far more attention, as well as research efforts, has been drawn to this source than the far more remote but nevertheless more crucial original Chinese source. If we confine our discussion to what Qian Zhaoming described as the ‘Pound-Fenollosa

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Venture’, Cathay is indeed a product of a pair-work cooperation. Though the two had never met, there was affinity, something more profound than physical contact and direct communication, between the two. For Pound, rather than a deliberate cooperative arrangement, it was a kind of auspicious interaction of circumstances and coincidences all falling into the right place at the right time: Fenollosa’s widow was looking for a talented poet to execute the publication of her late husband’s legacy, accumulated over many years of hard work on classical Chinese poetry, when the young Pound was all ready for it! He felt he couldn’t wait for his venture into classical Chinese poetry, as he recalled in Date Line, ‘Fenollosa’s work was given to me in manuscript when I was ready for it. It saved me a great deal of time. It saved probably less time to a limited number of writers who noticed it promptly but who didn’t live with it as closely as I did’ (Pound, 1954: 77). In fact, he had spent the winter of 1913
1914 with William B. Yeats working through the manuscript notes and could hardly conceal his joy and ecstasy over his literary windfall. As soon as the last batch of Fenollosa’s manuscripts reached him in November 1914, Pound threw his heart and soul into his Chinese bonanza, and Cathay, the fruit of this pair-work cooperation, most fortunately blessed by cultural affinity, empathy and a favorable literary climate, came out in the spring of the following year.

Cathay as a Product of an Exciting International ‘Relay’ and Witness to Intellectual Synergy However, Cathay is unique in that it is neither one man’s singlehanded achievement nor merely the product of a pair-work cooperation. As mentioned above, far more attention and research efforts have been given to the ‘immediate source’ than, and sometimes at the expense of, the vital original Chinese source. By its very nature, translation is invariably bound up with the source texts as well as the target ones. And in the final analysis, it is the original source that is the point of departure and the yardstick by which Cathay must be measured, studied and discussed, as a translation and creative poetic work. The need to go into this source and delineate the exact route so as to identify the collaborators and their roles becomes more pressing, especially when one realizes that a literary history with its vast heritage spanning centuries and even millennia and three formidable languages
Chinese, Japanese and English
are involved in this remarkable endeavor. Nevertheless, it is this ‘immediate source’ that leads us to the genuine source
the more remote but crucial Chinese source. It is obvious that no

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study of this complexity is complete without a careful study of these sources, and the discussions will always remain vague and elusive without a meticulous effort to identify and locate all the original texts and their authors. So, on the basis of previous researches, efforts were made to trace the 18 English poems to their sources and delineate the route to Cathay from the corroborated source consisting of 19 original Chinese poems, as listed in the Appendix. To match the number of the source texts with that of the Cathay poems, it may be necessary to make a mention of the anecdote that has shocked or amused so many readers, and which has struck many an expert as ‘bizarre’. No. 3 poem of Cathay, ‘The River Song’, is actually a translation ) The River Song, and Chi of two of Li Bai’s poems: Jiangshang yin ( cong Yichun yuan feng zhao fu longchi liu se chu qing ting xin ying bai ) (Pound’s translazhuan ge ( tion: /And I have moped in the Emperor’s garden, /Awaiting an order to write! /I looked at the dragon-pond, with its willow-coloured water, / Just reflecting the sky’s tinge, /And heard the five-score nightingales aimlessly singing./) Indeed, the title of the second poem of Li Bai’s is so long that it takes Pound five lines of English to continue his ‘River Song’. It is hoped that the inventory presented here may serve as a common ground for discussions of Cathay both as a translation and a poetic re-creation. (See the Appendix for a full inventory of Cathay’s poems.) As a matter of fact, on the title page of Cathay, Pound himself made this very acknowledgement: FOR THE MOST PART FROM THE ), FROM CHINESE OF RIHAKU (Japanese transcription for Li Bai THE LATE ERNEST FENOLOSSA, AND THE DECIPHERINGS OF THE PROFESSORS MORI AND ARIGA (1915). Again, in 1928, 13 years after the publication of Cathay, Pound wrote, with touching sincerity, ‘Before I die I hope to see at least a few of the best Chinese works printed bilingually, in the form that Mori and Ariga prepared certain texts for Fenollosa, a ‘‘crib’’, the picture of each letter accompanied by a full explanation’ (Pound, 1954: 71). Evidently, the immediate source provided by Fenollosa is essential for Pound’s accomplishment. He appreciated the latter’s work in the form of elaborate notes and wished very much to have more access to some of the best Chinese literary works. Of course, before and after he set to work and during the whole process, he honestly needed ‘a full explanation’ accompanying each Chinese character; he needed ‘bilingually printed’ lines and texts to get the ‘crib’ and ‘picture’, though he would not entirely rely on them for his poetic creation. With his poetic instinct and flair, he opted for, and was quick to pick up, the images flying all over

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these Chinese poems to fulfill his poetic ideals. Moreover, in addition to Fenollosa, he remembered to make a special mention of the two Japanese professors who lectured and gave private lessons to Fenollosa on Chinese literature and classical Chinese poetry (Zhao, 1985: 121
148). Indeed, it is Pound’s own acknowledgement that serves as the best guide for us to delineate his ‘exact route’ to the originals. This ‘detour’, or paradoxically, the ‘shortcut’, is thrown into clear relief in the following sequenced relations and work accomplished (shown by arrows): The originals:

19 classical Chinese poems 0

Mori and Aria’s lectures:

Deciphering on Chinese poetry 0

Fenollosa’s notebook:

Notes, cribs and translations 0

Pound’s Cathay:

Album consisting of 18 English poems

This thrilling sequence, showing Cathay’s detour as well as shortcut to the Chinese source, has made it crystal clear that Cathay is the product of a collective endeavor by an international team consisting of wellestablished Sinologists, linguists, translators and poets working on a cooperative model transcending time and space. Here, one feels convinced that Pound, thriving on the brilliant achievement of the source culture and the painstaking work by Fenollosa, and by Mori and Ariga, succeeds in producing a series of translated poems accurate to the spirit and soul of the originals, if not to the exact script. The journey from classical Chinese poetry to Cathay is long and tortuous, but with Fenollosa’s ‘cooperation’ in the form of notes and word-for-word transcriptions and cribs stemming from Japanese Sinologists’ years of hard and meticulous work, Pound takes a shortcut, bringing out a most attractive poetry album within a few months. After studying the detour and shortcut of Cathay, we find the process of its translation not only legitimate, but also secured appropriately at each stage by an international team with the right expertise and by intellectual synergy. Here, one finds Eugene Nida’s model for translation process highly relevant and very useful for a close study and analysis of the process. To begin with, the Japanese professors, Mori and Ariga, were among the best Sinologists and researchers with genuine expertise on classical Chinese poetry, and their choice of the best readings in Chinese texts and source editions guaranteed textual reliability. The next move in the

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process was ‘analysis’, which means that they took the source text, corroborated the existing editions and analyzed the various aspects of meaning of its lexicon, grammar and style. And these erudite JapaneseSinologists completed this stage painstakingly and professionally. Now we come to the vital stage of ‘transfer’ shown in Figure 6.1. This time, similar to what happens in a long-distance relay, the American Orientalist, Ernest Fenollosa, took over, having attended a great deal of lectures given by his Japanese professors on classical Chinese poetry. He had spent many years on researches and interactive discussions, and had developed a profound rapport with his teachers, resulting in those proverbial notebooks, rich and copious notes, paraphrases, cribs, translations and word-for-word transcriptions, all in English, to about 150 classical Chinese poems that had been selected from thousands (Alexander, 1979: 102) (Figure 6.1). Then came the crucial stage of the relay, ‘restructuring’. Here, a gifted poet is indispensable and more urgently needed than a ‘faithful’ translator in the production of good poetry for the English-speaking audience of the early 20th century. Miraculously, and most fortunately, Pound was sought out at the right moment to run the last leg of the race. And he ran it well, so well indeed, as if he had run a 60-meter or a 100-meter dash. Thrilled by his literary fortune, the young Pound seized the opportunity to manipulate it to his heart ’s content. Guided by his poetic instinct, he opted for only those that he liked best and those that were, to quote Pound’s own words, ‘indisputably the best’. He also put each of his poems to test immediately: in great excitement he dashed into his friends’ rooms several times a day to read them the poem he had just composed and received unanimous applause (Ford, 1915: 800
801). In summary, the process, the method and the product all demonstrate that Cathay is not just one man ’s work, but a success story of collective efforts and cooperation, like the running of a long-distance relay, and it is a thrilling cooperative endeavor transcending time and space.

Figure 6.1 Nida’s model of the translation process (Nida, 1969: 484)

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Conclusion: Cooperation as an Answer to Translating China This chapter has discussed a few interesting cooperative translation models, with a focus on Ezra Pound’s Cathay, which, though a very small volume in itself, is significant and illuminating in that it is a product of internationally cooperative efforts and intellectual synergy. The Chinese nation has made extraordinary literary achievements and accumulated an enormous heritage, which is a vital and integral part of the intellectual wealth of all humanity and should be shared by all peoples of the world. And it should be ‘made known to the whole world and dedicated to all humanity’ (Ren, 2004). As one of the answers to introducing classical Chinese literature to an audience speaking different languages, translation will not only bring to life again this brilliant Chinese cultural heritage, but also make it grow and glow with new spectra. However, in a rapidly globalized world that is changing and exploding with new knowledge, translation activity is becoming more and more an internationally cooperative endeavor. Such cooperative efforts will bring out the best of the source texts and provide the target audience with the best possible target texts, thus guaranteeing and enhancing the quality of cross-cultural communication. Moreover, in addition to the concept of ‘cultural diaspora’, as suggested by Professor Sun Yifeng, they may help overcome some of the difficulties, including the ‘age-old impasse of foreignization versus domestication’ in literary translation.5 One can hope that theorists and translators with multiple expertise will join hands and work on a variety of cooperative models in a knowledge-building community that will give impetus to intellectual innovation and creativity and bring about the prosperity of literary creations and translations. Notes 1. According to Guo Shuying ( ) and Guo Pingying ( ), the wellrenowned Chinese poet, Guo Moruo ( ), believing that poetry could be best translated through the cooperation of a language expert and a poet, strongly recommends the ‘pair-work’ cooperative method for poetry translation. The process starts with the source language expert directly translating from the source to the target language at the comprehending and transferring stages and then the poet completing the process by restructuring the piece into poetry and polishing it up. For more details, please refer to Guo ) and Li Qingsheng ( ), A Practical Course in Translation Zhuzhang ( ], Wuhan University Press, 1998, pp. 412
413. [

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2. According to different sources, the number of novels translated by Lin Shu varies from 178 to nearly 200, the latter being quoted from [ ] (A Companion for Chinese Translators), pp. 416
417. 3. Cathay has been translated into Chinese under various titles, such as [ ] (Shenzhou Ji, A Collection of Shenzhou, Shenzhou meaning the Sacred Land and referring to China), [ ] (Huaxia Ji, A Collection of Huaxia, Huaxia ] (Gu Zhongguo, Ancient China), being an ancient name for China), [ [ ] (Guotai Ji, A Collection from the Most Prosperous Period of Ancient China) etc. 4. Indeed, toward the close of the last century, there was a renewed interest in Ezra Pound and the source research of his Cathay, and many efforts were made to locate and identify the source poems to facilitate comparative cultural studies. Seminal works emerging from these studies include Qian Zhaoming’s Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (1995), Zhu Hui’s Comparative Studies on the Art of Chinese and English Poetry (1996), Zhang Ziqing’s A History of 20th Century American Poetry (1997) and Yuan Xingpei’s Imagery in Classic Chinese Poetry. I also made a little contribution to this research in the form of papers published in Macao Daily and a PhD dissertation. 5. These are quoted from a talk given by Professor Sun Yifeng, Lingnan (Ling Nam) University, Hong Kong, on ‘Cultural Diaspora and Foreignizing Translation’, at the University of Macau, Macao SAR, PRC, on 3 March 2004. 6. This poem has been selected for inclusion in some prestigious anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Poetry (4th edn) edited by M. Ferguson et al., New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996. 7. This inventory was included in my paper entitled Rediscovering Ezra Pound’s Cathay: Sources and Routes, which was presented at the 19th Ezra Pound International Conference on ‘Ezra Pound and the 20th Century’, at Universite de Paris-Sorbonne, France, 4
8 July 2001.

References A Complete Collection of Li Bai’s Poems (1996) Shanghai: Shanghai Classical Books Co, Bao Fang (ed.). A Comprehensive Dictionary of Names in Roman-Chinese (1993) Comp. by Editorial board of Proper Names and Translation Service of the Xinhua News Agency. Beijing: China’s Translation & Publishing Corporation. Alexander, M. (1979) The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound. London: Faber & Faber. Eliot, T.S. (ed.) (1954) Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. London: Faber & Faber. Ferguson, M. et al. (eds) (1996) The Norton Anthology of Poetry. New York/London: W.W. Norton & Co. Ford, M.F. (1915) From China to Cathay. Outlook XXXV, 800
801. Gallup, D. (1969) A Bibliography of Ezra Pound. London: Faber & Faber. Homeberger, E. (ed.) (1972) Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage. London: Faber & Faber. Ieong, S.L. (2000) Source Researches and Translation Studies: The Case of Ezra Pound’s Cathay. Macao Daily 28 May. Ieong, S.L. (2001) Rediscovering Ezra Pound’s Cathay: Source research and a comparative study. Ph.D. dissertation, Sun Yat-sen University.

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Ieong, S.L. (2002) Rediscovering Ezra Pound’s Cathay: Sources and Routes. Bilingual Review 16 (3), 25
36. Kenner, Hugh (1971) The Pound Era. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Liu, Jingzhi (ed.) (1990) [Essays on Translation]. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co. Nida, E. and C.R. Taber (1969) The Theory and Practice of Translation. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Pound, Ezra (1970) Translations. London: Faber & Faber. Qian, Zhaoming (1995) Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams. Durham/London: Duke University Press. ) (1990) [Linshu’s translations]. In the author’s Qian, Zhongshu ( [A Collection of Seven Decors]. Hong Kong: Comos Books Co. Qi Zhui Ji Quan Tangshi [A Complete Collection of Tang Poetry] (1986) Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House. Ren, J.Y. (2004) Prospects for the Study of Sinology in the 21st Century. Macao Daily 25 January. Shen, Deqian (ed.) (1998) Gu Shi Yuan [Origins of Ancient Poetry]. Changsha: Yuelu Publishing House. (2004) Cultural Diaspora and Foreignizing Translation. Seminar Sun, Yifeng paper presented at the University of Macau, 3 March. Yip, Wai-lim (1969) Ezra Pound’s Cathay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Yuan, Xingpei (1997) Zhongguo Gudian Shige de Yixiang [Imagery in Classical Chinese Poetry]. Beijing: Beijing University Press. Zhang, Ziqing (1997) Ershi Shiji Meiguo Shige Shi [A History of 20th Century American Poetry]. Jilin: Jilin Education Press. (1985) Yuan You de Shishen [Poetry Gods in Far Away Zhao, Yiheng Places]. Chengdu: Sichuan People’s Publishing House. Zhongguo Fanyi Cidian [A Companion for Chinese Translators] (1997) Wuhan: Hubei Education Press. Zhu, Hui (1996) Zhong Ying Bijiao Shiyi [Comparative Studies on the Art of Chinese and English Poetry]. Chengdu: Sichuan University Press.

Websites and Pound Discussion Lists: http://www.seaple.icc.ne.jp [email protected] http://fusehime.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp [email protected]

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Appendix A Full Inventory of Cathay Poems and their Chinese Source Texts 1.

Song of the Bowmen of Shu

Shijing Xiaoya Caiwei Picking Fern-shoots in Book of Songs 2.

The Beautiful Toilet

Gushi shi jiu shou (2) Qingqing hepan cao Green and Green is the Grass by the River in 19 Ancient Poems 3.

The River Song

Li Bai, Tang Dynasty

(1) Jiangshang yin (2) Chi cong Yichun yuan feng zhao fu longchi liu se chu qing ting xin ying bai zhuan ge Song on the River and Ordered by the Emperor to Write a Poem in Praise of His Beautiful Garden 4.

The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter6 Li Bai, Tang Dynasty

Chang gan xing (1) Song of the River-Merchant’s Young Wife 5.

Poem by the Bridge at Ten-shin Li Bai, Tang Dynasty

Gufeng (18) Tianjin san yue shi The Third Moon in Tianjin 6.

The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance

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Appendix (Continued) Li Bai, Tang Dynasty

Yujie yuan Sorrows on the Jade Stairs 7.

Lament of the Frontier Guard Li Bai, Tang Dynasty

Gufeng (14) Huguan rao fengsha Sandstorms round the Frontier Huguan by Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai 8.

Exile’s Letter Li Bai, Tang Dynasty

Yi jiuyou ji Qiao Junyuan canjun Reminiscing about an Old Friend, General Qiao Junyuan 9.

(A title poem for ‘Four Poems of Departure’) Wang Wei, Tang Dynasty

Weicheng qu. Song Yuan-er shi Anxi Farewell to Yuan the Second on His Mission to Anxi 10.

Separation on the River Kiang Li Bai, Tang Dynasty

Huanghe lou song Meng Haoran zhi Guangling Seeing Off Meng Haoran Leaving for Guangling at the Yellow Crane Tower 11.

Taking Leave of a Friend Li Bai, Tang Dynasty

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122 Appendix (Continued) Song youren Seeing Off a Friend 12.

Leave-taking Near Shoku Li Bai, Tang Dynasty

Song youren ru Shu Seeing Off a Friend Leaving Shu for a Foreign Land 13.

The City of Choan Li Bai, Tang Dynasty

Deng Jinling Fenghuang tai Climbing Up the Phoenix Hll at Jinling 14.

South-folk in Cold Country Li Bai, Tang Dynasty

Gufeng: Daima bu si Yue The Horse of Dai Has No Love for the Cold of Yue 15.

Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku Guo Pu, Jin Dynasty

Youxian shi (3) Feicui xi liantiao Sennin Poem: Kingfishes Playing Amidst Orchids 16.

Ballad of the Mulberry Road Anonymous, Han Dynasty

Mo shang sang Yuefe Song of the Han Dynasty: The Mulberry

Cooperative Translation Models Appendix (Continued) 17.

Old Idea of Choan by Rosoriu Lu Zhaolin, Tang Dynasty

Changan gu yi Ancient Images of the City Changan 18.

To-Em-Mei’s ‘The Unmoving Cloud’ Tao Yuanming, Jin Dynasty

Tingyun The Clouds Stop7

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Chapter 7

Ideology and Literary Translation: A Brief Discussion on Liang Qi-chao’s Translation Practice LUO XUANMIN

Introduction The theory and practice of translation form an integral part of the achievements of the great figure Liang Qichao (1873
1929). This reflects the modern Chinese pioneer’s commitment to democracy and freedom in the hard-won process of learning from the West. While there are many general studies of his accomplishments, research on his approach to translation is less than adequate. I recently conducted a survey of websites dealing with Liang Qichao and found that from 1994 to 2003 there were 464 papers about his journalism, language and the like, but only four, less than 1%, about his views on translation1. Although some papers discussing the ‘new novel’ touch on those views, they understandably emphasize his reforms vis-a`-vis the novel as such. Even the quotations of sentences from Preface of Translating Political Novels and On Translation are inaccurate. It is apparent that translation has been marginalized, relegated to a simple tool or supplement to literature, rather than being recognized as the ‘sharp sword’ of transforming society and culture that Liang Qichao considered it to be. Liang Qichao’s translation practice is pointedly utilitarian and ideological, and we shall discuss it from these perspectives.

Political Novels as Ideological Subjects for Translation Even before a translator decides how to translate, he must decide what to translate, and one may analyze and assess his outlook on the world on the basis of the decisions he makes. Liang represents a central figure in translation in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, but his views can still be inspirational for Chinese scholars in that his stance is 124

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firm and clear: China can be reformed and educated, its people guided by means of translation, the translation of relevant works. Liang Qichao was an advocate and activist of the late Qing movement of literature. He called for a ‘revolution in poetry’, a ‘revolution in prose’, a ‘revolution in fiction’ and a ‘revolution in drama’, all of which have had an extraordinarily positive impact on modern Chinese literature. Moreover, they all served his theory of ‘neo-democraticism’. But, he was particularly taken with political novels, claiming that ‘even a wise king or benevolent prime minister could do no better work than political novels’ (Liang, 2001a: 548). As he noted in the paper On the Relationship Between the Novel and the Masses, ‘In order to arouse the people of a country, one must first arouse their novels. . .. Why? Because the novel possesses an unimaginable power to influence people’ (Liang, 1989b: 758)2. Liang stressed the distinction between the ‘arousing novel’ and ‘arousing the conscience of people’ because he disdained the classical novels of China, which he felt not only failed to educate, but also served as bad models of ‘adultery and theft’. In order to change novels, and ultimately to change people, he advocated the Japanese, European and American practice of transforming a society through the influence of the novel. However, Western fiction could not be introduced into China without translation. After the failure of the Reformation ( ) Movement in 1898, Liang realized that it was up to literature in translation to serve as the ‘sharp sword’ of culture. He, therefore, turned his attention to literature and started translating foreign fiction that would introduce new thoughts from the West. His purpose was to criticize the policy of the imperial government and analyze the backward reality of China. He was convinced that people’s inner essence could not be improved and political reform could not be achieved without translation. Liang made no overall statement of his views on translating political fiction, but he once commented on the insufficient amount of translation being sponsored by the government. In his paper Rules of the Datong Translation Publisher, he treated translation as an urgent task: We should unite our comrades and establish a publishing company with Eastern Studies as its primary concern and Western Studies as its secondary concern. Politics is the first priority, art the second. Exemplary comments in earlier translated books or recent books by foreigners should be excerpted and printed as a series of booklets at low cost or published as separate pamphlets and circulated widely. (Liang, 2001b: 147) Clearly, Liang intended to promote political reform through translation.

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During that period, certain of Liang’s contemporaries, such as Kang Youwei and Yan Fu, also stood up for Western novels. Kang (1992: 1213) noted in Record of Japanese Bibliographies: ‘There are only a few educated Chinese and fewer literary men who know the classics and history well. Thus it is high time to translate and read foreign works. In the West people appreciate novels’. In 1897, Yan and Xia Zengyou also wrote: The novel is so fashionable, powerful and popular in society that its importance has surpassed that of the classics or history. Hence the spirit and customs of our people cannot go unaffected by the novel . . . Everyone here knows this and has heard that the Europeans, Americans and Japanese often used novels as vehicles for reform. But Liang Qichao was the only one who emphasized the importance of political novels; indeed, he proselytized them fervently, regarding their translation and publication as an urgent task: ‘There are three major things to do today. The first is to select good books for translation; the second is to establish universal rules for translation; the third is to hire capable translators’ (Liang, 1984: 11
12). And the ‘good books for translation’ were exclusively Western political novels, novels that aimed to educate people. He deeply sensed the strain of humanism in modern Chinese thought and was determined to turn it into a theory of literature that could be applied to the practice of literary translation. Wu Yanren ) he was publishing at writes in a paper about the Fiction Monthly ( the time: ‘I am very impressed by the comments Liang raised in ‘‘The Relationship Between the Novel and the Masses’’ regarding the reform of fiction. Within a few years many newly written or newly translated novels will appear in our country’ (Yang, 2002: 24).

New Terminology and the Use of Japanese Texts Two important papers about translation came out in 1896
1897: The Preface to the Translation of Evolution and Ethics by Yan Fu and On Translation of Books by Liang Qichao. The former, though brief, raised three fundamental principles of translation
faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance
that guided translation theory in China for almost a century. The latter was much longer and not only asserted the necessity of translating Western books, but set forth strategies and methods. Xu Zhixiao considers it ‘the first article advocating and discussing translation in the modern spectrum of literature and contributing to both Chinese translation theory and the relation between Chinese and foreign literatures’ (Xu, 2000: 137).

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As far as translation is concerned, however, the latter had much less influence than the former. Why? First, Yan Fu did a great deal of translation, and since both his Chinese and his English were excellent, translators tended to follow his model and study his style. Second, the traditional Chinese theory of translation places more emphasis on the artistic features of the source text. Yan’s three principles of translation met this demand. On the other hand, Liang preferred to look at translation from a cultural viewpoint and analyze it as an outcome of culture. Studying translation as a cultural process lends itself to criticizing political reality, not to establishing artistic criteria. Consequently, Liang’s paper attracted less and less attention as the political reality changed. However, scholars have ignored the basic fact that Liang’s influence on Chinese society of the time might have excelled Yan’s. A good example of this influence is his initiative of translating Western scholarly works through Japanese. Liang Qichao held that: Japan and China used the same language at the time Japanese adopted Chinese characters. Later the Japanese dialect emerged ), katagana ( ), etc. but mixed with Chinese, using hiragana ( which accounts for sixty or seventy percent of its usage. After the 1860 Meiji Reform Japan was determined to learn from the West and translated many foreign books in many fields. It also published a number of new works by its own people. If we start to learn Japanese immediately and translate them into Chinese, we shall reap great benefits. There are several reason why we can learn Japanese quickly. First, it is succinct; second, its pronunciation resembles that of Chinese and has no difficult or rough sounds; third, its grammar is quite loose and free; fourth, its objects and names are similar to those in Chinese; fifth, it is sixty or seventy percent Chinese. Of course, we Chinese must still study it to gain competency, but by memorizing a number of words, one can master Japanese in half a year. It is much easier to learn than Western languages. It takes much less effort and yields greater results. (Liang, 1989b: 20) Japanese proved particularly useful for translating terminology. Yan Fu once lamented: ‘It may take me months to clarify and translate a single phrase’, where ‘phrase’ refers to a technical term. For example, he ’, which is something like translated ‘economy’ into Chinese as ‘ ’, which accountancy in English, and ‘freedom’ into Chinese as ‘ means the boundary of rights between a group and an individual. Although Liang Qichao did not deny the benefits of learning from the West by translating Western scholarly works directly from the languages

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in question, he maintained it was more advantageous to translate from the Japanese because more Chinese at the time knew Japanese than European languages. The need for immediate reform and ‘awakening the people’ through translation was too great. Post-reform Japan, which was becoming a rival as strong as the West, had translated nearly all the important books of the West into Japanese. Translating from the Japanese was advantageous in another way as well: Japanese books were easier to come by. Zhang Zhidong (2002) was aware of these advantages before Liang Qichao. He noted that: almost all kinds of Western scholastic works have been translated into Japanese, and if we translate them from Japanese we can save time. Learning a foreign language is highly time-consuming, and while mastery of a language will open many doors, it is valid only for the young. Translation from Japanese into Chinese can be productive at a lower cost and is good for middle-aged scholars. The benefit from studying Japanese and translating Japanese books into Chinese is immediate. Just as learning from a foreign teacher is not as good as learning a foreign language, so translating books from a Western language is not as good as translating their Japanese versions. (Zhang, 2002: 101) Yan Fu (1986) did not agree. In a letter to Cao Dianqiu, he wrote: Translating the original text entails its own inaccuracies, and if the source text is a translated text, the result will be even further from the original meaning and cause confusion. I therefore avoid it. I find it strange that in recent years more and more people are trying to learn from Japan. It is becoming a trend. Some even declare that translating from Japanese versions is better than translating from Western originals. As a result, most of the advertising pillars in Chinese ports are copies of Japanese advertising pillars. Saying that studying the West by learning from the Japanese is better than nothing makes sense, but thinking it is better than learning directly from the West is as nonsensical as thinking that the picture of a beautiful woman is better than the beautiful woman herself. Nothing could be more ridiculous. (Yan, 1984: 567) Wang Guowei’s (1997) notion of ‘introducing new words and terminology’ is quite fitting. Wang opposed the acceptance of foreign terms merely for the sake of fashion, but also the blanket rejection of relevant terms from foreign languages. ‘Since the country is eager to make progress in academic fields, creating new terms is necessary,

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especially in a time of isolation. When Western knowledge enters China through translation, our language shows its inadequacy and new terms are urgently needed’ (Wang, 1997: 83). Wang took a historical and objective perspective on new terminology: In recent years, Western scholarship is gradually entering China, and Japan is rising between China and the West. Chinese characters mixed with foreign words made or translated by Japanese are invading our literature. A modish person abuses them, a narrowminded person rejects them, but they are both wrong. For everyday texts we need no new terms, but scholarly and scientific disciplines require their invention. The Japanese learnt from West before us and their terminologies are both well established and Chinese in form. Though we did not invent them, they suit our language, so why not take them as our own? (Wang, 1997: 83) According to Wang, the introduction of new words reflects progress. If one is arrogant and rejects reform, then ancient words from ancient times will do, but if one desires development, they will not. In the end, most terms translated by the Japanese were formally accepted into Chinese. In a University of Waseda doctoral dissertation, Li Yunbo analyzes all the words borrowed from Japanese in the modern period. In particular, he has made a comparative study of 161 terms appearing in Liang Qichao’s A Complete Collection of Essays in the Yinbing Chamber and concluded: 141 entered Chinese because Liang started using them, terms like ‘‘ ’’ (brandy), ‘‘ ’’ (pyramids), ‘‘ ’’ (Siberia), ‘‘ ’’ ’’ (Italy), ‘‘ ’’ (law), ‘‘ ’’ (sovereignty), (European Powers), ‘‘ ‘‘ ’’ (citizen), ‘‘ ’’ (the earth), etc. Only one term of philosophy, (philosophy), had been introduced before him. In addition, among his 141 terms there are 52 belonging to the category of ancient Chinese, redefined with the new meanings used after the Meiji Reform. (Li, 2003: 37
40) Under Liang Qichao’s influence there was a spate of translations of Japanese books on Western topics at the turn of the century. Some were by Japanese authors, but many were Western works translated by the Japanese. Chen Pingyuan quotes Yang Shouchun in Records of Observation on Translation as saying that ‘a total of 533 books on foreign studies had been translated into Chinese during the period of the Guangxu Emperor (1875
1908). 321 of them were from Japanese translations of foreign books and account for more than 60 percent’ (Chen, 1989: 60). Li Zehou (1979: 423
424) calls the period from 1898 to 1903 ‘a golden era for Liang

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Qichao as an educator of the bourgeoisie, when he had the greatest influence on the masses and the greatest impact on society’.

Rewriting and Manipulation in Literary Translation Liang Qichao tended to alter or abridge the texts he translated so as to increase the likelihood of their influencing societal reform. As Chen Pingyuan (1989: 60) points out, there was no market for ‘metaphrase’ during the late Qing; instead, the translation of novels in China leaned toward ‘paraphrase’3. Liang’s belief in an English doctrine of ‘translating the meaning rather than the word’ was very much favored by his contemporaries. ‘Translating the meaning’ figures in four ways: (1) use Chinese names and places in a translated text for convenience of memorization. For instance, Liang replaced English names with Chinese names like Wu’an ), Erdun ( ), Moke ( ) and Dufan ( ), in his translation of The ( ). (2) Change the style of a novel, cut the Fifteen Young Heroes ( number of chapters and rewrite chapter titles. Liang noted (1989: 5) in his preface to The Fifteen Young Heroes: ‘In the translation [into Japanese] by Morida ( ), there are fifteen chapters; in my translation every installment in the newspaper is counted as a chapter, so the total number of chapters is double that of the original text. According to the mode of Chinese fiction, however, I feel that such an alteration improves the original text’. (3) Remove ‘unimportant’ sentences or paragraphs that are inappropriate to the Chinese context. (4) Add passages the translator deems necessary. These practices were accepted because of the relatively low qualifications of the translators or to a system in which one person provided a rough oral translation and the other a final written version (as in the case of the famous translator Lin Shu). Liang Qichao’s basic method was one of imitation. This point is critical to our discussion, because it marks him as an ideology-oriented rather than artistry-oriented translator. True, Liang’s Japanese was not particularly strong at the time, but even if it had been, he would not have adopted a metaphrasal approach. His method of translation more resembles rewriting. Liang appreciated literature from the perspective of a thinker or politician; and he placed the moral value of foreign literature above its artistic features. He was concerned with its function as propaganda and hoped to use it to form a new kind of ideology, a new kind of nationality. His translation was more a matter of ‘waking the world’ than of ‘loyalty to the original’.

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When Liang Qichao published his translation of the Japanese political novel (Encounter of a Beauty) in the newspaper (The China Discussion) together with (Stories of the Nation) translated by Zhou Hongye, it had an enormous impact on the reader and inspired a sense of nationality. Later, he translated the French novel (Fifteen Youngsters), publishing it in a newspaper under the title (Fifteen Young Heroes). In the epilogue to the first chapter of the book, he wrote: The English translator writes in his preface to the book that he replaces it with an English style, translating meaning rather than individual words but confident of having retained the full intention of the original. The Japanese translator Morida writes in his preface that he uses a Japanese style and also retains the original meaning. ), and Now I have translated it with a Chinese style of narration ( like them I am confident of its accuracy. I have been vindicated by readers and reviewers after the book was published. Its meaning does not stray from the original. (Liang, 1989a: 5) Liang’s translation was based on a translated text, which itself had been significantly altered. It is doubtful that he did in fact retain the meaning of the original. As he said in his introduction to the fourteenth chapter, I intended to translate the novel in the style of (Outlaws of the Marsh) or (The Dream of the Red Chamber) using the modern colloquial language. It proved very difficult. But when I used the classical language, I could make more progress with less effort. With the old method I could translate only one thousand words an hour; with the new method I translate two thousand and five hundred words in the same amount of time. For efficiency’s sake I use two different languages for translation. I realize this does not suit the novel’s style, but I hope to correct it by the time it is published. (Liang, 1989a: 20) In spite of these faults, the novel had a vital impact on society at the time and underwent many reprints.

The Newspaper as a Medium for Literary Translation As we have seen, Liang Qichao’s accomplishments rest on his selection of political novels as a main subject, his retranslation of Japanese works from Western works, and his manipulation of the

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original through revision or rewriting. However, another point is also critical: his tactic of taking full advantage of newspapers as a mean of cultural dissemination. His translations were published in serial form in the newspaper he owned, and accompanied by his own comments. He maintained that the function of a newspaper was ‘removing obstacles for communication, serving as a kind of aid to the ear (for listening), the eye (for seeing), the throat (for singing), and the tongue (for speaking)’ (Liang, 2001c: 92). One of the goals of Liang’s newspaper, (The New Citizen), was to ‘publish the best of western knowledge’, and a column devoted to reviews contained the following: ‘All new books, in the original or in translation, are provided with their new titles and critiques to ensure readability’ (Lai, 1968: 40
41). Worried about the newspaper’s financial resources, Liang borrowed five thousand dollars from the conservative Translation Bureau. The newspaper had originally belonged to the Bureau, but later came under the management of Liang and Fang Dishpan. Within a year, it had a subscription of nine thousand, then fourteen thousand; in other words, it had become highly influential. The same held for Fiction Monthly, in which ‘writing is tantamount to translating. . .’ (Lai, 1968: 42
43). Newspaper language was greatly enhanced by translation. ‘Liang’s new style not only bridges the gap between the classical and the colloquial, the single line and the couplet, the essay and rhymed prose; his article is so heroic in spirit and elegant in rhetoric that it also bridges the gap between Chinese and foreign languages, adopting a large number of foreign words to introduce Western theories and expressing the fresh color of a new era’ (Lai, 1968: 42
43). During the late Qing Dynasty, many reformers stressed the signifi(National News) cance of translation. In October 1897, Yan Fu’s published a lengthy article entitled ‘The Influence of Publishing Novels on Our Newspaper’, which includes the following: ‘When Europe, America and Japan began to open up to the outside world, they often sought help from the novel. They painstakingly gathered novels from many sources and printed and circulated them, translating the popular ones and reprinting the rare ones . . ., their sole purpose being to educate’ (Zhang, 2000). Jiang Qinghai (1997: 144) writes: For reformers like Lin Zexu or Wei Yuan translation was always a means of studying the West. Kang Yonwei and Liang Qichao laid special stress on it, and some of their critical enterprises like founding newspapers or establishing the Translation Bureau centred on it. They even recommended translating foreign novels to learn from the

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West, an idea set forth initially not in ‘‘A Preface to Translating the Political Novel’’ but in the article ‘‘The Influence of Publishing Novels on Our Newspaper’’ two years earlier in (National News). But it was Liang Qichao who actually put the idea into practice. Liang turned his theory into reality, publishing an entire series of Western political novels in the newspaper and thereby greatly accelerating the dissemination of foreign culture. He also started a column of translations from foreign newspapers in (Current Duties News). In the end, translation occupied nearly half the newspaper’s space (Jiang, 1997: 144). He himself translated novels like the Encounter of Beauty, Doomsday, A Ghost in the Russian Palace and so on, publishing them in (The China Discussion), (The prestigious newspapers like the (Recent Fiction). As the latter was the only literary New Citizen) and newspaper in China at the time, it played an invaluable role in introducing translations of foreign literature.

Conclusion Liang Qichao’s theory of translation should be distinguished from his practice. The former is aesthetic and academic, the latter goal-oriented, the goal being to ‘awaken’ the Chinese people. The former, which is based on a profound study of Buddhism and contains a number of insights on the nature, methods and functions of translation, can still serve as a useful manual; the latter, having evolved against the background of day-to-day politics, bears the distinct mark of its era and its pragmatic roots. Thus, when we evaluate Liang’s theory, we should focus on its artistic features, and when we evaluate his practice, we should examine it from the point of view of such non-artistic factors as culture, ideology and society. Notes 1. The survey was made on the website of CNKI in 2003. 2. All passages in Chinese have been translated into English by the author in order to make for easier reading. 3. Metaphrase was used in the sense of Dryden (1680/1989), who proposed three kind of translation: metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation. Metaphrase means a word for word and sentence for sentence translation. Paraphrase is something like hermeneutic translation.

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References Chen, Pingyuan (1989) A History of Chinese Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Vol. 1). Beijing: Beijing University Press. Dryden, John (1680/1989) Metaphrase, paraphrase and imitation. In A. Chesterman (ed.) Readings in Translation Theory (pp. 7
12). Helsinki: Oy Finn Lectura Ab (in English). Jiang, Yinghao (1997) Liang Qichao and new vs. old literature in China. Journal of Nankai University 3 (pp. 22
30). Kang, Youwei (1992) Record of Japanese bibliography. In A Complete Collection of Kang Youwei (Vol. 3) (pp. 581
1219). Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Press. Lai, Guanglin (1968) Liang Qichao and Modern Newspapers. Taipei: Commercial Press. Liang, Qichao (1984) On translation of books. In A Collection of Theses of Studies on Translation, compiled by the Editorial Board of ‘A Bulletin of Translation’ of the Association of Chinese Translators (pp. 8
20). Beijing: Foreign Languages Teaching and Research Press. Liang, Qichao (1989a) Fifteen young heroes. In A Collection of Articles in the Yinbing Room (Vol. 94) (pp. 1
46). Liang, Qichao (1989b) The future of a new China. In An Edited Collection of Articles in the Yinbing Room (Vol. 2) (pp. 1
57). Beijing: Zhonghua Book Publishing Company. Liang, Qichao (2001a) On arousing people. In An Edited Collection of Articles in the Yinbing Room (Vol. 1) (pp. 547
650). Kunming: Yunnan Education Press. Liang, Qichao (2001b) On the relationship between the novel and the masses. In An Edited Collection of Articles in the Yinbing Room (Vol. 1) (pp. 758
760). Kunming: Yunnan Education Press. Liang, Qichao (2001c) Rules of the Datong translation publisher. In An Edited Collection of Articles in the Yinbing Room (Vol. 1) (pp. 147
148). Kunming: Yunnan Education Press. Li, Yunbo (2003) Japanese words borrowed by Chinese in modern times. Journal of Tianjin Institute of Foreign Studies 4 (pp. 37
40). Li, Zehou (1979) A History of Modern Chinese Thought. Beijing: People’s Press. Wang, Guowei (1997) On the application of new terminology. In A Collection of Wang Guowei: Good, Truthful, Substantial (pp. 40
43). Shanghai: Shanghai Far East Press. Yan, Fu (1898) Translator’s Preface to Evolution and Ethics of Nature (pp. 565
575). Beijing: Zhonghua Book Publishing Company. Yan, Fu (1986) Letters to Cao Dianqiu. In A Collection of Fan Fu’s Works (Vol. 3) (pp. 1321
1323). Beijing: Zhonghua Book Publishing Company. Yan, Fu and Xia, Zengyou (1897) Notes on publishing novels. In Guowen Newspaper, Tianjin. Yang, Hongqi (2002) On Liang Qichao’s revolution in the novel and modern literary theory. Journal of Guizhou Normal University 2 (pp. 95
98). Xu, Zhixiao (2000) The Modern Relation Between Chinese and Foreign Literatures. Shanghai: Huadong Normal University Press. Zhang, Yongfang (2000) A product of the interaction between China and the West and mass communication: On Liang Qichao’s writing of essays. Journal of Social Science 6 (pp. 143
145). Zhang, Zhidong (2002) The fifth part on broad translation. In An Article on Study (pp. 100
104). Beijing: Huaxia Press.

Chapter 8

Translating Modernity Towards Translating China SHAOBO XIE

Introduction The past two decades or so have witnessed an explosion of academic publications investigating transcultural translation, which has radically revised the parameters of translation studies; however, there does not seem to have been sufficient critical attention focused on the relationship of translation and modernity. Any careful research on modernity and translation will reveal an intriguing, enabling relationship between the two apparently unrelated areas of study. It is well arguable that modernity originates with translation and translation begins with a desire for modernity. Translation is always motivated by a certain desire in the translator or the translating community for the modern, the auraed new, or for what is admired of a cultural Other. Translation betrays a genuine curious interest in the Other and it begins when a nation or a language community finds itself lacking or insufficient in some important aspect. Modernity is ‘a concept of Otherness’ (Jameson, 2002: 211) and it always comes from elsewhere, whether the trope of modernity refers to a projected or lived system of ideas, assumptions and social practices that rejuvenates a nation or community, making a rupture in its history of thought and social life or to the Western condition of social life defined by rationalization, industrialization, differentiation and democratization. According to the second reference, it seems that only nonWestern peoples are anxious to seek the norm of modernity from another place, whereas the first reference equally binds all nations to the experience of turning to another time-space for the source of modernity. The Renaissance in Europe famously drew upon ancient Greece for fresh ideas and energies. Peter the Great of Russia in the 18th century turned to his Western neighbors for methods of reinventing Russia into a modern power. Japan, which is in many ways legitimately regarded as an integral part of the West today, imported Western political and economic 135

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philosophy and technology in the time of Meiji, thus reincarnating itself as an emerging modern power. All these efforts of seeking the seeds of modernity from other parts of the world not only corroborate the argument that modernity comes from elsewhere, but define modernity as beginning with translation, for all the above-mentioned projects of modernity hugely involved translation. In a different context, Martin Heidegger explicitly asserts that a certain modernity in Europe began with translation, that is, with the Roman appropriation and transformation of Greek names, thoughts and experiences (Jameson, 2002: 59). Translation is necessitated by the presence of a certain admired or envied Other and there would have been no modernity or no desire for it in Europe or Japan had there been no efforts to translate the Other in the first place. In much the same way, modernity in China began and evolved with translation as well. Actually, the Chinese discourse of modernity was not only inaugurated, but also enabled by translation. In other words, translation is not merely auxiliary and instrumental to the shaping of Chinese modernity, but an essential part of it. China has been regarded as a superpower over the past few decades for various reasons: as the erstwhile leader of the so-called Third World or as the largest population in the world. Perhaps it is no exaggeration to regard China as a superpower in translation, which has committed itself to translating works, ideas, customs, institutions and genres of writing from abroad more than most other countries have in the world. This can be easily verified by visits to libraries and bookstores in China today. For many disciplines and subjects, there are far more translated works than works written in Chinese by native writers. There are millions of university and college students, junior and senior academics and professionals who prefer to read translations. One of my friends in Beijing, who himself is a brilliant writer, a creative thinker and a good translator, recently intimated to me that he read nothing but translations. Over the past ), Lin hundred years, almost all the master writers, such as Yan Fu ( ), Hu Shi ( ), Chen Duxiu ( ), Lu Xun ( ), Ba Jin ( ), Shu ( Qu Qiubai ( ) and Zhou Zuoren ( ), to name just a few, whose work has contributed immensely to shaping the blueprint and itinerary of Chinese modernity and without whose work Chinese modernity would be totally unimaginable, have been zealously involved in translating Western works and thoughts into Chinese. While comparing Chinese culture/civilization to a never-ending river, internationally ) notes: renowned Sanskrit literature scholar Ji Xianlin (

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The river of Chinese civilization has kept alternating between rising and falling, but it has never dried up, because there was always fresh water flowing into it. It has over history been joined by fresh water many times, but the two largest inflows were from India and the West, both of which owed their success to translation. It is translation that has preserved the perpetual youth of Chinese civilization. Translation is hugely useful! (Quoted in Sun, 1999: 160; my translation) It is in this context of translation that I will stage my discussion on the relationship of translation and Chinese modernity, and it is in this context that I venture to argue that translation not only enables and shapes Chinese modernity, but also contributes to bringing about a Chinese version of modernity that will call for efforts to translate China. First, for the Chinese to translate Western concepts and theories into their own culture is also to translate the Chinese desires and anxieties in borrowed Western terms. Second, translation always alters, displaces and hybridizes the translated and what emerges at the other end of the process of translating modernity will be an alternative modernity, which at once cancels and preserves the Western and the indigenous, the self and the Other, the modern and the premodern at the same time. Last but not least, when in the future the concept of modernity calls for its own backward translations into its place of origin from its landed homes, the world will be translating China into other cultures for the modernity it champions. In Translation as Transformation and Resignification, I will argue that, because there are no semantic or conceptual equivalents between different cultures, translation always means transformation and resignification. Translation and the Genesis of Chinese Modernity examines translation as the inaugurator of Chinese modernity. Humanism and Postmodernism: Displacement and Hybridization of the Translated discusses how translation displaces self and Other at the same time and how it expands and hybridizes what is translated. The Chinese translations of ‘humanism’ and ‘postmodernism’ resymbolized as ‘re) and ‘houxiandaizhuyi’ ( ), for example, nwenzhuyi’ ( best illustrate how these Western concepts were disembedded from their original socio-historical milieu and re-embedded in China to accommodate Chinese needs and designate Chinese socio-historical reality, hence the Chinese versions of humanism and postmodernism. Conclusion: Translating Modernity Towards Translating China draws the conclusion that to translate modernity in China is to translate China in a double sense. For what emerges from the processes of appropriative translation in modern China is a form of modernity different from and alternative to

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the hegemonic modernity of the West, and, therefore, in performatively translating Western ideas and values, the Chinese constantly engage in self-transformation and self-reinvention, returning to the world a Chinese version of modernity for translation.

Translation as Transformation and Resignification Translation, whether linguistic or cultural, textual or theoretical, is not a mere passive or neutral transmission or transferring of images, meanings, ideas, narratives, feelings and/or scenes, from one language into another or from one geographical space to another. Translation transforms the translated and the translator at the same time, for at the other end of the translation process neither remains the same that has been known and both become displaced, enriched and revised. Translation is transformative because, as Saussurean structuralist linguistics have taught us, there is no necessary correspondence between sign and referent, or between word and meaning. The sign is arbitrary or culturally determined and the relationship of signifier and signified is a mere matter of convention. There is no pre-existing system of concepts or ideas prior to language, and different cultures cut up the phenomenal world in different ways. If concepts are culture-specific and if there is no universal language, then it goes without saying that there are no identical terms or concepts between any two languages. There is no Chinese equivalent, for example, for the English concept of ‘gentleman’, nor is ) there a corresponding English term for what was known as ‘wenren’ ( in ancient China or in classical Chinese literature. It would be a flabbergasting mistake to translate North American ‘cowboy’ into ) or vice versa. One of the most commonly Chinese ‘mutong’ ( encountered words in philosophy and literary theory is the German word ‘Dasein’, a word Heidegger uses in his Being and Time, which he defines as the Being of an entity ‘which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being’ (Heidegger, 1962: 27). This word appears untranslated in the English translation of the text with Heidegger’s approval documented in his introduction to the English translation. In much the same way, many Greek and Latin words and phrases were left untranslated by Heidegger himself. Due to the often perceived impossibility of translation, translation becomes a performative act of transformation and resignification. Therefore, to translate thoughts and experiences from one cultural context into another is not only to resymbolize them from the source language to the receptor language, but also to displace them, revise them and hybridize them.

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Because of the original’s untranslatability, the process of translation is, as Paul de Man insightfully points out in Conclusion: Walter Benjamin’s The Task of the Translator, ‘an afterlife, because translation also reveals the death of the original’ (de Man 1986: 85). de Man compares the translator to the critic or theorist in terms of their relation to the text they deal with, for neither imitates or reproduces the original, but shows in the original a mobility, an instability.1 Literal translation, translation word by word, is the death of meaning. In a sense, all translation, the translation of poetry in particular, is literal translation, for it can only transfer what the words say at the surface level and cannot convey their connotations and underpinnings inextricably embedded in their native culture. This is why translation does and has to performatively displace and transform the original. Anyone who has read English translations of poems by Li Shangyin ), Qin Shaoyou ( ) or Su Dongpo ( ), or of Cao Xueqin’s ( ( ) epochal novel, or Chinese translations of Shelly’s poems or Dickens’s novels, will readily agree that what emerges from translation is an afterlife, a transfigured life of the original, for most of the emotional and cultural subtleties and nuanced meanings, and most of the nostalgic memories, enchanted associations and platial auras, are irretrievably lost. ) poem ( ) ‘Yumeiren’ ( ): One exemplary case can be Li Yu’s (

The English translation reads as follows: Spring flowers, autumn moon: when to end? The past: how much is known? Upon the tower last night, east winds blow again. Native country: unbearable to look back amidst the bright moon. Carved railings, jade inlays should still be there, Only faces are changed. How much sorrow do you have? The way a spring river eastward flows. (Yip, 1976: 421) ) will be Anyone well versed in classical Chinese poetry ( surprised how drastically hemorrhaged the English version of Li Yu’s poem is of its original graceful rhythm, suggestive imagery, intertextual allusiveness and aesthetic pleasure, so much so that the two versions simply have nothing to do with each other. In order to frame the

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discussion within the question of impossibility of translation from one language/culture to another, I choose not to attend to what is unique to the poetic mode of writing, such as meter, rhyme and euphony; instead I will focus on words, imagery and their connotative associations. For what is unique to poetry not only cannot be transferred from one language into another, but become lost even when it is translated or paraphrased in the same language. Words and images are different: they can be transferred in same-language translation or paraphrased without losing much, but not between languages or cultures. Let’s first ’ for example. ‘ ’ take a look at ‘ becomes a mere literal pointer without any poetic associations when it metamorphoses into ‘east winds’, whereas in Chinese it recalls first of all the famous couplet from Tang Dynasty poet Li Shangyin’s ‘Untitled’: ’ (‘Partings are as difficult as reunions, ‘ flowers are withering because east winds are weak’; my paraphrase), which portrays a similar mood of sorrow and a similar desolate situation of helplessness. It also recalls Southern Song Dynasty poet Lu ) ‘ ’ (‘East winds are unfriendly, happy days are You’s ( short’; my paraphrase). As for ‘ ’ ‘ ’ means more than ‘native country’ or, as encountered in another translation, ‘home’.2 It means in this context the poet-emperor’s lost kingdom or imperial ’ is grievously hemorrhaged into ‘the bright moon’, sovereignty. ‘ which in the English literary tradition and English-speaking culture by no means calls to mind the sedimented sentiments surrounding the word or the poetic contexts it has traveled through.3 An informed reader of Chinese poetry quickly sees the intertext between Li Yu’s ‘ ’ and Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu’s ( ) ‘ ’, and Li Bai’s ( ) ’. ‘ ’ also reminds one of Cao Cao’s ( ) ‘ ‘ ’ from his poem ‘ ’, in which Cao Cao says that a great man in the evening of his life still harbors towering aspirations. In all these poems, moonlight is associated either with thoughts of home or with apprehensions of belatedness. These associations coincide well with the sentiments and thoughts residing or implied in Li Yu’s poem, for here what moonlight triggers are also thoughts of home - his own imperial court - and a sense of belatedness. ’ is supposed to signify more than ‘carved railings, jade inlays’; ‘ it is a metonymy that in Chinese culture refers to imperial palaces or magnificent mansions - here again Li Yu is thinking of his lost empire. ‘ ’ does not mean only ‘faces’ or, as given in another translation, ‘faces of youth’; rather, it is a synecdoche standing for beautiful women ’, in and in this context imperial concubines and maids. ‘

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much the same way, becomes an indifferent, irrelevant reification when turned into ‘The way a spring river eastward flows’. For in Chinese culture so much meaning and implication have evolved around the image of river waters and it is part of Chinese literary convention to compare the endless flow of waters and the endless thoughts of sorrow. It is only natural that Li Yu may have had in mind Li Bai’s universally ’ (‘Stopping the course of cited couplet ‘ water with a broadsword only makes its current run swifter; drinking oneself out of sorrow only leads to more sorrows’; my paraphrase). What one detects between Li Yu’s and Li Bai’s poems is the shared image of ceaseless sorrow and the shared comparison of sorrow and river waters. All these are, unfortunately, irretrievably lost in the English translation. No readers, Chinese or English, can go back to the original images, connotations and sentiments as encountered in Li Yu’s poem. The point I am trying to make here, however, is not that Wai-lim Yip’s translation is poor or that someone else can do more justice to the original, but that translation is impossible. The untranslatability not only allows translation to displace, transform and ‘violate’ the original, but entitles translation to the status of a performative act of resignification. The Derridean double-bind of ‘translation is impossible; translation is necessary’ legitimizes the resignification, which displaces, alters and hybridizes the original. The untranslatable ‘Sovereign Other’, be it a phrase, concept or a text, by a Hegelian sleight of hand, turns into the translator’s sovereignty.4 The same happens when it comes to translating a theory or an intellectual movement. In Traveling Theory, Edward Said remarks that to translate a theory, a concept or a literary genre from one culture into another is always to disembed it from its original social and cultural circumstances, to wrest it from its original use, and to enrich and expand its meaning or content. There are four stages common to the way theory travels. First, there is a point of origin, ‘a set of initial circumstances in which ideas came into birth’; second, there is ‘a distance transversed, a passage through the pressure of various contexts’, which brings the theory or idea into ‘a new prominence’; third, there is ‘a set of conditions’ that makes possible its introduction or toleration; fourth, the translated idea is appropriated and positioned in a new time and place (Said, 1983: 226
227). The example of traveling theory Said cites in his essay is Lukacs’s theory as appropriated by Goldmann and Goldmann’s theory as appropriated by Raymond Williams. The problem of translation as broached here involves more than has been discussed in the ongoing debate on the domesticating and foreignizing strategies

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of translation.5 In his recent essay on transcultural translation, Luo ) (2003) succinctly outlines the historical context of the Xuanmin ( debate on assimilation and alienation in translational practices, insightfully pointing out the discursive potential of foreignization, which usefully contributes to the forming of a new national literature or a new national identity. However, what seems to have been neglected here is the inhuman element or materiality of language and culture, what is beyond human control of linguistic or cultural works taken up by translators. There is always some irreducible otherness recalcitrant to the translator’s will, as structuralist and poststructuralist literary and cultural theories have taught us over the past few decades. If that is true, neither can the will to assimilate the foreign completely assimilate the foreign, nor can the will to foreignize retain the foreign unchanged or undisplaced. Given that different cultures divide up the phenomenal world differently, there are no semantic or conceptual equivalents between cultures. Therefore, assimilation by no means cancels all the foreignness; foreignization nonetheless displaces the foreign from its original socio-cultural context, thus altering or diminishing its foreignness beyond the translator’s control.

Translation and the Genesis of Chinese Modernity China had no desire for modernity till the mid-19th century and never thought itself unmodern till its disgraceful confrontation with a technologically much more powerful West, whose weaponry, machinery, parliamentary and participatory democracy, and Enlightenment ideals of liberty, democracy and individualism all struck the Chinese as modern and superior. Imperial China had never felt any real need to learn from Others. True, from Han Dynasty to Song Dynasty there were numerous Buddhist scripts translated from Sanskrit into Chinese and imported Buddhism brought the Chinese a certain modernity in religiousphilosophical thought, filling up a felt gap in Chinese culture. However, as Andre´ Lefevere has pointed out, Buddhism, since it did not pose a threat to the fabric of Chinese society, was readily assimilated on Chinese terms as evidenced by ‘the manner of translating’ and by ‘the fact that Taoist concepts were used in translations to acculturate Buddhist concepts’ (Lefevere, 1998: 13). One major sin or virtue of Chinese translational practices is that they often revised or altered the original text or meaning at will, using ready-to-hand Chinese terms or concepts to transfer foreign concepts or terms, because the Chinese were possessed by a center mentality and did not tolerate the thought of being

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substantially affected by foreign cultures. In this sense, translation was indeed one effective strategy devised for dealing with the Other (Levefere, 1998: 13) in that it enabled the Chinese to keep the imported new in an assigned safe place, divesting them of any potential danger to the Central Kingdom under the sun. The center mentality of Chinese society was at the core of the well-maintained Chinese empire, but Sinocentrism or China-centrism, unlike modern Eurocentrism, did not go with what is called expansionism. Expansionism is a defining feature of European modernity, which maintains that man makes his own history and that the Cartesian cogito is the source of knowledge, encouraging the expansion of the self in terms of knowledge, freedom, autonomy and in terms of the ability and means to control and transform the Other. European expansionism finds best expression in Europe’s scientific and technological advancement and rapid industrialization, as well as in its colonialist expansions all over the world in the 19th century. However, it never occurred to the Chinese to expand the individual self’s sovereignty and freedom or the collective self’s to conquer and control the Other, be it nature or other peoples. Before Columbus claimed to discover America in 1492, China in the time of the Ming Dynasty was already able to build huge ships, but instead of sending fleets and people out to other parts of the world for territorial expansion, imperial China burned hundreds of ocean ships already built, which were the major technological means of imperialist maneuvers at that time. What the Chinese were centrally concerned with at that time was how to perpetuate the inherited imperial system with its Confucianist fabric of socio-economic life and political institutions. For, with its 4000-year-old civilized history and its sophisticated cultural and social institutions and its highly efficient bureaucracy, why did China need to learn from others? Things changed drastically in the mid-19th century. Thereafter, the Chinese suffered humiliation after humiliation that came with the Sino-Japanese war, the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the Eight-Power Allied Forces’ invasion of Beijing, Boxer Indemnity and a series of ceded territory treaties. Apprehensively aware of the other world systems threatening the safety and sovereignty of imperial China, the Chinese , Westerners) seriously, starting to voraciously began to take the xiyi ( read about and introduce the West. Among the pioneers was Lin Zexu 1785
1850), who was not only actively involved in initiating and ( organizing several translational projects, but did actual translation as well. The first systematic introduction of Western countries’ geography, Encyclopedia of Geography, was translated by Liang Jinde into Sizhouzhi , Geography of Four Continents) on Lin’s request. Later, this volume (

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along with other works were combined into Haiguotuzhi ( , Illustrated Geography Overseas), Volume 83 of which, entitled Westerners on Chinese Affairs (including Thelwall’s ‘Pamphlet Against Opium’ and J.F. Davis’s ‘Chinese People’), was translated by Lin himself.6 After Lin, ), Kang Youwei ( ), scholars and intellectuals such as Yan Fu ( Liang Qichao ( ) and Zhang Taiyan ( ), whose work triggered an anguished desire in their countrymen for modernity, were all preeminent writers and translators. The most influential Western works were perhaps those translated by Yan Fu, among which were T. Henry Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations and Montesqueu’s The Spirit of Law. As for literary modernity, Lin Shu’s translations of European literature were too important to be neglected. All his life, Lin, in collaboration with others, translated into classical Chinese 160 fictional works from European literature and the best received were Alexander Dumas’s La dame aux camellias, H.B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, The Old Curiosity Shop and Nicholas Nickleby, Watt Scott’s Ivanhoe, Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.7 Later on, leaders of the New Culture Movement around May Fourth 1919, such as Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren, all made great contributions to translating Western works and ideas into Chinese with a view to constructing a Chinese modernity. Roughly speaking, there were two different attitudes towards Western modernity and its translation into China from the mid-19th century to May Fourth, which respectively championed two different kinds of translational theory and strategy. Most of the pre-May Fourth intellectuals were still of the mind that what China needed to import from the West were basically technology and economics, and that Chinese culture must remain the substance of the projected reformed Chinese society. This group in translational practices did not aim at accuracy, but at turning out a familiar Chinese version of the translated thought or experience, and in , classical Chinese), they rendering the source text into wenyanwen ( translated feelings, experiences and ideas encountered in the source text into handy terms and expressions readily available in Chinese instead of creating new terms to transfer the unfamiliar Western concepts and thoughts into Chinese culture. The second group believed that a rejuvenated China had to undergo a radical change and cast away its traditional culture and social custom. And for them, the first thing that was necessary to trigger the birth of a New China was a totally new or renewed language, linguistically, culturally and discursively. Therefore,

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in their textual practices, both critical and translational, they started using , vernacular Chinese). They had to what was called baihuawen ( create new terms out of Chinese characters to convey Western thoughts and themes. Translated into vernacular Chinese accessible to the average man and woman, the influx of new thoughts and values exerted an unprecedented impact on Chinese society. It is this group of writerstranslators that set in motion the project of Chinese modernity. And it is this group of intellectuals who advocated a wholesale repudiation of traditional Chinese culture. In Travels in the New Continent, Liang Qichao said, ‘our standard of civilization falls a long way below [the Americans’]. When I compare our nation with theirs, I can only sigh and weep’ (quoted in Chen, 1979: 78). In Hu Shi’s view, China then was in every way inferior to its Western Others, inferior not only technologically and materially but ‘politically, socially [and] morally’. The Chinese ‘must give up all hope and study others. Speaking frankly, we must not be afraid of imitating’ (quoted in Chen, 1979: 89). Echoing Hu’s Eurocentric remarks was Wen ), who wrote, ‘Compare Chinese and Western styles? What do Yiduo ( you have to compare Western styles with? Are you good enough for any comparison?’ (quoted in Chen, 1979: 89). Lu Xun’s much cited ‘grabbism’ outdid all the above-mentioned comparisons of China and the West in blunt frankness. What informs the May Fourth intellectuals and their translational principles and projects are the anxieties to mould China into a modern power that is strong enough to rival the West. It is their writings and translations that laid the groundwork for Chinese modernity. Between 4 May 1919 and the 1940s, all kinds of Western modernism were introduced to China through translation: Darwinism, Schopenhauer, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Proust, Marlame, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Goethe, Marx, Freud, Sartre, Woolfe, Eliot, Wilde, Bergerson, etc. These were the decades that marked an epochal rupture in the history of Chinese thought and culture. Hundreds of Western terms and concepts, such as kexue , science), minzhu ( , democracy), geming ( , revolution), ziyou ( , enlightenment) and renwenzhuyi ( , ( , freedom), qimeng ( humanism) flowed into China and took root in the fabric of Chinese social life as well as Chinese language and thought.

Humanism and Postmodernism: Displacement and Hybridization of the Translated There is no doubt that Chinese modernity began and developed with translating the modern West. But there is no reason to take Chinese modernity as a replica of its Western forerunner, because translation is

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not transmission but transformation, whether it is linguistic translation or cultural translation. Just as the more conservative intellectuals’ assimilative translation ushered into China a world of foreign values, thoughts and perspectives, despite its insistence on ‘domesticating’ foreign ideas and concepts, so the more radical intellectuals’ ‘foreignizing’ translation against its intended goal ended up sinicizing or indigenizing imported ideas and theories. One prominent theme of ), which is Chinese modernity over the past hundred years is Qimeng ( the Chinese translation of ‘Enlightenment’. But between Chinese ‘Qimeng’ and English ‘Enlightenment’, there occurs a pronounced shift or change in meaning. Enlightenment for Europeans is a historical process, but it has been translated into ‘a spectrum of different themes’ in China, due to completely dissimilar interpretations of the European historical movement, which are motivated or necessitated by varying ) has pointed out, historical situations (Wang, 2003: 3). As Wang Hui ( the concept of Qimeng among the May Fourth intellectuals had for its content a relentless break with traditions; during the Second World War, Qimeng came to metamorphose into a triple movement of patriotism in China; then in post-Mao China the theme of Qimeng pointed to a critique of orthodox Marxism. A more interesting case of translation as transformation is the rendition of ‘humanism’ into Chinese, where it ), rendaozhuyi ( ) or has been translated into renwenzhuyi ( renbenzhuyi ( ), meaning, respectively, in English ‘humanism’, ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘anthropocentrism’. Anyone informed of The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of ‘humanism’ will see that its reifications in Chinese not only shrink its rich connotations, but alter its culture-embedded meaning. ‘Humanism’, according to OED, refers to (1) belief in the mere humanity of Christ; (2) the character or quality of being human; devotion to human interests; (3) a system of thought or action that is concerned with merely human interest (as distinguished from divine); (4) devotion to those studies that promote human culture, especially the study of the Roman and Greek classics (1971: 1345). A rediscovery and re-evaluation of classical civilization, humanism in Renaissance Europe designated an intellectual and social movement, which, emerging as a reaction against scholasticism, the dominant intellectual school of the Middle Ages, championed a system of beliefs about humanity that excludes God from reality and makes man the judge of his own world. At the very core of European humanism is the attempt to place man at the center of the universe, upholding humanity as the measure of all things. This sketchy delineation of the historical context and the discursive thrust of European humanism is already evidence

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enough for its untranslatability and its necessary hybridization when transferred into the Chinese cultural context. For renwenzhuyi in China did not emerge as a break with the social, intellectual and ideological climate instituted in the Middle Ages, and China had not been exposed to centuries of subjection of the spirit to rigid, tyrannical Christian institutions. Religion was never a substantial part of Chinese social life, and the oppressive social hierarchy and institutions in China were imposed upon its people, not in the name of God, but in the name of Man. In other words, China was primarily a secular society from the beginning. It is only obvious that there is not even a near-synonym in ), the key word for the Chinese for European ‘humanism’. ‘Renwen’ ( Chinese translation of ‘humanism’, originally came from the Section of ): ‘ ’ Ben ( ) in the Book of Changes ( (To observe heavenly culture in order to realize the changes of times; to observe human culture in order to educate the whole world).8 Renwen in ancient China had nothing to do with an idea of modernity, whereas the humanities in Europe bespoke a yearning for modernity via turning to ancient Greek and Roman classics. True, because the term renwen comes from ancient classics in China, as Wang Hui has noted, the Chinese New Culture intellectuals seem to have shared a common position with the Renaissance intellectuals of Europe in resorting to ancient classics and culture for an emancipated, rejuvenated present. However, this apparent similarity, on closer examination, only betrays a fundamental difference in that European Renaissance scholars turned to ancient Greek and Roman classics, the beginnings of Western art and thought, for literary and intellectual resources to mould a modern society, whereas the Chinese intellectuals looked to the West instead of their ancient past for spiritual, intellectual and social resources in building modernity, though they had to borrow characters from the ancient past to translate modern Western terms. The genuine parallel between Chinese renwenzhuyi and Western humanism is, however, structural in kind and it consists in that each used a distant Other, an elsewhere, as the norm for modernity and each had to fight with a repressive and oppressive tradition of thought and representation. This structural similarity is the reason for the Chinese embrace of humanism. In mobilizing social energy to emancipate humanity from the secular forms of tyranny, the Chinese version of humanism certainly displaces the Western concept from its original socio-historical content, but, at the same time, it expands and enriches the concept. Another intriguing instance of transformative translation of the West-embedded concept or theory into China is houxiandaizhuyi

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( , postmodernism), which did not become known to the Chinese till the 1980s. Postmodernism emerges in the post-Second World War West as a cultural and intellectual movement against the principles and assumptions that have underpinned Western thought and social life for the past few centuries. Postmodernism, as such, relentlessly decenters the sign, the subject, the world and history, and the assumptions it questions and challenges, ‘which constitute the core of what we call modernism, include a belief in the inevitability of progress in all areas of human endeavor, and in the power of reason, as well as a commitment to originality in both thought and artistic expression’ (Sim, 2001: 339). Postmodernism, as such, is expressed in developments in arts and culture, in new forms of social and economic organization, and in various designations of poststructuralist theory, which can be respectively distinguished by postmodernism, postmodernity and the postmodern (Conner, 1996: 428). In its philosophical and aesthetical aspects, postmodernism is best articulated by the Lyotardean war on totality and on grand narratives and by the cultural logic of late capitalism, which Fredric Jameson defines in terms of pastiche, depthlessness of meaning, eclipsed history, the loss of critical distance and the split sign. When postmodernism, as such, began to be translated into China in the 1980s, it only pointed to its groundlessness in China as many critics have discussed. If postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, it is certainly a catachresis to apply the term to a 1980s China when capitalist modernity was something that remained to be realized in China. Instead of striving beyond the modern, the Chinese decidedly considered themselves not modern enough. One has to agree that during most of the 1980s, postmodernism in China ‘as a discourse preceded postmodernism as a reality, and that the intense collective experience of change, similar to that of the West on a macro-historical scale, did not give rise to the Euro-American feeling that ‘‘the modern was now over’’’.9 It is no surprise that at a historical moment when the Chinese were anxious to break out of the forbidden space of Maoist ideology and social life, postmodernism was groundlessly translated in China into postsocialist and postrevolutionary energies, sensibilities, narratives, images and theoretical formulations. To say that postmodernism was groundless in China in the mid1980s and the early 1990s is not, however, to preclude certain significant psychical or psychological parallels it bore with the West. Due to their different traumatic historical experiences, both China and the West were disillusioned with an exhausted utopian modernity project; both were impatient to turn from public to private, from depth to surface,

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from spirit to body, and from rational to irrational. What the Chinese were looking for, in the course of translating postmodernism, was an expedited entry into the modern in Lyotard’s sense of the word. They incorporated postmodernism, among other things, to forge a new modernity, a capitalist modernity, instead of a postmodernity. When Lyotard said that the postmodern is ‘undoubtedly part of the modern’, and that ‘postmodernism is not modernism at its end, but in a nascent state’, for ‘a work can become modern only if it is first postmodern’ (Lyotard, 1992: 12, 13), he can be interpreted as saying that to be modern is always to be post a certain achieved modernity or modernism be it realism, impressionism or modernism, or a Thackeray, Ce´sanne or T.S. Eliot. This idea implicitly gives rise to a concept or reality of modernity or postmodernity that is relational or relative in kind, that is, a nation’s or a community’s modernity or postmodernity may not be a merging into a spatial Other, but a break with its own past. This well accounts for the explosion of postmodern thoughts and representations in literature, visual and plastic art, and cinema in the mid-1980s and 1990s China, which can certainly be theorized in terms borrowed from Western postmodernism, but which more often than not point to a postmodernism displaced from its Western social context. Indeed, when the Chinese translated the concept of postmodernism into Chinese language and culture, they consciously and unconsciously displaced and expanded it from its Western social, historical and intellectual content, and in this way China returns to the world an enriched concept and practice of postmodernism. The translation of a concept or theory from a source culture into a receptor culture always hybridizes it, and as such the translation always points to a future moment when the concept or theory, when called upon to revise its identity, will gather new or added meanings from its various reifications abroad. And this will be the moment when the concept will, as previously mentioned, call for its own backward translations to its place of origin from its landed homes. Translation as transformation or hybridization as we have discussed so far certainly has much to do with translators’ anxieties, preferences and decisions, but more importantly, it is to a large extent effected by something that is beyond translators’ conscious will or decision. In his 2004 essay on ) ‘Modernity, Nation and Literary Theory’, cultural critic Nan Fan ( names that almost unnamable something as ‘indigenous or Chinese experience’.10 Despite the looseness of his vocabulary, Nan Fan’s insightful remarks on translation as transformation or hybridization

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are extremely useful to the present discussion and are worth quoting at length: The unique structure of Chinese experience alone can resist the forceful reproduction of Western literary theory, undermining the established relationship of knowledge and power, destroying the illusion of universalism. That is why the encounter between Chinese experience and Western literary theory often results in a dramatic transformation of both. Through various appropriations, extensions, misreadings or distortions, Western literary theory undergoes alteration or hybridization, thus losing its consistency and authority... Indigenous Chinese experience is of course perpetually in the process of (re)construction, rejecting any essentialist interpretation. The unique lived experience continuously challenges theory, forces theory to renew itself. Chinese experience is the inexhaustible content of Chinese literature as well as the basis for theorizing the relationship of literature and modernity. This is a necessary component of Chinese version of modernity. If modernity is plural in number, then the Chinese version of modernity must provide a modernity project other than the familiar Western one. (Nan Fan, 2004: 145; my translation) There are three key points on translation and hybridized modernity derivable from the quoted passage. First, indigenous Chinese experience does not admit any Western theory translated into China unchanged; instead, it resists and transforms it. Second, the resistant and transformative indigenous experience always remains to be changed. Third, translation-inaugurated and translation-mediated Chinese modernity has to be differentiated and displaced from hegemonic Western modernity. If literary or cultural translation changes or displaces self and Other at the same time due to a perpetually changing indigenous experience of history, then translation-mediated interactions among different cultures and nations indeed result in what Roland Robertson (1992: 109) terms the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism. This two-fold process happens simultaneously throughout the history of international or global contact. The implications of Robertson’s theory of globalization are not only that globalization is neither a centripetal process of homogenization nor a centrifugal process of fragmentation, but that translation itself can prevent cultural homogenization from happening.

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Conclusion: Translating Modernity Towards Translating China Ever since their first contact with the modern West, the Chinese have always aspired to an alternative modernity, though the doctrine of whole-sale Westernization has never lacked a strong following (e.g. at the turn of the 19th century and in the 1980s and 1990s). The idea of alternative modernity appeals to its various advocates in China at different historical moments. As Fengzhen Wang and I have put elsewhere, the Chinese have always been ambivalent toward the kind of modernity championed by the West. Such ambivalence finds expression ‘in a mind split between opening up a path of modernity on its own and following the Western itinerary of modernity, or a compromise inbetween’ (Xie & Wang, 2002: xvii). This is especially true today when China is being fully globalized into the world’s economic system. On the one hand, the Chinese are vehemently embracing and importing everything Western, from free-market, consumerism, urban space, spatial language, cinematography, food, theory and advertising, to fashion, sex, body politics, violence, commodity fetishism, and commodified education and publication. On the other hand, they want to be modernized technologically and economically without losing their cultural heritage and sovereignty. One of the most engaging ongoing debates on globalization in China today concerns the survival and identity of local or indigenous cultures under the impact of global flows of capital, information, ideology, values and technology. There is a general anxiety behind the debate, the fear that the ongoing processes of globalization are threatening to level or erase various historically formed local cultures. Each side in this particular debate seems to be apprehensive of the perceived prospects of disappearing indigenous or local cultures. However, critics seem to have neglected or underestimated performativetransformative translational agency. If transformative translation alters the self and the Other or the translated and the translator at the same time as has been evidenced by the past 4000 years of global interaction and exchange, then what emerges at the end of the translational process is always a hybridized product that at once cancels and preserves both self and Other and allows neither full sovereignty.11 This fact in no way changes the lived reality that West-centered capitalism with its consumerist culture-ideology is penetrating every corner of the world, but it opens new ways of imagining alternative routes of modernity as well as theorizing and mobilizing counter-hegemonic agency in opposition to global capitalism.

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Historically, modernity is a European reality, and if we talk about modernity in terms of European or Western modernity’s parameters, then there seems to be no modernity in non-Western countries, for in historicity those places and Western countries have little in common. Therefore, the modernity developed elsewhere other than the West owes its existence to its relation both to a simultaneous spatial Other and to a temporal Other, which is the non-Western countries’ own premodern anteriority. When Lyotard collapses the rigid opposition between the modern and the postmodern, he is not only talking about the dialectic of modernity and postmodernity, but is disengaging the modern and the postmodern from their European or Western context, making the ideas of modernity and postmodernity applicable elsewhere. For, when the modern is and has to be postmodern, it means, as previously discussed, that the postmodern in question is actually a ‘modern’ post an existing or hegemonic ‘modern’. Lyotard’s theorizing on modernity can be taken as an effort to emancipate the concept of modernity into a relational one. The relationality of modernity frees non-Westerners from the domination of the Western discourse of modernity, alleviating them of their political anxieties and their fears of being reduced to the status of subalternity. It is well arguable that there are three phases to Chinese modernity, which can be respectively designated as the cultural, the political and the economic. At its every phase, Chinese modernity derives its criteria from translating Western theories of modernity. With the May Fourth Cultural Revolution intellectuals, the model of cultural modernity, synchretic and ambivalent in nature, comes from translating works by Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Spencer, Weber, Smith, Dewey, Hugo, Shelley, Stendhal, Joyce, Babbitt, Lenin, Tugnev, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Emerson, etc. One certainly has to acknowledge the ‘naivite and confusion’ of those intellectuals12 and the unfulfilled nature of their modernity project judged in terms of Western modernity, but the fact is, after their anguished desires and efforts to translate Western ideas and works, there did emerge a new literature, a new culture, a new social formation, a new educational system and new ways of thinking and representation, which laid the foundation of Chinese literary, intellectual, scientific and cultural modernity, although much of the country at that time remained unaffected by the modern. The second phase of Chinese modernity openly declared itself as counter or alternative to hegemonic Western modernity, translating Marxism into a socialist theory whose terms were indigenized and made accessible to the average worker and peasant. The Maoist project of modernity ‘evokes the memories of a time when the world’s largest population with its utopian political

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imagination lived outside the bounds of tradition and outside the hegemonic stream of Western modernity’ (Xie, 2003: 365). It experimented with what had been unimagined and unforeseen in the history of Western modernity in attempting to remake humanity, rebelling ‘against all that is normative’ (Habermas, 1990: 344). The third, economic phase of Chinese modernity is postsocialist in kind. This is the moment when the Chinese, displaced from their traditional ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes, are undergoing a nationwide geographical, social, cultural and institutional deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The desire of capital is penetrating into every Chinese social and political space and, confronted with the perceived superiority of the West in technology, economy and ideology, the Chinese unhesitantly cast off the Maoist politico-cultural legacy for the eternal now of consumerist jouissance and fulfillment. They choose pragmatism over idealism, development over stability, efficiency over equality, space over place, cosmos over hearth, and freedom over security.13 China is now becoming fully globalized and the world is becoming fully Chinaaffected. All kinds of ideas, modernist and postmodernist alike, are imported through translation
one can hardly name a single Western concept or theory, modern or postmodern, which has not been translated into Chinese. However, no Western idea or theory comes to China unmodified, untransformed or unhybridized. This is the way Chinese modernity takes its shape. A non-synchronic gathering of temporalities and a differential collectivity from the West, Chinese modernity asserts its presence in the world as an alternative modernity. This should be no surprise in a world alive with projects of alternative modernity. For, as John Gray (1998: 195) writes in False Dawn, ‘There are many modernities and as many ways of failing to be modern’. Whether Chinese modernity is a camouflaged socialism or a masquerading capitalism, it will be an alternative to the currently hegemonic form of capitalism, as long as linguistic, conceptual and cultural translation performatively transforms the self and the Other at the same time, resignifying and hybridizing the imported or globalized concepts, habits, fashions, customs or practices for various reasons previously discussed. Economic analysts have remarked that China will develop faster than many other areas in the world, and that in a few decades it will, in important aspects, catch up with and even overtake the USA, the universally acknowledged paragon of modernity. Such optimistic predictions are based not merely on statistical figures so far published in and outside of China, but on the fact that the Chinese regard their modernity as far from complete and that their anxieties and

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energies for modernity are far from being exhausted. They will for decades remain euphorically enthusiastic about modernity or capitalism and they have huge untired space for expansion in their mind and in their market. If China will, like Japan, return an alternative model of modernity to the world after its century-long endeavor to modernize itself, translation will be a key factor. Translating modernity sounds impossible, like translating poetry, but it is what has happened in real history. Translation brought China and the West into contact; it transformatively imports Western ideas and values; it constantly rejuvenates China’s national energy and identity. Translation makes an imagined future increasingly nearer and more tangible when the translated West will be admiringly translating the non-West. It is in this sense that translating modernity in China is towards and even synonymous with translating China because every translational project displaces China from where it was, and because at the other end of the translational process the world will be translating China, not for its ancient glories, but for the glories of its modernity. Notes 1. See Paul de Man (1986: 82). 2. See Stephen Owen (1996: 568), whose translation reads as follows: Flowers in spring, moonlight in fall, when will they ever end? How much can we know of what is past and gone? Upstairs in my room last night the east wind came again; I cannot bear to turn and look home in the light of the moon Its carved railings and marble pavements are, I’m sure, still there* All that changes is the flush on the face of youth. Tell me then of sorrow* how much can there be? It is exactly like: a whole river of springtime waters flowing off to the east. 3. According to Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), every word of a national language has undergone innumerable contexts, and therefore language, heterglot in nature, constitutes a space for socio-ideological negotiation among individuals, classes and communities. 4. J. Hillis Miller used the term ‘Sovereign Other’ at the Conference on ‘Legacies of Theory’, at the University of Alberta, 28
30 October 2004. 5. For the debate, see Luo Xuanmin (2003). 6. See Ma Zuyi (1998: 328
330). 7. See Guo Yanli (1998: 278). 8. See Wang Hui (2003: 4). 9. See Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang (2000: 8). 10. The ‘indigenous or native Chinese experience’ discussed in Nan Fan’s (2004) essay can be taken as made up of lived and historically embedded traditions,

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lifestyles, cultural and intellectual habits, social customs and modes of feeling and expression. 11. For examples of hybridization, see Wang Ning (2002: 38). 12. See Shaobo Xie (2003: 13). 13. According to I-fu Tuan (1996: 1
2), space and cosmos are associated with freedom whereas place and home give the peasantry a sense of security. Moving into the city, into the space of freedom, one gives up one’s placerooted customs, habits and ways of life. See I-fu Tuan (1996) for more discussion of space and place and their differentiation and significance in Chinese culture.

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24). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. ). In Long Yusheng ( ) (ed.) Tang-Song Mingjia Li, Yu (1978) Yumeiren ( Cixuan ( ) [A Selection of Poetry from Tang and Song Dynasties] (p. 45). Shanghai: Shanghai Classical Literature Press. Luo, Xuanmin (2003) A transcultural perspective on foreignizing and domesticating translation. In Liu Qing-chih (ed.) New Focuses in Translation (pp. 64
67). Hong Kong: Commercial Press. Lyotard, Jean Franc¸ois (1992) The Postmodern Explained. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ) Ma, Zuyi (1998) Zhongguo fanyi jianshi: wusi yiqian bufen ( [A Brief History of Translation in China Before May Fourth]. Beijing: China Translation Company.

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Nan, Fan (2004) Modernity, nation and literary theory. Literary Commentary 1, 136
146. Owen, Stephen (1996) An Anthology of Chinese Literature. New York: Norton. Robertson, Roland (1992) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Said, Edward (1983) Traveling theory. In the author’s The Text, the Critic, and the World (pp. 226
247). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sim, Stuart (ed.) (2001) The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Sun, Zhili (1999) Culture and translation. Translation Quarterly 13/14, 159
169. Tuan, I-fu (1996) Cosmos and Hearth: A Cosmopolite’s Viewpoint. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Tuan, I-fu (1997) Space and Place: A Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Wang, Hui (2003) Humanism as the Theme of Chinese Modernity. On WWW at http://www.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol5/hui.html. Wang, Ning (2002) Modernity, translated literature, and the reconstruction of modern Chinese literary classics. Studies on Literature and Arts 6, 32
40. Xie, Shaobo (1997) Rethinking the problem of postcolonialism. New Literary History 28 (1), 7
19. Xie, Shaobo (2003) Remapping the history of Chinese modernity. In Wang Fengzhen (ed.) Lectures by Famous Teachers (pp. 353
382). Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Press. Xie, Shaobo and Wang, Fengzhen (2002) Introduction. In Fengzhen Wang and Shaobo Xie (eds) Dialogues on Cultural Studies: Interviews with Contemporary Critics (pp. vii
xviii). Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Yip, Wai-lim (1976) Chinese Poetry: Major Modes and Genres. Berkeley, CA: University of California.

Chapter 9

‘Authenticity’ and Foreignizing Translation YIFENG SUN

Introduction There is no denying that foreignization is directly related to authenticity, which in turn represents the cultural identity of the translated text. Undoubtedly, domesticating translation eases intercultural communication, but the purpose of reading translations is mainly to learn what is unfamiliar embedded in the foreign rather than to reinforce what is already familiar largely as a result of domestication. There is no compelling reason, in principle, for the target language reader to be insulated from the true intercultural experience of dialogical intimacy with the foreign. Also, authenticating the cultural identity of the source text is of paramount importance if, in the final analysis, the reader expects to read translation rather than some dubious form of rewriting. Translational identity derives from cultural identity, whose dissolution or nullification would render intercultural communication nearly meaningless. To lend authenticity to translation, a degree of foreignization is called for, and this chapter will explore, in this connection, how ‘authentic’ referencing signifiers, as vividly manifest in linguistic and cultural features of the original text, determines and enforces what constitutes authenticity and (in)accurate translation.

Difference and Authenticity Despite deconstructionist denial of one origin or a stable source text, authenticity in translation still remains a primary concern. And Derrida’s later shifts in his emphasis from diffe´rance to what is excluded and effaced have led to changes in perception of what gets translated. It would, therefore, be overly simplistic to think that deconstruction simply entails endless free play of signifiers. With regard to translational authenticity, difference must be recognized, without which there cannot be any 157

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meaningful discussion of authenticity. The seemingly intractable nature of authenticity makes it extremely difficult to define it. Nevertheless, the concept of authenticity can prove useful because it helps to encapsulate essence whose importance should not be underestimated. Also, authenticity is of particular relevance to translation studies on the grounds that translation derives from the source text, no matter how unstable the latter may appear in the first place. Apparently, translation cannot be an exact copy of the original, although it may be an authentic replica of it. How can authenticity be expected if purity or exactitude is not possible in translation? To be sure, there should be some criteria for assessing the authenticity of translation because authenticating a translated text seems to be somehow necessary, even though it tends to be approached with a bit of skepticism. Many related questions may be raised. For instance, who is responsible for translating? Under what circumstances is a text translated? What is the role played by the translator and his/her patron prior to and during the process of translation? To what extent is the translation restricted or controlled by the prevalent ideology or poetics of the time? Is the text accurately or adequately translated? To what extent is the translated text corrupted, maimed, manipulated or appropriated? And for what purpose(s) or motivated by what? Does the translator’s own interpretation or understanding, in the name of translation, find its way into the translated text while evidence suggests that there are elements in translation that are not inherent in the original? Can partially translated or transmitted meaning, for whatever reason, be regarded as authentic? Ernst-August Gutt (2000: 132) revealingly describes translation as ‘interlingual parallel to direct quotation’, and as in any type of quotation, authenticity in relation to its proper context is essential to an accurate understanding. But it is not always possible to guarantee ‘direct’ quotation in translation, which shows the argument’s inherent lack of empirical underpinnings. Sometimes, even if direct quotation is provided, these could still pose some problems. Things can be quoted out of context, and indeed translation betokens that since the transferred meaning is shown in a somewhat different context, both linguistic and cultural, and, further, possibly historical as well, the meaning of the quotation in question is subject to change. Since a translated text derives from the original, it cannot possibly be absolutely authentic. Only in relative terms, will it be meaningful to discuss the issue of translational authenticity. Authenticity tends to be associated with the traditional view of translation, yet it is still relevant to translation today. However nonchalant the target language reader appears to be about the authenticity of the translated text, he/she is obviously not content if such a text

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is found to be distinctly unreliable to such an extent that even the very identity of the translation is under threat. To authenticate a translation in relation to its source is almost tantamount to warranting the claim that a translation is a genuine translation. Given that a translation cannot possibly be the same as the original, the question is how to determine that a translation is related exactly to the source text that is prepared originally. The existence of a translation is both dependent on and independent of its source. There is a double difference: a translation is quintessentially different from its source, and at the same time in many ways it is different from any other texts composed in the target language. Moreover, authenticity is also something of an illusion of meanings with the power of self-regulation and independence of the totality they represent in translation. The natural quality previously associated with the source language is often presumed in the target language as if the translated text were originally composed in that language. But if this is indeed the case, it must be essentially rather different from its source, thus bordering on inauthenticity. In this sense, it is like transparency as defined by Lawrence Venuti: the so-called authenticity is occasioned by substantial domestication. On the other hand, ontological authenticity may be epitomized in an exact word-forword duplication of the original; but in view of the inevitable lack of naturalness associated with the language of translation, it constitutes inauthentic writing, in which the foreign linguistic properties are so obviously alien that the norms of acceptability in the target language system show signs that they may be violated. And to a large extent, communicative accuracy depends on the naturalness of expression in translation so as to enable the target language reader to understand what gets translated. An exegetically accurate translation, usually regarded as maximally authentic, is often not highly communicative, for the reason that its language is unnatural, and the result is that it may not be understood properly by the target language reader. The knotty problem is that what is accurately reinscribed tends to be unnatural, and thus is often inaccurately perceived in spite of its authentic nature. Therefore, for a translation to be suitably perceived, it has to be at once accurate and natural
an obvious conclusion on empirical grounds. In many cases, lexical, synchronous and grammatical differences in translation are not tolerated, and as a result, transgressive reinscription is necessary, for doing translation cannot be an unmediated activity. With reference to Bible translation, Gutt (2000: 186) probes into the natural desire, on the part of the translator, to enable the target language reader to see ‘the authentic meaning of the original, unaffected by the

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translator’s own interpretation effort’. However, even if one can presuppose that there is such a thing as ‘the authentic meaning of the original’ in the first place, it may not be easy to establish it. Further, without the ‘interpretation effort’ of the translator, meaning may not automatically emerge from the text. The real issue seems to be more complex than is assumed here by Gutt. But he is clearly aware of the difficulties in cognitive reality, as he further explains: Since the differences in cognitive environment between the source language and the receptor language audiences are generally great, these two objectives are bound to clash. If the translator wants to make the translation clear to the receptors in their particular cognitive environment, he will need to bring out explicitly (parts of) his own interpretation or that of some other authority; if the translator aims at authenticity and hence is concerned to the keep the influence of his own interpretation on the translated text to a minimum, his translation will in many cases prove difficult to the receptor language audience. (Gutt, 2000: 186
187) However, to make a text more explicit in translation than the original risks simplifying a complex reality of meaning. The primary function of interpretation is to turn implicit awareness into explicit knowledge by making explicit previously implicit assumptions about linguistic and cultural differences. In other words, explicitness is only achievable through interpretation. It is quite common that when the translator anticipates difficulties in comprehension on the part of the target language readership, he/she will need to interpret meaning, apparently with a different ‘cognitive environment’ in mind. This may amount to making an effort, either conscious or unconscious, to reduce synchronous foreignicity inherent in the source text, the result of which is not necessarily renouncing communicative accuracy. On the contrary, the more accurately the source text is understood by the translator, the more effectively the translation is likely to be undertaken for the practical efficacy of communication. It is necessary to point out that explicitness, particularly if used indiscriminately, can be destructive in literature in which over-clarity is, if anything, utterly disastrous. In this respect, the ambivalent inside/ outside trope can help to understand the nature of authenticity in reference to the end-product of translation. Making translation more explicit serves the interests of the target reader, who otherwise can only remain a helpless outsider. The original implicitness may only be understood by the source reader and if, for whatever reason, such

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implicitness is preserved in translation, the target language is not only alienated from its intrinsic naturalness, but the effectiveness of communication is likely to be reduced. Whatever the translator tries to do, his/her identity is not to be confused with the author’s identity because, after all, they do different things. On the other hand, explicit cultural references in the original need some changes so that they become somewhat implicit in translation. This may give rise to ambivalence toward authenticity, and in light of this perpetual anxiety about authenticity, we can even raise the question of correlation between linguistic expressions and extra-linguistic reality. It has to be recognized, however, that certain things will remain essentially unknowable to an outsider. In general, authenticity suggests a commitment to accuracy
any lack of this commitment attracts derogatory comments in translation criticism. Nonetheless, it seems that the present concern with identity has an authenticating function. Insisting that the public identity does not accurately represent the inner ‘I’ of the translator, one could prompt an identity crisis, for if the translator is pseudonymous, as is sometimes the case, he/she is not even held responsible for inauthenticity.

Foreignization and Textualization It is important to recover the real identity of the translator in order to unravel the intricate nature of translation. Because a lack of authenticity is predisposed towards the destabilization of translation activity, there is a cultural or political desire for authenticity. The translator may be obliged to bring himself/herself into conformity with the recognized authority of the source text, without making an effort to contest it or posit other competing authorities that represent the target culture. But, in reality, the source text scarcely represents merely one single unifying authority, the result of which is that both authenticity and identity are politicized, and unsurprisingly, the politics of identity is a delicate one. By and large, authenticity is a high-culture or an academic concern. Authenticity is the prerequisite of translations of scholarly works or canonized literary classics. In this respect, mistranslations and inaccuracies are not tolerated in any event. However, translations of popular culture tend to be less concerned about reliability, but are inclined to place more emphasis on readability. For such translators, fears of inauthenticity do not, in general, surface. In commenting on Guo Moruo’s translation of poetry, Wen Yiduo grants ‘poetic license’ to poetry translation. Some mistranslations make the reader feel that ‘the

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semantically mistaken parts are far better than the original and far more poetic’ (quoted by Chen Fukang, 2000: 278), even though mistranslations are no doubt clear signs of inauthenticity. Authentic translation seems to be more explicitly tied to high quality and reliability. The crux of the matter concerns authority and acceptability. The politics of authenticity manifest in what borders between acceptable and unacceptable practices is often nebulous. The artificial authenticity of translations does show the difficulties faced by the translator whose identity is determined by variable circumstances. The translator may be denied the historical, cultural and political contexts of the authorial identity or the variety of possible ways of trying to assume it on an individual level. The notion of transparency is traditionally associated with the self-effacement of the translator, but the inevitable change of the linguistic structure is an implicit testimony to the illusion of transparency that exemplifies the enigma of authenticity. According to Venuti, the invisibility of the translator amounts to reducing authenticity in terms of cultural values. On the other hand, the translator may be recalcitrant to the original text. If a translation or parts of it are ideologically, culturally or linguistically misrepresented, the authenticity invariably suffers. Yet, unlike the original, the authenticity of a translation is in effect achieved largely through control rather than immediacy, and it is thus often more premeditated than spontaneous. As a result, the idea of multiple forms of authentic translation is important, since it reveals how translation is undertaken in real life. When a translation that assumes a particular form seems to be anti-authentic or demonstrates an indifference to authenticity, it is perhaps more interested in the establishment of an alternative authenticity, or even attempts to change the perception of authenticity because in the final analysis, translation is both possible and impossible, both authentic and inauthentic, and both derivative and creative. Nonetheless, translation must first of all be an authentic performance, in that meaning is not supposed to be damaged or corrupted. But dislocation and displacement resulting from translation would make this extremely difficult. What will constitute authentic performance? Can translation be an alternative authenticity in relation to the original? Translational authenticity can only be claimed on the basis of the continual possibility of recovering the original linguistic and cultural meaning from being lost or distorted in the world of things that appear to be of no great concern, and of creating worlds of meaning around those things that are actually delineated in the translated text. Authentic translation can indeed be claimed if it is solidly based on what may be

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considered an authentic interpretation of the source text. To be sure, interpretative authenticity also needs to be established, and is an extremely important issue as well. However, both at the semantic and formal levels, the problem of translational authenticity is still largely unaddressed; translation needs to be verified with regard to accuracy and adequacy. Changes in vocabulary and syntax are bound to give rise to doubts about their possible impact on the accuracy of translation. If a cultural substitute is used, will authenticity be a problem? When it is impossible to reproduce original structure and context, as is often the case, can translational authenticity be claimed? Since a translated text is prepared derivatively, certain parts of the text may be reconstructed in such a way that they do not correspond with or are not even directly related to the original, even though they may not be intended as deceit. So it can be safely said that authenticity means commitment, but to what? If a translation is committed to formal resemblance, the upshot can only be superficial authenticity, which may be meaningless in terms of communication manifest in the very aim of translation. Yet, in a strict sense, real authenticity is based on the efficacy of communication, although simplification, which facilitates understanding, undermines authenticity as well. What then lends authenticity to a translated text? It can be argued that in a paradoxical way, the maximum of sameness is achieved by virtue of the maximum of difference. For instance, metaphorical sameness through translation is achieved mostly not through formal resemblance. The artifice of sameness involves a process of turning away, of deviation, and of reduction with regard to the original formal features. In this respect, a different conception of sameness can be introduced in relation to claims to translational authenticity. According to Gutt, translational authenticity is evidenced in its repeatability: The higher the presumed degree of resemblance to the original, the higher its claimed authenticity will also be. The highest possible claim of authenticity is found in direct translation with its presumption of complete interpretive resemblance. Bearing in mind possible limitations imposed by linguistic differences, the fallibility of the translator and the need for familiarity with the original background, the target audience can expect to gain from direct translation as authentic an understanding the original as it ever could across language boundaries. (Gutt, 2000: 228)

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Gutt (2000: 229) further expounds that the linguistic differences between the source and target languages ‘may make it very difficult, if not impossible in places, to achieve the intended degree of interpretive resemblance’. Admittedly, even direct translation involves some sort of interpretation. Gutt seems to suggest that both texts should be similarly interpreted by their different sets of readers. But the problem is that it is precisely direct translation that may at times guarantee different interpretations in light of ‘contextual background differences’ (Gutt, 2000: 230). Direct translation generally assumes the form of foreignization, the advantage of which seems to be obvious enough in that the ideological elements of linguistics that are inscribed in rewriting or even in rewording are less likely to be inserted into the translated text. But a relevant issue to consider is that the social process of textualization and contextualization regarding the source text cannot be reproduced in translation in the same fashion, even though it is the same message that is being dealt with in the process of translation. Umberto Eco provides a telling example about the English translation of his novel Foucault’s Pendulum with reference to one particular moment in the novel. In spite of some changes to the original in the translation, Eco insists that the translation ‘can be defined as ‘‘faithful’’, but it is certainly not literal. One can say that, in spite of the literal meaning, it has preserved the ‘‘sense’’ of the text’. And then he asks: ‘What is a ‘‘sense’’ that does not correspond to the literal meaning?’ (Eco, 2001: 8). It is plain that in this case, the literal meaning and the sense of the text are not the same. As demonstrated by Eco (2001: 8), faithfulness is not the same as literalness in translation. If the translator concentrates on translating the literal meaning that does not correspond to the ‘sense’, the quest for authenticity is not only meaningless, but can be misleading because, as observed by Eco (2001: 8), a ‘faithful’ translation may look ‘referentially false’. Indeed, translation warrants moving away from the literal sense, and then the danger is that somewhere between source and target texts misrepresentations occur, thus threatening the authenticity of the resulting translation.

Ontological and Formal Sameness The fundamentally asymmetrical relationship between source and target texts is expressed as one of reciprocity, but whether the asymmetry between the needs of the writer and the reader and between the needs of the translator and the target reader might be exploited is a question that

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has to be considered to see how cultural asymmetry functions in shaping the resulting translated text. Unmistakably, authenticity of translation is primarily related to the deep-rooted but unrealistic assumption of sameness in the ‘copy’ of the original. But there is a distinction to be drawn between the sameness of meaning and the sameness of effect. Regardless of meaning and effect, translation is rarely burdened by expectation of producing an identical text, and much attention is being focused on the possibility of resemblance or approximation, since exact copy is out of the question. Still, there is good reason to differentiate between essential, ontological sameness and formal, inessential sameness; it is essential sameness rather than formal sameness that translation is expected to achieve if the two are quintessentially different and irreconcilable. Therefore, it may be necessary to alter the ‘surface’ meaning so as to reproduce the ‘effect’ of the source text in the translated text. In other words, the ensuing superficial inauthenticity can be justified in order to create what is intrinsically authentic because beneath the surface resemblance semantic difference can be observed, even though it is commonly assumed that linguistic and stylistic features, such as lexicon, metrics and syntax, should be reproduced in the target text so as to authentically translate one sign into another. A central issue is whether syntactic and semantic information contributes independently or interacts in the comprehension process of reading translation. As a pragmatic compromise, translation is only capable of revealing a different level of sameness. While adherence to linguistic authenticity can be problematic as it may disadvantage the translated text in intelligibility, it is more challenging to prevent translation from losing the cultural authenticity of the original. The problem about sameness associated with translation reflects the ontological uncertainty of the translated text. In general, authenticity tends to privilege the source text. As has been previously stated, authenticity seems to be a very restrictive concept that may result in incomprehension caused by trying to achieve absolute authenticity of signs. The translator must, at the same time, deal with the form of content [expression] and substance of the content that belong to different linguistic [semiotic] systems characterized by distinctly asymmetrical reciprocity. The question is, which is more real: the signifier or the signified? Benjamin further examines the topic of genuine translation in an asymmetrical relationship between the two texts involved:

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Even when all the surface content has been extracted and transmitted, the primary concern of the genuine translator remains elusive. Unlike the words of the original, it is not translatable, because the relationship between content and language is quite different in the original and the translation. While content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds. For it signifies a more exalted language than its own and thus remains unsuited to its content, overpowering and alien. This disjunction prevents translation and at the same time makes it superfluous. (Benjamin, 1968: 75) After the puncturing of the illusion of sameness, it may be useful to consider a different conception of sameness. The artifice of sameness involves a process of turning away, of deviation, and of reduction with regard to the original formal features. And further, this may leave us with what might appear to be a paradoxical situation: it is quite possible that the maximum of sameness is achieved by virtue of the maximum of difference, which indicates that metaphorical sameness through translation is not necessarily through formal resemblance. In ‘Translators’ hell: Three recent versions of Dante’s Inferno’, H.I. Needler observes when comparing the two translation versions by Singleton and Gilbert: It is immediately apparent that Singleton’s translation illustrates, far better than Gilbert’s, the virtues claimed for prose. It is sober, restrained, and quite literal throughout*to the extent that passive constructions in the original, for example, are invariably translated as passive, and the order of clauses in a sentence, no matter how long or complex, is generally preserved. (Needler, 1973: 377) But such a translation strategy is not without problems. As Needler (1973: 377) proceeds to point out: ‘The language is simple and, although literary, is perceptibly lacking in stylistic vitality, richness and color’. It is surprising that ‘Singleton’s literalism involves him in a bad syntactical tangle only once . . .’ (Needler, 1973: 377). Yet on the whole, Needler (1973: 378) approves Singleton’s translation, which ‘is impressively accurate in rendering the meanings of Dante’s words and constructions . . .’. However, on one occasion when Singleton ‘abandons literal translation’, Needler (1973: 378) objects to it immediately because ‘something is certainly lost by the substitution’.

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Gilbert is quoted by Needler to set his goal of translation as manifest in his translation language ‘immediately intelligible, avoiding un-English expressions without being false to the Italian’ (Needler, 1973: 378). Even though he alternates in using literal and free translation approaches, Gilbert still shows ‘extraordinarily infelicitous results’ in his translation (Needler, 1973: 379). A very telling remark is made about Gilbert’s translation, which is ‘a good example of the dangers of translating an interpretation, rather than the text itself’ (Needler, 1973: 381). Literal translation seems to be the best antidote to inauthenticity; suffice it to say, however, that it is commonplace to see the severe limitations of such a strategy experienced particularly by translators of literary texts. When a text refuses to be translated literally, the translator has no choice but to translate his/her interpretation. It is a complicated creative process, yet also an unsettling one, since what gets translated is susceptible to revision and change if cultural communication is allowed a chance to succeed.

Credibility of Translation In a discussion of Pound’s translation of Chinese poetry, T.S. Eliot remarks: When a foreign poet is successfully done into the idiom of our own language and our own time, we believe that he has been ‘‘translated’’; we believe that through this translation we really at last get the original . . . His [Pound’s] translations seem to be*and that is the text of excellence*translucencies: we think we are closer to the Chinese than when we read, for instance, Legge. (quoted by Hayot, 1999: 513
514) It is well known that Pound’s Cathay (14 translations of Chinese poems) is not Chinese poetry or its accurate translation. And what Pound’s translation ensures is only credibility, but not authenticity. Pound’s translation of Cathay is based on the notes taken by Ernest Fenollosa. According to Eric Hayot, ‘[s]ometimes he guessed at meanings, sometimes he misread Fenollosa’s writing, sometimes Fenollosa got things wrong. That Pound’s translations are successful has been taken by any number of critics as a literary miracle, by others as a literary fraud’ (Hayot, 1999: 518). Both views can be valid depending on one’s perspective. In spite of the combination of inaccuracies and misinformation, the endurance of Cathay is truly remarkable. As in a similar case, Lin Shu’s translations are equally unreliable, but their immediate success and genuine popularity are not

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affected in the least. This notable example conveniently makes the point that although cross-cultural communication can barely avoid misunderstanding, yet something fruitful can still come out of it, which is perhaps the most important thing. Such a case of misrepresentation may well be ‘a literary fraud’, but if so, its deleterious effects are yet to be seen. Strictly speaking, it is not an act of dishonesty since no claim has been made to authenticity. Nevertheless, the concept of authenticity is still relevant to the issue involved. In spite of its cultural values in a perverse sense, few would argue that this is an exemplary conduct for translations. It is true that authenticity does not mean the effacement of the translator; an authentic identity is opposed to a false identity. Translation necessitates the construction of identity, but at the same time it also leads to the de-construction of identity. The concept of the authenticity of translation draws attention to not only the possibility of fake translation, but also the potentially dubious authenticity of the target language, which can be ‘inauthenticated’ by the language of translation. By and large, the most authentic representation of the original is foreignization, which introduces differences into the target language. Zhou Zuoren, Lu Xun’s brother, asserts that if a translation is done in such a way that it reads just like Chinese, then ‘it must turn out to be a muddled text that I have put together at random, which cannot be genuine translation’ (quoted by Chen, 2000: 169). If a translated text reads like Chinese, namely the target language, the translator must lay stress upon the manipulation of linguistic and cultural materials, thereby amounting to dubious authenticity. Therefore, he argues for direct translation. As if echoing Schleiermacher, Lu Xun maintains that reading good translation is like ‘traveling abroad’ so as to see the real things (quoted by Chen, 2000: 298). However, despite the strategic significance in celebrating the foreignization of translation, a somewhat hybrid discourse will come into being, whose identity is, consequently, subject to change. Whatever claims are made about the value of foreignization, it seems that the translator still usually aims to extract semantic information and reconstruct it in an alternative (more accessible) form, but according to Walter Benjamin (1968: 69), the transmission of basic information is something ‘inessential’. Thus, the inauthentic forms of assimilation and transformation become problematic, since these are presumed to be essential. Similarly, Wang Guowei, a celebrated Chinese scholar, argues ‘together with the importation of new thinking, there is importation of new discourse’. And he questions the accuracy of the coined words by Yanfu, implying that direct borrowing is preferable (quoted by Chen, 2000: 151
152). Also, as

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is clearly indicated by Lu Xun in the preface to Collection of Foreign Short Stories, translated by him and his brother, Zhou Zuoren, it is not because of the translation but because of its ‘essence’ that ‘the reader has benefited’ (Lu, 1981, vol. 10: 193). Although, at first glance, the ‘essence’ here obviously refers to the content of the translated stories, what constitutes essence should not be confined to content in view of Lu’s argument for the importance of retaining the formal features of the original. Elsewhere, Lu Xun speaks of the Chinese ‘cultural backwardness’ and opines that the Chinese need to learn from the foreign (Lu, 1981, Vol. 4: 553). In view of this, can we conclude that translation should be encouraged to embrace the cultural specificity inherent in the original? For if not, something is bound to be lost through translation. In one of his prefaces to his translated works, Lu Xun admits that he ‘would cause the original to lose half of its merits’; still, even such a translation is ‘better than nothing’ (Lu, 1981, vol. 10: 214). In a letter to a Japanese friend, Lu Xun makes clear his motive in doing translation in a direct fashion. It was in response to ‘the many mistakes in Lin Shu’s translations’, even though they would make good reading, that they started doing translation (quoted by Wang, 2004: 114). On the other hand, inauthenticity can be justified as manifest in his call for guarding against the authentic wicked foreign elements unsuitable for the Chinese, especially the Western ‘banditry’ (quoted by Chen, 2000: 128). In this regard, inauthenticity can function as a protective cultural or political filter for the target language system.

Conclusion It is true that cultural appropriation is generally used as a mediating device that ‘translates’ the foreign other inherent in the original into more familiar terms while unavoidably diluting its authenticity, thus causing the resulting translated text to be somewhat inauthentic and transgressive. Inauthenticity is often used to label a translated text if traces of deviation from the original are in abundance. Although authenticity is an illusion, translation can ill afford to abandon it altogether. The changed cultural political context because of translation determines its transgressive and manipulative nature. And the function of transgressive reinscription is to appropriate reaction for resistance. Thus, authenticity here relies on perception and acceptability and translation is a complicated negotiation between authenticity and inauthenticity, between

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resistance and acceptance, between unintelligibility and being lost in translation. Because the concept of authenticity is commonly met with caution and dubiety, translation is a bit like an imposter playing upon the credulity of the reading public without claiming that it is the original, but wishing it to be seen very much like the original. But an imposter is bogus and fraudulent if pretending to be the same as the original. Credulity and skepticism go hand in hand in the process of reading translation. But the credulity of the target language reader must not be strained too far. In reading translation, the veracity or falsehood of other competing discourses are constantly judged. Even a so-called sameness need not exclude difference, but contain it within the rational, functional and acceptable forms of its own choosing. References Benjamin, Walter (1968) The task of the translator. In H. Arendt (ed.) Illuminations (pp. 69
82) (H. Zohn, trans. from German). New York: Schocken Books. Chen, Fukang (2000) A History of Chinese Translation Studies. Shanghai: Foreign Language Education Press. Eco, Umberto (2001) Experiences in Translation (A. McEwen, trans.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gutt, Ernst-August (2000) Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context. Manchester/Boston: St. Jerome Publishing. Hayot, Eric (1999) Critical dreams: Orientalism, modernism, and the meaning of Pound’s China. Twentieth Century Literature 45 (4), 511
533. Lu, Xun (1981) Complete Works of Lu Xun (Vols. 4 & 10). Beijing: People’s Literature Press. Needler, H.I. (1973) Translators’ hell: Three recent versions of Dante’s Inferno. Italica (Italian Literature in English Translation) 50 (3), 375
399. Venuti, Lawrence (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London/New York: Routledge. Wang, Binqin (2004) A History of Chinese Thinking in Translation in the 20th Century. Tianjin: Nankai University Press.

Chapter 10

Representation, Intervention and Mediation: A Translation Anthologist’s Reflections on the Complexities of Translating China MARTHA P.Y. CHEUNG

Introduction The facilitation of cross-cultural communication is often considered a distinct feature of the general purpose and function of translation, as the popular metaphor of translation as a bridge testifies. This metaphor of the bridge, which connotes the idea of effective communication, direct and easy access and the promise of connection, implies a view of crosscultural communication as straightforward and unproblematic, affected only by the closure of the bridge and/or deliberate self-withdrawal. In the second half of the 20th century, however, such a view has come under close scrutiny. The advent of postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism and the increasing influence of feminism have brought about a cultural turn (Bassnett & Lefevere, 1990; Snell-Hornby, 1990), and, more recently, a power turn (Bassnett & Trevedi, 1999; Tymoczko & Gentzler, 2002) in translation studies in many parts of the world. The focusing of critical attention on texts for signs of ‘manipulation’ (Hermans, 1985), and the systematic study of the operation of ideology, poetics, economics and patronage (Lefevere, 1992) on the norms
preliminary, initial and operational (Toury, 1980)
which translators are subjected to, have provided solid, large-scale and, many would say, conclusive historical and empirical proof that translating was, is and always will be an act of re-presentation/representation, mediation and/or intervention. Hence, cross-cultural communication, an important agent of which is translation, is never an innocent matter. In what follows, I shall examine this issue of the complexities of translating, but not from the perspective of the Self translating the Other, 171

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but from that of the Self translating the Self. Not self-translation in the sense of a person translating her own writing, but that of someone engaged in an attempt at translating her culture, in this case, the Chinese culture, via the preparation of a translation anthology. The first volume of this anthology, entitled An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation, Volume 1: From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project, was published in 2006. The second volume, which covers the 13th century to the beginning of the 20th century, is under preparation. The purpose of focusing discussion on a single project
hereafter referred to as the Anthology
is not to re-legitimize personal experience or the anecdotal mode of discourse, but to locate a position from which to speak, relying on declared positionality as a discursive strategy to bring to light what might otherwise remain unarticulated. Topics I shall reflect on include the rationale for undertaking the anthology project, principles of selection and factors governing the delimiting of scope. In particular, I shall focus on the problems encountered in the process of conceptualization and implementation of the project
problems of representation, mediation and intervention. Tentative ways of dealing with these problems will also be discussed. In so doing, I hope to explore, with a measure of self-reflexiveness and as a tentative first step, the nature and limits of the kind of cross-cultural communication I hope to facilitate through the compilation of this anthology. More importantly, I hope that my discussion will lead to a more nuanced understanding of the complex issues of mediation, intervention and representation involved in attempts at translating China, or for that matter, any other country.1

The Meanings of the Word ‘Chinese’: The Root of Complexities The complexities of translating China lie first and foremost in the complexities of the word ‘Chinese’. It is a word with floating meanings
a levitational word, so to speak. Certainly, I am not using it to refer to a single, homogeneous and monolithic entity, or simply as an indicator of a certain ethnic origin. With reference to the Anthology, and especially where the selection of material to be translated is concerned, the word is used with a certain measure of strategic flexibility. This means that although some of the texts selected for translation are excerpted from the work of ethnic Chinese, non-Chinese will not be excluded as long as (1) they had Chinese as one of their language pairs and their views were, still are, related to translation in the Chinese context; and (2) they had been centrally involved in the production of translated texts (in Chinese) and

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their views were, still are, related to such a process or such a mode of production. This is not an attempt to subsume non-Chinese under the label ‘Chinese’ for the all too obvious purpose of discursive nation building. Neither is it an effort to invent a Chinese translation tradition richer and grander than it actually is. The notion of ‘Chinese’ is, admittedly, stretched, but this is because I believe the notion itself is a construct
necessary so, inevitably so. I believe, moreover, that every culture is mixed, and translation, one of the constituent elements of culture, is an important discursive site where the myth of purity is most clearly debunked. And, precisely because the notion of ‘Chinese’ is open to change and partakes of the nature of a construct, all attempts to translate China must deal with the issues of representation, intervention and mediation.

Why this Project? Or, the Ideology of Representation The project is motivated by theoretical discussions of the last few decades about ‘the other’, in particular, about the problematics of (mis)representation and/or (mis)understanding of ‘the other’ in situations of unequal power relations. These discussions have awakened in me, just as they have awakened in people in many parts of the world and especially in places that have experienced colonization in their recent history, a strong awareness that one way of resisting subjugation as ‘the other’ is to assume the right of self-representation. Even if the act of subjugation has already been carried out, one way of countering it
in the political as well as other spheres
is still to assume the right of selfrepresentation. Such an ideological position has the appeal of an urgent imperative for me, who have lived in Hong Kong (an ex-colony of the UK) all my life. It informs many of the decisions I make as a translator and an anthologist, including, first and foremost, the decision to translate, not from a second language into my mother tongue, but from my mother tongue (Cantonese) into my second language (English). The compilation of an anthology, in English translation, of Chinese thinking about translation, is another of my continuous effort at self-representation.2 So when I talk about the complexities of translating, it will be from this particular perspective, not the perspective of someone who is translating into his/her mother tongue and hence representing not the self but the other. The assumption of such a reversed perspective
a deliberate defiance of what many textbooks on translation would advise their prospective translators against
is important because it carries all kinds of implications
ideological, theoretical and epistemological
that are as yet unexplored. At the very least, I hope that the perspective of ‘self-representation’ may

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have a skewing effect on mainstream theorizations about translation strategies, theorizations that, no matter how politically correct, are almost exclusively grounded on the perspective of the self representing the other. I am not suggesting that the self can represent himself/herself better. Self-representation entails problems too, not least of which is the difficulty of seeing the self as a stable entity with clearly defined essence. The problems are especially complex when the person undertaking this act of self-representation, i.e. the writer of this chapter, was born and bred in Hong Kong, a British colony from 1842 to 1997. Hong Kong’s colonial history and its marginality
geographical, political and cultural
in relation to China makes me acutely conscious that I am less than Chinese, and perhaps also more Chinese than the Chinese, and hence indeterminately Chinese
floating, levitating, unsure about my legitimacy in any attempt to represent China, unsure about how selfrepresentation, important as a strategy of resistance against subjugation, is actually to be carried out. If these doubts and uncertainties are not so strong as to be crippling, it is because I am aware that marginality has its advantage, not least because the distance from the center can often result in a relative clarity of vision that could facilitate mediation. But, in planning for the anthology, the question of legitimacy of representation is a presiding concern, as shall become clear in the discussion that follows. There is another reason as to why the anthology is worth compiling. If discourse on translation is to break free from the Eurocentric model on which it has long been based, it is important that primary material on Chinese thinking about translation is made available in translation for the crafting of comparative knowledge.3 Take for example a question that is central to recent theorization on translation: is the prototype theory most likely to help break new grounds in epistemological and ontological inquiries about translation?4 I can see many different ways of approaching this question, but a simple, down-to-earth answer will suffice. If the tendency
a dangerous one, though it is carefully guarded against by the culturally sensitive scholars
to universalize Western theoretical practices at the expense of local articulations is to be avoided, then knowledge of what Chinese people (among others, of course) thought about translation and of how they talked about translation is needed. Such knowledge has to be obtained through re-articulations
one form of which is primary material in translation
unless the power relation between the English language and the Chinese language shifted and everyone could be expected to have knowledge of Chinese, including reading knowledge of classical Chinese. This not being the case,

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re-articulation through translation is an important means of asserting the ideology of representation.

From Why to How: The Politics of Representation In seeking to compile an anthology of texts that represent Chinese thinking about translation, a few questions come to mind. What models of representation can the mind anchor itself to? Are there anthologies
in Chinese or English
that could be used for reference? Is it possible, or desirable, to choose one from the existing anthologies in Chinese and translate it into English? As far as the politics of representation goes, the option that first presented itself was to select an existing anthology in Chinese and translate it into English. This option, however, was not taken up. Anthologies that focus on special periods of translation in Chinese history or special types of translation (scientific translation for example) are too specialized or narrow in scope to be considered at this particular point of East-West communication. They should come later. There is the more comprehensive type of anthologies. But they are limited in contextual and other background information, or they present the material in a way that a reader with little or no knowledge of Chinese culture may find hard to appreciate. Contextualization, however, is important. And it is a delicate art. One needs to guard against overloading of background information, just as one needs to be careful about under-determination of meaning, for both may bring a damaging result
mystification and alienation of the reader towards the source culture. Behind contextualization also lies a question, which any attempt to promote cross-cultural understanding of the Chinese tradition of thinking about translation must consider: to what extent can concepts of translation be dissociated from specific traditions and modes of transmitting texts across cultural boundaries? Rather than from an existing Chinese anthology, I found in the anthology edited by Douglas Robinson
Western Translation Theory: From Herodotus to Nietzsche (published by St Jerome in 1997, hereafter Western Translation Theory)
a workable solution to the problem of delimitation of scope. Translation has a long history in China. The earliest recorded history of such a mode of interlingual communication can be traced back to the Zhou dynasty ( ) (1066
256 BCE), and all through the Chinese dynasties there were records of such activities. Moreover, translators, interpreters, writers, critics, historians and others, including imperial emperors belonging to the various nationalities of China, Buddhist monks from Central Asia (referred to as ‘xiyu’ [ ], literal

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translation, the ‘Western Region’, in Chinese historical documents) and the Indian subcontinent, as well as Jesuit priests and Protestant missionaries from Europe and America, have all written about translation, and from an amazing array of perspectives. A brief collection would not do justice to such a kaleidoscope of views, unless, of course, one were a purist and chose to leave out the contribution of all non-Chinese who had written on the topic. Nor will a brief collection do justice to the long history that translation has in China. A more comprehensive volume should be aimed at. Robinson’s anthology, which begins with Herodotus (484?
430/420 BCE) and ends with Nietzsche (1844
1900), provides me with a sense of what can be considered a manageable time frame for the anthology I am preparing: from ancient times to the beginning of the 20th century. With this time frame, the readers can understand Chinese thinking about translation not in isolation, but in the context of the historical tradition in which translation and thinking about translation took place. Robinson’s anthology could be useful in another way. The structural framework devised by Robinson for organizing his material could be borrowed to structure the material of the Anthology. This means that the entries would follow a chronological order, and each entry would be provided with a title, a headnote and, if necessary, footnotes. The titles give the reader a sense of the diversity of topics presented. The headnotes supply biographical and other information on the historical importance or significance of the texts or the translators. The footnotes provide information on the texts themselves. Together, the headnotes, footnotes and the texts should go some way in meeting the need for contextualization. Moreover, there would be a section on ‘biographies of people mentioned in the text’, one on ‘further reading’, one on bibliographical references, as well as a name index, a subject index and a title index. But, while Robinson’s anthology has an Editor’s Preface, this new anthology will carry an introductory essay on ‘Chinese’ thinking about translation, thus ensuring that the purpose of (self)representation will be achieved not only through re-articulation, but also through direct articulation. If there are advantages in adopting Robinson’s anthology as a model, there are also drawbacks. Given its very noticeable reliance upon Robinson’s anthology for its format, wouldn’t the Anthology be interpreted as a companion piece to Robinson’s volume? How effective an act of self-representation would it be then? Would I not be betraying too much of an anxiety of pairing by structuring and presenting the material this way? What are the ideological implications of being a companion volume to a book called Western Translation Theory? For all I have said about the ‘Chinese’ being a word with changing meanings and about

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cultures being ‘mixed’, would I not be setting up two huge, monolithic blocks and would I not be re-inscribing, reinforcing and hardening the boundaries between them? And what title should I give to this anthology under preparation? Should it be entitled Chinese Translation Theory
From Earliest Times to the Beginning of the 20th Century? Wouldn’t that throw me into the very epistemological and ideological trap I wish to avoid
rigid dichotomies, binary oppositions?

Finding a Title: The Necessity of Intervention? I shall deal with the questions just raised by answering the one that is of the greatest import
the question of a title for the Anthology. The main title, Chinese Translation Theory, seems problematic to me. Not only does it accentuate and magnify the problems just listed, but it also has an exclusionary force that would considerably hamper my effort at contextualization. For the word ‘theory’, even if interpreted loosely, as Robinson does in his anthology, will not be able to function as an umbrella term for some of the material I wish to include for translation. The following are a few examples of such material:

The people living in the five regions spoke different languages and had different customs, likings and preferences. In order to make accessible [da´ ] what was in the minds of different peoples, and in order to make their likings and preferences understood, there were functionaries for the job. Those in charge of the regions in the east were called jı` [the entrusted; transmitters]; in the south, xia`ng [likeness-renderers]; in the west, Dı´di [they who know the Di ` tribes]; and in the north, yı [translators/interpreters]... (From ‘Wangzhi’, Liji (‘The Royal Regulation’, Book of Rites). Translated by Martha Cheung (2006: 46)) This passage is taken from ‘Wangzhi’ of Liji ( ), said to be compiled sometime between 475 BCE and 8 CE. It gives the titles of the officers who could speak the languages of the peoples inhabiting the regions of the Middle Kingdom and who were responsible for communicating with them. The passage is not directly about translation. Yet it provides fascinating sociological information on ‘yi’ ( ) (the Chinese character ‘yi’ makes no distinction between translation and interpretation; in fact, in the earliest times, when writing was not yet invented, ‘yi’

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was interpreting).5 We learn about the form ‘yi’ took in ancient times, its institutional basis, the purposes that such an activity was meant to serve, the extent of the country’s need for such an activity and so on. It should also be noted that apart from ‘yi’, the other characters ‘ji’ ( ), ‘xiang’ ( ), ‘di’ ( ) also contain the idea of translation. ‘Ji’ means ‘to send
hither or thither’, hence ‘to transmit’. ‘Xiang’ means ‘to imitate’ or ‘likeness’. In the context, it means ‘to imitate another’s language’, hence an imitator or a ‘representatist’, if one may be permitted to coin a word. The first ‘di’ ( ) of ‘didi’ ( ) is, according to Chinese scholars such as Kong Yingda ), the name of a tribe inhabiting the Northern regions of the Middle ( Kingdom in ancient times. As for the second ‘di’, it means ‘to know, to understand well’. In the context, the term means someone who knew the languages of the tribes of ‘yi’ ( ) and ‘di’ ( ) so that these people could get to know the people of the Middle Kingdom.6 Of the three characters ‘ji’, ‘xiang’ and ‘di’, ‘xiang’ is particularly (Zhou Rites), we important. From another ancient text, Zhouli, know that ‘xiang’ or ‘xiang xu’ ( ) are the ancient names for ‘translator/ interpreter’:

The xia`ngxu [ , interpreting-functionaries: xia`ng , likeness-renderers; xu , minor government officials] are responsible for receiving the envoys of the tribes of Man , Yi , Min , He , Rong and Di . They are charged with conveying the words of the King and explaining his meanings to the envoys so that harmonious relations with these tribes may be maintained. At regular intervals, when the heads of these states or their representatives come to court to pay tribute, the xia`ngxu are responsible for overseeing matters relating to protocol; they also serve as interpreters. (From ‘Qiu Guan’, Zhouli (‘The Ministry of Justice’, Zhou Rites) Translated by Martha Cheung (2006: 43)) However, from the Han dynasty onward, the tribes from the North often posed serious threats to China, and there were a lot of dealings and traffic with them. As a result, ‘yi’, which was the title of the officers responsible for communicating with the Northern tribes, became the general term for the activity we now often refer to as ‘fanyi’ (‘interpretation and translation’), thus putting the other characters out of currency.7 Both these passages have little to do with what actually happened in translation as an interlingual transfer of meaning, but they form an

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integral part of the historical context. More importantly, they are crucial to our understanding of the evolution of the concept of translation in China and should be included in the anthology. One more example:

The tribes of Rong and Di are bold, rash, reckless and brash, and forthright in their demands, and they do not yield or defer to others. They are untamed and uncouth, like animals. When they come to court to pay their tribute, they do not wait to be served fine and delicate food. So they are seated out of doors, and the tongue-men are ordered to give them whole chunks of meat (From ‘Zhouyu zhong’, Guoyu (Discourses of the States). Translated by Jane Lai (Cheung, 2006: 36)) This passage is not overtly about translation either. However, it contains another name for officials serving as interpreters/translators in ‘Tongue-man’). ‘She’ ( ‘tongue’) is a vivid ancient China
‘Sheren’ ( image, and says a lot about the verbal nature of ‘fanyi’ as an activity in ancient China.8 The passage works with the one just discussed to add a sense of historical depth to the cross-cultural understanding of Chinese thinking about translation, which the Anthology aims to promote. What strategy then should a translation anthologist employ to ensure that such a sense of historical depth can emerge from the textual space encompassed by the Anthology?

Constructing a Structural Framework for the Material: The Dynamics of Intervention In the end, two decisions were made in order to properly ground Chinese translation concepts in their natural terrain and to avoid the ideological pitfalls of presenting the Anthology as a companion volume to Western Translation Theory. First, the Anthology was to be divided into two volumes, thus allowing room not only for materials serving a contextualizing function, but also for the inclusion of a section called ‘commentary’. Comprised of my own comments appended to the end of each translated text, the section is intended to give the Anthology a character different from that of Robinson’s collection. The second decision was to replace the word ‘theory’ in the title with the word ‘discourse’.9 The word ‘discourse’ has a number of meanings, all of which are relevant to my anthology project. At the simplest level,

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‘discourse’ means ‘the expression of ideas; esp: formal and orderly expression in speech or writing’ (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, 1993 [1961]: 647) and thus it readily accommodates the range of material considered necessary for adequate self-representation. ‘Discourse’ also has a meaning in linguistics, a meaning that is similar to the notion of ‘text’ as being a connected series of utterances, and hence it is also an appropriate label for the Anthology. Moreover, discourse on translation takes different modes and these different modes of discourse can be brought together to function as a conceptual frame, a mental filing cabinet, so to speak, which could help the readers appreciate the translated material in their entirety. Table 10.1, showing the different modes of discourse on translation, is given in the Introduction of volume one of the Anthology. The conceptual frame set up by the different modes of discourse on translation is made up of two broad categories
direct discourse on translation and indirect discourse on translation. The former can be divided into the inward-looking mode and the outward-looking mode. The inward-looking mode includes texts that are focused on translation itself, i.e. on topics such as the nature of translation, the different forms translation takes, or has been perceived to take (interlinear, interlingual, direct, indirect, fake, assumed, pseudo, etc.), the principles and strategies of translation, evaluation criteria, etc. The outward-looking mode includes texts that address the relation between translation and outside factors (e.g. the relation between translation and the source culture, between translation and the target culture; the training of translators, and so on). As for indirect discourse on translation, it is a flexible category.10 The explicit mode includes texts about translation rather than texts on translation. For example, historical records of the official titles of officers in charge of translating-interpreting in dynastic China (quoted above), or of the elaborate division of labor for Buddhist sutra translation, which for a few centuries took the form of institutionalized team translation, often Table 10.1 Modes of discourse on translation

.Direct . . . .discourse . . . . . on . . translation: . . . . . . .inward-looking .......................... Direct discourse on translation: outward-looking ............................................. Indirect discourse on translation: explicit mode ............................................. Indirect discourse on translation: subterranean mode Source: Cheung (2006: 15)

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under the patronage of the imperial emperors. The implicit mode of indirect discourse on translation includes texts that say nothing on or about translation, but that serve as the philosophical underpinnings of key concepts of translation in China, concepts such as ‘xin’ ( ), ‘da’ ( ), ‘ya’ ( )
usually translated as ‘faithfulness’, ‘comprehensibility’ and ‘elegance’. As the dotted lines indicate, the boundary between different modes of discourse is not fixed. This is because the categories are not meant to impose a rigid and artificial division of the materials included in the Anthology, but to help readers make better sense of them. Generally speaking, texts that discourse directly on translation are included to provide readers with a sense of breadth
of the variety of topics and range of perspectives characterizing Chinese thinking on translation
while texts that discourse indirectly on translation are included to provide readers with a sense of depth
of the cultural tradition in which most Chinese translation concepts are rooted. Readers who adopt such a conceptual frame will then be able to understand the texts not in isolation, but in relation to one another, and also to treat the texts not merely as archival or historical material, but rather as large formations of statements bearing the marks of rules, conventions and systems of dispersion governing the way translation was talked about through the centuries in China. What is more, the texts can also be regarded as material for new theorizations about translation. In other words, the conceptual scheme is meant to facilitate understanding of the production and management of knowledge on translation, and also to generate new knowledge
of Chinese thinking about translation. Not necessarily just Chinese thinking about translation, it should be stressed, but other thinkings as well, for the scheme does have a relevance beyond the Chinese domain. And knowledge management, as well as discursive formation, are part of the complex network of concepts that Michel Foucault (1972) had woven into his theory of discourse, the others being power and ideology.11 But there is perhaps no need to labor these points here. With this scheme, the large body of material selected for translation should be able to stand up to scrutiny as an organized and coherent work of reference. It can keep Western Translation Theory within hailing distance, but, first and foremost, it would have an independent existence of its own. In addition, I would be able to open up possibilities for intervention
or perhaps I should say possibilities for further intervention, since the very making of the Anthology and the shaping of the material already constitute acts of intervention
into current discussions and theorizations about translation, both in China and in the West. The

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scope of this chapter does not permit me to detail these possibilities. Suffice it to mention just one topic: what, in terms of consequences, are the differences between using the concept of ‘theory’ and that of ‘discourse’ in the disciplining, management and generation of knowledge about translation? The notion of ‘discourse’ throws problems into my path too. While the linguistic approach towards ‘discourse’ is fairly well established in China, the Foucaultian and other related theories of discourse (primarily postcolonial) have yet to take root in the Chinese translation studies community. With this editorial decision, will I not make the Anthology in some ways an extension of me, i.e. less than Chinese, or more than Chinese, hence indeterminately Chinese? I do not know whether these are real problems or fashionable worries. But, in the process of conceptualization, questions relating to the legitimacy of representation and the ideological pitfalls of intervention did return to vex me. I even tried to tackle them, as well as practical problems such as time, energy, research resources and expertise needed for the implementation of such a project, by inviting Lin Wusen, the then Executive Vice-President of the Chinese Translators Association, to be the Advisory Editor of the Anthology. In addition, Chinese mainland experts on translation history and translation theory were invited to participate in the project. These scholars contributed to the Anthology by commenting on the suitability of the texts I have selected for inclusion and by writing the headnotes. Their involvement should go some way in producing a collective effort at self-representation, even if the notion of the self remains problematic
rightly so, it should be stressed. Their involvement is crucial in another way. Writing the headnotes means setting the context for the translated pieces. Contextualization is the deployment of interpreted historical facts for a particular purpose. The two scholars who, together, are responsible for writing over half of the headnotes, have shown, in their publications, a leaning towards the construction of a Chinese translation tradition with an impressive history and distinct Chinese characteristics. Their involvement, therefore, means that the mainstream view will be represented. Of course, some might cast doubt on the reliability of the context thus set, of the reading thus proffered and, by extension, of the kind of understanding provided by the Anthology for its English-speaking readers, who would have no means of checking the accuracy of the information presented. But as I do not believe that discourse can be ideologically free, I do not see this as a problem. I do think, however, that ideological positions should be made known to the readers and I will use the footnotes for such a purpose. In

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addition, the footnotes will function as a discursive space for different, alternative or oppositional reading(s).12 Together, the headnotes and footnotes can, I hope, alert us to the need to think ideologically about translation research. The ‘need to think ideologically about translation research’ is a call I made in another paper (Cheung, 2002). I would like to reiterate it here. To think ideologically about translation research does not mean that we treat everything as ideologically suspect. It does mean, however, that we accept ideological leanings/bias/convictions as an epistemological fact, as something that is built into our attempts to make sense of things. And this, I think, is one way of dealing with the problem of representation
both selfrepresentation as well as representation of ‘the other’. As far as the Anthology is concerned, thinking ideologically about translation research means admitting that the kind of understanding provided by this anthology for its English-speaking reader will be mediated by all who are involved in the preparation of the project, and above all, by my own theoretical and ideological orientations. These orientations can be summed up as at once a readiness to help
in a non-innocent manner
‘Western’ readers understand ‘Chinese’ thinking about translation in its context, as well as a determination to engage with ‘Western’ thinking about translation on its own terms. These orientations are the result of my attempt to make full use of Hong Kong’s marginal position
marginal in relation to China as well as the West
which enables me to look East and also to look West rather than at or from a single direction. These orientations mark the limits, and perhaps also the excitement, of the kind of translation project I am engaged in through the compilation of this anthology.

Some Thoughts on Mediation I shall bring this exercise in self-reflection to an end with an observation and two questions. In cross-cultural communication, mediation is in the order of things, whether mediation takes the overt form of commentary, introduction or conceptual flagging (in the title, for example), or through subtler maneuvers such as the selection of material, the delimitation of scope and so on. My way of dealing with this issue, therefore, is not to reduce mediation as far as possible in pursuit of objectivity or historical ‘truth’ in my representation of Chinese thinking about translation. Instead, my strategy is to use mediation as a way of intervening in debates or matters that are of concern to me. In addition, I talk about my mediation, as I did in this chapter. No one can write outside of frames, to borrow a term

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from Erving Goffman. No one can escape from positionality. But one can be articulate about it, while bearing in mind that a fully reflexive text cannot exist, because any piece of writing, in order to say something, necessarily contains an element of blindness. Donna Haraway, in her celebrated paper, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (1988), uses the notion of ‘situated knowledges’ to highlight the ‘critical and interpretive core of all knowledge’ (Haraway, 1988: 584), and specifically to query, critique and problematize the meaning of ‘objectivity’. She does this not to exalt relativism, which she regards as ‘the perfect twin mirror of totalization in the ideologies of objectivity’ (Haraway, 1988: 584). Rather, she stresses that it is limited location and situated knowledge that allow us become ‘answerable for what we learn how to see’ (Haraway, 1988: 583). I share Haraway’s commitment to situated knowledges and all that such a position entails. But, have I managed to talk about the mediated nature of my anthology project with a measure of self-reflexiveness that could promote a better (i.e. more nuanced and more discourse-sensitive) understanding of the complex and ideologically loaded issues involved in the making of a translation anthology? Or is this ‘turning-back-upononeself’ merely a kind of navel-gazing that is academically trendy? These, I think, are questions that must be left to the readers of this chapter.

Conclusion The discussion above focuses primarily on the compilation of a single translation anthology, but I hope that the argument and observations would be appreciated for their general validity. Translating (China, or any other country) is a demanding task. Whoever is undertaking the venture has to negotiate formidable questions of ideological positioning and deal with the nuances of cultural politics. Whether we are a translator, a translation anthologist or a translation researcher, it is important that we fully grasp these implications. Only then would we be able to responsibly exercise our power, and that is, the power to represent our country/another country, the power to intervene in cultural politics and effect change
in the way international translation studies is to develop, now and in the future. Acknowledgements Research for this paper was supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (HKBU 240907). An earlier version of this paper was published as Paper Number 14 of LEWI Working Paper Series, October

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2003, David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies (LEWI), Hong Kong Baptist University, under the title, Representation, Mediation and Intervention: A Translation Anthologist’s Preliminary Reflections on Three Key Issues in Cross-cultural Understanding. That Working Paper has subsequently been revised for presentation at the ‘XVIII World Congress of the International Federation of Translators’ held in Shanghai, China, 4
7 August 2008, and published in the CD version of the Congress Proceedings under the title A Translation Anthologist’s Reflections on the Ideological Complexities of Translating China. This is an expanded version, further revised. Notes 1. I am aware that for my discussion of mediation, intervention and representation to be thorough and complete, there should also be a section on the strategies of translation. But this is a topic of such complexity that it would require the length and breadth of another paper for a satisfactory treatment. The topic has in fact been dealt with in a separate paper, On Thick Translation as a Mode of Cultural Representation (Cheung, 2007). Readers interested in the translation strategies employed in this anthology might like to consult it for reference. 2. Two earlier attempts at self-representation are An Oxford Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama (Cheung & Lai, 1997) and Hong Kong Collage: Contemporary Stories and Writing (Cheung, 1998). Both carry an Introduction in which the issue of representation is discussed, either implicitly or explicitly. A more self-conscious exploration of the politics of representation behind the compilation of An Oxford Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama is undertaken in Politics of Representation: A Translation Anthologist’s Self-examination (Cheung, 2005). 3. In A ‘Multilingual’ and ‘International’ Translation Studies?, Sebnem SusamSarajeva (2002) talks about the plight of ‘periphery researchers’, i.e. researchers whose academic base is away from the central research institutions or who work on and/or write in ‘exotic’ languages rather than the ‘dominant’ languages
English, French, German and, nowadays, occasionally Spanish. She argues that in order to break the existing center-periphery relations within translation studies, periphery researchers should ‘concentrate on what is being done and what has been done in the peripheral languages and cultures in terms of translation theory’ in order to bring about ‘a reconsideration on everybody’s part of what ‘‘theory’’ means and what it is comprised of’ (Susam-Sarajeva, 2002: 204). The anthology project I am working on, over 90% of whose texts will be translated into English for the first time, can be considered an effort in that direction. 4. Sandra Halverson (1997, 1998, 1999, 2000) is the key proponent of this question. According to her, ‘prototype theory and research have shown that, instead of the uniform internal structure and clear boundaries guaranteed by necessary and sufficient conditions, virtually all natural language concepts show signs of having graded membership (not all members are equal), and fuzzy boundaries (where one concept stops and another starts is indeterminate)’

186

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

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(Halverson, 2000: 4). Her research focuses on the usefulness and theoretical significance of applying the prototype theory to the concept of ‘translation’. She says that her interest in this question is part of the overall interest shown by translation theorists since the mid-1990s in defining the concept of ‘translation’ through exploring ‘questions of boundary drawing and category relationships’ (Halverson, 2000: 4). Nowadays, ‘interpreting’ is designated by the characters ‘kou (‘‘ ’’, literally, ‘‘mouth’’) yi’ ( ) and ‘translating’ by the characters ‘bi (‘‘ ’’, literally ‘‘pen’’) yi’ ( ). ‘Yi’ is still in currency, though its derivative ‘fan (‘‘ ’’, literally ‘‘to turn over’’) yi’ ( ) is perhaps more popular. The term ‘fanyi’ also makes no distinction between translating and interpreting. ), explained above, is translated from the following The meaning of ‘didi’ ( annotation by Kong Yingda: ‘Di, zhi ye, wei tongchuan yidi zhi yu, yu zhongguo ) (Hanyu dacidian, 1995) xiangzhi’. ( This point is made by Chen Fukang, a Mainland translation scholar, who draws the information from the writings of two Buddhist monks of the Song dynasty
Zan Ning ( ) and Fa Yun ( ). Chen, citing Zan Ning, also notes that the use of the character ‘fan’ (‘to turn over’) to denote ‘translate’ started in the period of the Eastern Han (C.E. 25
221). He notes, too, that it was again in the context of Buddhist sutra translation that the two characters ‘fan’ ( ) and ‘yi’ ( ) began to be used together as a single term, no later than the 6th century (Chen, 1992: 12). The character ‘she’ also carries the meaning ‘language(s)’. Therefore ‘sheren’ can also be translated as ‘tongues man’. Such a translation brings an echo of the English expression ‘speaking in tongues’. The choice of ‘tongue-man’ over ‘tongues man’ is an indication of positioning and should throw some light on one amongst the numerous translation problems and translation decisions to be dealt with in the Anthology. For a detailed account of the various options considered before finally deciding on ‘discourse’ as the most appropriate umbrella term for the material included in this translation anthology, and the ideological and epistemological considerations involved in the making of this decision, see From ‘Theory’ to ‘Discourse’
the Making of a Translation Anthology (Cheung, 2003). In Literature, Translation, and (De)colonization, Jose´ Lambert remarks, and I agree with him, that ‘hardly anybody so far has made the distinction between explicit and implicit discourse on translation’ (Lambert, 1995: 116, footnote 7). Although that paper does not define or explore the theoretical significance of the distinction between explicit and implicit discourse on translation, I drew from it a touch of inspiration and developed the theoretical notion of discourse into a scheme with interconnected categories. The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault, 1972) and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Foucault, 1979) are the two works of Michel Foucault that launched his highly complex concept of ‘discourse’ and its related concepts
ideology, power, knowledge and language
into critical currency in the domains of literary theory and cultural studies in the last few decades. For an illuminating summary of the different concepts and the intricate web of ideas encompassed in the word ‘discourse’, see Foucault’s (1972: 215
237) Appendix to The Archaeology of Knowledge.

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12. The question could be asked of whether this tactic raises an ethical issue, i.e. whether the writers of the headnotes will be able to respond to the readings given in the footnotes. However, since the footnotes will only record oppositional views already expressed in publications in Chinese, there should be no breaching of ethics. I am, however, grateful to Theo Hermans for alerting me to this issue.

References Bassnett, Susan and Lefevere, Andre´ (1990) Introduction: Proust’s grandmother and the thousand and one nights. The ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies. In S. Bassnett and A. Lefevere (eds) Translation, History and Culture (pp. 1
13). London/New York: Cassell. Bassnett, Susan and Trivedi, Harish (eds) (1999) Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. London/New York: Routledge. [A Draft History of Chen, Fukang (1992) Zhongguo Yixue Lilun Shigao Chinese Translation Theory]. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Languages Education Press. Cheung, Martha P.Y. (ed.) (1998) Hong Kong Collage: Contemporary Stories and Writing. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Cheung, Martha P.Y. (2002) Power and ideology in translation research in twentieth century China: An analysis of three seminal works. In T. Hermans (ed.) Crosscultural Transgressions: Research Models in Translation Studies II: Historical and Ideological Issues (pp. 144
164). Manchester/Northampton, MA: St Jerome. Cheung, Martha P.Y. (2003) From ‘theory’ to ‘discourse’
the making of a translation anthology. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 66 (3), 390
401. Cheung, Martha P.Y. (2005) Politics of representation: A translation anthologist’s self-examination. Translation Quarterly 36, 1
27. Cheung, Martha P.Y. (2006) An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation: From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project. Manchester: St Jerome. Cheung, Martha P.Y. (2007) On thick translation as a mode of cultural representation. In D. Kenny and K. Ryou (eds) Across Boundaries: International Perspectives on Translation Studies. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Cheung, Martha P.Y. and Lai, Jane C.C. (eds) (1997) An Oxford Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama. Hong Kong/New York: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge (A.M. Sheridan Smith, trans). New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan, trans.). New York: Vintage Books. Goffman Erving (1974) Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. London: Penguin. Halverson, Sandra (1997) The concept of equivalence in translation studies: Much ado about something. Target 9 (2), 207
233. Halverson, Sandra (1998) Translation studies and representative corpora: Establishing links between translation corpora, theoretical/descriptive categories and a conception of the object. Meta 43 (4), 494
514.

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Halverson, Sandra (1999) Conceptual work and the ‘translation’ concept. Target 11 (1), 1
31. Halverson, Sandra (2000) Prototype effects in the ‘translation’ category. In A. Chesterman, N. Gallardo San Salvador and Y. Gambier (eds) Translation in Context: Selected Contributions From the EST Congress, Granada, 1998 (pp. 3
16). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. [A Comprehensive Dictionary for Chinese Words] (1990/ Hanyu Da Cidian 1995). Shanghai: Chinese Dictionary Press. Haraway, Donna (1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3), 575
599. Hermans, Theo (ed.) (1985) The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation. London: Croom Helm. Lambert, Jose´ (1995) Literature, translation and (de)colonization. In T.M. Hyun and J. Lambert (eds) Translation and Modernization (pp. 98
117). Tokyo: ICLA ’91 Tokyo Congress Headquarters. Lefevere, Andre´ (1992) Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London: Routledge. [Book of Rites] (1987) Hong Kong: Chung Hwa Book Co. Li Ji Robinson, Douglas (1997) Western Translation Theory: From Herodotus to Nietzsche. Manchester: St Jerome. Ruan, Yuan ( ) (ed.) (1987) Zhou Li [Rites of the Zhou]. In Shisan Jing Zhushu [The Thirteen Classics with Commentaries and Subcommentaries]. Hong Kong: Chung Hwa Book Co. Shen, Rong ( ) (comp.) (1916) Guo Yu Xiang Zhu (detailed Annotations of Guoyu, the History Book of the Spring-Autumn Period). Shanghai: Wenming Book Co. Snell-Hornby, Mary (1990) Linguistic transcoding or cultural transfer? A critique of translation theory in Germany. In S. Bassnett and A. Lefevere (eds) Translation, History and Culture (pp. 79
86). London/New York: Cassell. Susam-Sarajeva, S¸ebnem (2002) A ‘multilingual’ and ‘international’ translation studies? In T. Hermans (ed.) Crosscultural Transgressions: Research Models in Translation Studies II: Historical and Ideological Issues (pp. 193
207). Manchester/ Northampton, MA: St Jerome. Toury, Gideon (1980) In Search of a Theory of Translation. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University. Tymoczko, Maria and Gentzler, Edwin (eds) (2002) Translation and Power. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.’ Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, unabridged (1993 [1961]). Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster.

Chapter 11

Translating for the Future: Some Reflections on Making A Dictionary of Translation Technology SIN-WAI CHAN

Introduction It took me some five years to complete A Dictionary of Translation Technology (Chan, 2004), which was published by The Chinese University Press in May 2004. At the beginning, my main goal was to produce a work of reference for general readers who might be interested in translation by acquainting themselves with the major concepts of the field. Gradually, I shifted my focus and collected a huge number of examples in Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation to illustrate the application of theory in translation practice. Eventually, with the proliferation of terms relating to computer translation, it began to dawn on me that in the present information age, it would be more useful, and academically and intellectually more rewarding, to explain in a concise manner those terms that will soon become a part of the language that we use in our work. I also observed that translation and translation studies have moved ahead largely in a computational manner, which has brought about three major changes in the field: the emergence of corpus-based translation studies, the coming of a technological turn in translation and the creation of proactive translation studies.

The Emergence of Corpus-based Translation Studies It cannot be denied that the use of corpora in translation studies, as in the fields of lexicography and linguistics, is fast gaining momentum and will be a major trend in the future (Baker, 1995: 223
243; Granger et al., 2003; Kenny, 1998: 50
53; Laviosa, 2003: 105
117). This is obvious because what we get from corpora is verifiable, substantiable and widely practicable, while many of the ideas and concepts in the field of translation are mainly empirical, prescriptive 189

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and cannot be proven, since they are not based on any database or systematic documentary analysis. We have a huge number of terms that come from various people with different educational backgrounds and experience, and from different translators in different periods, working with different language pairs on different text types with different purposes in different cultural situations (Delisle et al., 1999). Since there are so many different concepts drawn from so many different sources, it would not be advisable to simply select ideas from certain theorists out of context or apply concepts indiscriminately to translation practice without reference to their sources and contextualized applications. Corpus-based research in translation is based on a body of written or verbal data collected for textual and linguistic analysis for translational purposes. It is through the use of corpora that more scientific generalizations can be made, concepts formed and methods created.

The Coming of a ‘Technological Turn’ in Translation As shown by changes in the field The bulk of the entries in A Dictionary of Translation Technology, as implied by its title, are in the areas of computer translation and translation technology, 625 entries in total. These entries, in a very significant way, show that a ‘technological turn’ in translation is taking place in different parts of the world with varying paces of development. Translation tools are increasingly used in the work of translation (Austermu¨hl, 2001a). We use word processors for document processing, scanners for data-capturing, dictation tools for text inputting, concordancers for text analysis (Pearson, 1996: 85
95; Ulrych, 1997: 421
435), online dictionaries for meaning clarification, translation memory systems for the reuse of previous translations, and automatic translation systems for informational translation. The application of translation tools in translation has become extensive and commonplace. The magnitude of this ‘technological turn’ is indeed unsurpassed, if we make a distinction between ‘approaches’ and ‘turns’ in translation. Historically speaking, translation as a bilingual language activity and an academic subject has experienced several periods of development. For a very long time in the old days, the philological approach, also known as the pre-linguistic approach, was dominant (Becker, 1995). This approach to translation was based on generalizations drawn from literary translation and the translation of religious texts, such as Bible translation. It is

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characterized by statements of opinions that are mainly anecdotal, vague, subjective and often unverifiable. Later, the linguistic approach emerged, which took linguistics as the key in translating (Larson, 1994: 4685
4694). Linguistics and the growth of a linguistically oriented translation theory are closely related, and it seems obvious that translation studies consistently reflect the trend of language studies. Then, several other ‘turns’ in translation occurred. There was the ‘cultural turn’ in translation, an idea proposed by Mary Snell-Hornby (1990: 79
86) to refer to the shift of emphasis from linguistics to culture and ideology as a shaping force in translation studies. There was the ‘hermeneutic turn’, which refers to the shift of emphasis from the linguistic to the hermeneutic approach (Rose, 1992: 261
268). There was the ‘translator’s turn’, coined by Douglas Robinson (1991) to mean a new opportunity for the translator to have somatic interactions with a text. Now the ‘technological turn’ is with us. It refers to the wide and frequent application of computers to translation studies and practice.

As shown by conferences on computer translation Reflective of the prevalence of technology in the present age are the organization of translation conferences and publication of works on computer translation in the last 10 years. As far as we know, between 1993 and 2002, 120 conferences on translation studies and related areas were held in different parts of the world. The number of conferences before 1997 was relatively small, with an average of 6.5 conferences per year. Between 1997 and 2001, 88 conferences were held, about 17.6 conferences per year. With the exception of 2002, the increase is 2.7 fold. The new ideas and concepts discussed in the conferences formed the basis of a new vocabulary of translation studies (Table 11.1). In the last 10 years, a total of 28 countries organized translation conferences on various themes and topics. The UK (20), Spain (14), China (11), the USA (11), Canada (10) and Hong Kong (8), are the six countries where conferences were most frequently held. The case of Hong Kong is exceptional. A relatively small territory with a population of slightly over 6 million, Hong Kong has the highest density of translation programs in the world
seven out of eight tertiary institutions offer degrees in translation, and is now ranked six in the organization of translation conferences (Chan, 2001) (Table 11.2).

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Table 11.1 Translation conferences by year (1993
2002) Year

No. of Conferences

1993

7

1994

4

1995

7

1996

8

1997

14

1998

21

1999

15

2000

20

2001

18

2002

6

From 1993 to 2003, 118 conferences were held in 25 areas. The largest number of conferences was on translation studies (37), followed by 26 on computer-related translation (automatic translation 1, computational lingusitcs 4, computer translation 7, corpus 1, information processing 1, machine translation 8, parsing 1, terminology 1 and translation technology 2), and 11 on interpreting. It is obvious from the figures that translation technology has become a very important part of translation (Table 11.3). As shown by works on translation technology According to a survey, 201 works on translation were published between 1993 and 2003 (Bowker, 2002; Chan, 2002; Vasconcellos, 1988). Of these, 56 belong to general works (27.86%), followed by 29 in translation studies (14.42%) and 20 in machine translation (9.95%). This shows that publications on machine translation and computer-related translation take up almost 10% of the total number of works published, and of the 20 works on machine translation, 10 of them, amounting to 50%, were published in the UK. This regional variation in publications on machine translation is noteworthy (Table 11.4). When we study the publication of works on machine translation in different countries, it should be noted that both Germany and India had

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Table 11.2 Translation conferences by country (1993
2002) Country China

No. of Conferences 11

Czech Republic

1

Denmark

3

Finland

3

Germany

6

Hong Kong

8

India

1

Italy

2

Japan

1

Malaysia

1

Mexico

2

Morocco

1

Poland

2

Singapore

1

Slovakia

3

Slovenia

1

Spain

14

Sweden

1

Switzerland

2

Taiwan

4

Tunisia

1

Turkey

1

UK

20

USA

11

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Table 11.3 Translation conferences by area (1993
2003) Conference topics

No. of Conferences

Arabic translation

3

Automatic translation

1

Cliche translation

1

Computational linguistics

4

Computer translation

7

Corpus

1

Culture

2

Practical translation

7

Information processing

1

Interpreting

11

Language processing

1

Language teaching

1

Languages and translation

2

Linguistics

1

Literary translation

7

Machine translation

8

Multimedia translation

4

Parsing

1

Psychology

1

Semantics

1

Subtitles

1

Terminology

1

Translation studies

37

Translation teaching

7

Translation technology

2

Translator training

5

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Table 11.4 Translation publications by category (1993
2003) Category

No. of entries

Grammar

1

Bible

1

Religion

1

Profession

1

Linguistics

2

Business

2

Biography

2

History

3

Translation teaching

3

Culture

5

Practical translation

8

References

9

Literature

12

Interpreting

13

Translation skills

14

Translation textbook

19

Machine translation

20

Translation studies

29

General works

56

four works on translation and they were all on machine translation (100%). Most notable is the UK, where 10 out of 15 works were on machine translation, 66.66% in total. The Netherlands comes next as 4 of the 11 works were on machine translation, 36.36% in total. Canada published three works, one of which was on machine translation, which amounts to 33.30%. Of the 18 works published in Hong Kong, one was on machine translation (5.55%). The cases of China and Taiwan are worth studying. China published 134 works and Taiwan 15 works, yet none of

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Table 11.5 Works on machine translation by country (1993
2003) Country

No. of works published

No. of works on MT

Percentage of works on MT 0

Beligium

1

0

Canada

3

1

134

0

0

Finland

1

0

0

Germany

3

3

100

18

1

1

1

11

4

1

0

0

Taiwan

15

0

0

UK

15

10

USA

5

0

China

Hong Kong India The Netherlands Singapore

33.30

5.55 100 36.36

66.66 0

them were on machine translation, despite the fact that these two places produce most of the software for translation between Chinese and English (Table 11.5). It should also be noted that most of the works on computer translation were published fairly recently, as shown in Table 11.6. It can be seen that from 1993 to 1998, a total of 10 works were written on machine translation. An equal number of works were published between 1999 and 2003. This shows that there is a continual interest in machine translation, mostly in the West. With the publication of these works, terms of computer translation and translation technology increased on a yearly basis.

The Creation of Proactive Translation Studies The need to create a new approach, known as ‘proactive translation studies’, must be seen in light of the establishment of translation studies with linguistics as its major component, the dominance of Western concepts in translation theory and the emergence of a forward-looking approach to meet challenges in the future.

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Table 11.6 Works on machine translation by year (1993
2003) Year

No. of works on MT

1993

1

1994

3

1995

3

1996

1

1997

0

1998

1

1999

2

2000

4

2001

2

2002

3

2003

1

The role of linguistics in translation studies Translation, which was recognized as an independent discipline 16 years ago (Snell-Hornby, 1988), has now been elevated from the status of a craft in the old days to an academic subject in universities today. During the last 16 years, translation vocabulary has grown enormously, indicating the rapid development of the theoretical components of the field (Chan, 1993). During the process of preparing this dictionary, considerable attention has been given to the role of individual subjects in making translation studies an interdiscipline. The following is an analysis of the contribution of each translation-related discipline to translation studies, based on the number of entries in the dictionary (Table 11.7). It should be admitted that firstly, the figures shown are not complete and the number of entries is largely determined by the selection criteria set down for the dictionary. Secondly, the statistics do not include those entries that have become a part of translation vocabulary, such as ‘cultural equivalent’ and ‘communicative approach’. Thirdly, the number of entries and their historical significance may not tally. It is possible that a considerable proportion of the selected entries might have been fairly

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Table 11.7 Translation and its related disciplines Linguistics

126

Semantics

41

Linguistics

35

Textlinguistics

25

Grammar

13

Pragmatics

12

Literature

20

Poetry

7

Rhetoric

7

Literature

6

Culture

13

Communication science

10

Information science

5

Hermeneutics

3

Psychology

2

influential in the past, but fail to exert any impact on the development of the discipline in the contemporary period. Despite the above concerns, these numbers do serve to indicate, at least in a small way, the fields that are closely related to translation and the areas where more attention should be given. As far as we can observe, 13 out of the 33 categories in the dictionary belong to what we call translation-related disciplines, 39% in total. As shown in Table 11.1, a total of seven disciplines, including linguistics, literature, culture, communication science, information science, hermeneutics and psychology, are in some ways related to translation, with linguistics being most closely related to it (Bennett, 2003). One hundred and twenty six entries, 70.39% in total, are in the field of linguistics, which includes 41 entries on semantics, justifying the claim that ‘translating is translating meaning’, 35 entries on linguistics proper, which corresponds to the claim that ‘translating is linguistic transfer’, 25 entries on textlinguistics, which

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substantiates the idea of ‘translating at the suprasentential level’, while there are 13 entries on grammar and 12 entries on pragmatics. Next is literature with 20 entries, which are relatively small in number when viewed against the volume of translated literary works published and the literature on literary translation that came out in the past (Classe, 2000). Culture and communication science have even fewer entries, 13 and 10, respectively. While information science with five entries, hermeneutics with three entries and psychology with two entries are the least related subjects to translation. This is about the first time that the contribution of each of the translation-related disciplines is analyzed statistically to assess its relationship to translation. Whether it reveals a true picture remains to be seen. But it seems that in future, subjects relating to practical translation should be given more attention as it takes up 96% of the annual translation output in most parts of the world, China in particular. Also relevant would be disciplines that would help to enhance our knowledge of films and other forms of media as the demand for subtitles has been on the rise in recent years. The dominance of Western concepts in translation studies Another observation that can be drawn from this dictionary-making exercise is that concepts and ideas in the field of translation are still predominantly Western, European in particular (Chan, 2001: 157
174). More efforts should be made to study the various aspects of the nonWestern source texts and the non-Western source cultures. A wholesale adoption of the Western or European concepts to study the translational issues involving a non-European language and language pair, such as translation between Japanese and Korean, is far from satisfactory, if not totally erroneous. It is true that some of the Western theories are not region-specific but universally applicable, such as concepts on accuracy. But when it comes to translation between a non-Western language pair, the linguistic and cultural issues specific to this particular language pair should be more important and relevant to the translator. The need of a forward-looking approach Yet another observation is that translation studies has so far been backward-looking, concentrating on what has transpired in the world of translation (Delisle & Woodsworth, 1995; Venuti, 1995). Concepts and ideas have been drawn from past events. Methodology has been based on what has conventionally been practiced. Research projects on

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translation have been conducted in the areas of history, literature, religion and culture. While admitting that these areas are academically and intellectually important, we do see the need to deploy at least some of our efforts to prepare ourselves for the changes that are now taking place on a global scale, and for the transformation in the translation profession in the future, which will drastically change the way we work. I would designate this new orientation in translation as ‘proactive translation studies’. Proactive translation studies focuses on issues that will meet the expectations of the academic community at large and cater to the specific needs of some regions and domains in particular. A discipline needs to look back on what has happened in the past. But more importantly, it also has to be forward-looking, projecting into the future to see what has to be done. The world is constantly changing, in a state of flux. To study the unchangeable past is important. To work on the changeable future, I believe, is equally important and exceedingly challenging. Seen in this light, proactive translation studies has to be based on informative data and reliable statistics, not on intuition, imagination or personal experience. It has a lot to do with foresight and prediction, but little to do with hindsight. Modern research methodology has to be used to find out more about what the future holds for us. Every discipline must move forward in the best possible way. Proactive translation studies is a novel concept and a new orientation. We need to work together to realize it and give it a distinctiveness that is predominantly Chinese. Proactive translation studies: Hong Kong as a case study Hong Kong may be used as a case study to illustrate how proactive translation studies can be put into practice. This Special Administrative Region of China is a unique example for this prospective approach for several reasons. Firstly, the role of translation has been important in the development of Hong Kong from a tiny spot in the southern part of China to an international financial center. I believe what I said four years ago still holds water. Hong Kong is a cosmopolitan city where international communication is a fact of everyday life. Translation has always played an important role in bridging the social and cultural gap between Chinese and Western civilizations. As a subject of practical, applied studies as well as an academic discipline of theoretical research, translation studies is essential to the development of the Hong Kong

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society as an international financial and commercial centre and a meeting place of Eastern and Western cultures. (Chan, 2001: ix) Secondly, Chinese and English, the two official languages of Hong Kong, are the most widely used languages in the world. According to some surveys, the primary and alternate speakers of the two languages reached approximately 1 billion speakers in 2000. Here in Hong Kong, Chinese, being the official language of the most populous nation on earth, and English, being the most widely used and studied language in the world, are used daily and ‘the two meet in almost every classroom and on every street corner in Hong Kong’ (Chan & Pollard, 1995/2001: xi). In addition, a large number of professionals are involved in translation between the two languages, including the Chinese Language Officers, court interpreters and police interpreters in the civil service, and financial translators and legal translators in the private sector. The experience and ideas that come from the use and translation of these two languages should contribute significantly to the study of translation. Thirdly, the percentage of tertiary institutions that offer undergraduate and postgraduate programs in translation in Hong Kong is probably the highest in the world (Chan & Pollard, 1995/2001: xii). Of the eight government-recognized universities and institutions, seven offer translation programs, 87.5% in total. The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Lingnan University have the Department of Translation, which offers degree programs in translation. Translation programs are also offered by the Department of Chinese of the University of Hong Kong, the Department of English of Hong Kong Baptist University, the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics of the City University of Hong Kong, the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the School of Arts and Social Sciences of the Open University of Hong Kong. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is the only university that does not have any program in translation. Graduates from these institutions form a strong workforce that makes Hong Kong a truly bilingual city. The above analysis provides the background against which the idea of proactive translation studies in Hong Kong can be studied from academic and practical perspectives. Proactive translation studies in Hong Kong: Academic considerations

One of the major academic issues relating to proactive translation studies is about the application of concepts in translation studies. Theoretical concepts in literary translation that have been drawn from

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language pairs other than Chinese and English have been widely introduced, hotly discussed, uncritically accepted and considered to be universally applicable, based on a certain degree of superficial similarity. Translation teachers with no or very little experience in literary or practical translation tend to believe in and champion most if not all of the ideas proposed by their peers in other parts of the world. It is true that translation is an interdiscipline that has been developed from a number of translation-related subjects (Snell-Hornby et al., 1994), but we have to proactively assess the validity and applicability of the concepts in a textspecific, language-specific and culture-specific context, with the understanding that some of the past attempts made by our fellow workers are simply well-intended mishaps. Text-specific considerations. The growing importance of practical texts: The types of texts that need to be translated for public consumption have undergone drastic changes in the last several decades. In the old days, documentary translation was mostly about literature and religious scriptures. Nowadays, more than 90% of the annual translation output is in the area of practical translation. To meet challenges in the future, text-specific theories for practical translation should be given special consideration. There is a general lack of attention to the theoretical issues relating to practical translation, as most practitioners hardly theorize, while scholars who theorize are not practical translators. The growing need of webpage translation: In the present age of information technology, we get the newest information from the Internet, some of which has to be translated for specific purposes (Austermu¨hl, 2001b: 38
51; Bergeron & Larsson, 1999: 22
25). Webpage translation is global, multilingual, electronic, voluminous and preferably instantaneous (Nesbitt, 1997: 20
21). The kinds of concerns and issues for webpage translators are different from those for literary translation. E-text translation is the growing trend and we need to look at it proactively and prepare ourselves, through research and training, for the new form of information presentation that will be the dominant format in the years to come. Language-specific considerations. A language, written or spoken, is deeply rooted in and evolved from the cultural tradition of its users. As translation is about contrastive study of the two languages concerned, issues specific to the language pair deserve the attention of translation scholars and linguists. But we should not simply concentrate on the language system, rather it is the language in use that is more important. Proactive translation studies means observing the linguistic changes

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taking place in the society, and working out translation strategies to deal with them. The language that is used in Hong Kong is under the influence of the English-speaking world as well as the languages of Asia, Japanese and Korean in particular. Proactive translation studies in Hong Kong: Regional considerations

Every region, including its own area and neighboring places, has its own concerns and issues, based on a number of factors. Proactive translation studies in a regional context is concerned about the volume of documents for translation, the size of the translation market, the number of languages to be translated and the training of translators to meet the market demand. Translation volume. Being a bilingual society, Hong Kong has a large volume of documents that have to be translated on a regular basis, mostly in the areas of law, government and finance. With China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, the demand for quality translation is not only local, but also regional and national. Locally, much work has been done in the financial field, especially relating to the translation of prospectuses and circulars for listed companies. Regionally, more and more companies want to provide bilingual or even multilingual information for public consumption. It is necessary to look into the changes in the amount of translation work that need to be done both locally and regionally, and take proactive measures to deal with these changes. Translation market. To meet challenges in the future, we have to study the size of the translation market in Hong Kong and in its neighboring regions. The SAR government has employed hundreds of translators and interpreters in the Official Languages Division, Department of Justice and Legislative Council. In the private sector, there are many translation agencies engaging in different types of translation activities. With seven tertiary institutions turning out hundreds of translation graduates, it is about time to conduct a survey on the translation market in Hong Kong to know the local demand for translation experts, the areas of concentration and the suitability of the program structures to meet the needs of the society. Languages of translation. The language pair that is taught in all the tertiary institutions in Hong Kong, as we have mentioned, has always been Chinese and English. As more and more Asian and Western international corporations move into this part of the world, and with the opening of the Disneyland entertainment park in September 2005, we have to study very seriously whether we need to offer multilingual

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training to our students to make Hong Kong a truly multilingual international city. We need to open up our linguistic horizons and venture into languages that are central to the development of Hong Kong, such as the Asian languages of Japanese and Korean and the European languages of French and German. Translator training. Closely related to the above concerns is the training of translators in Hong Kong. Pedagogically speaking, translation programs can design and plan their curricula according to certain goals they set. But academics should avoid making decisions that would cause disparities between translator training and the real world of translation practice (Li, 2001: 89
91). The issue is no longer one of more theory or less practice, more translation or less interpretation, or more Putonghua or less Cantonese. It is about training translators to meet the needs of tomorrow, involving the teaching of translation technology to speed up translation, the use of translation software to do multilingual translation, the application of translation memory systems in team translation, the globalization of translation service through the web, the search for information on the internet to keep up with the latest developments in various fields to gain the knowledge essential to produce quality translations in specialized areas. We have to look into the future, predict what is expected to happen, plan ahead and train translators who can meet future challenges with competence and confidence. I am aware that all of these are what proactive translation studies is all about. References Austermu¨hl, Frank (2001a) Electronic Tools for Translators. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing Company. Austermu¨hl, Frank (2001b) Translation and the Internet. In F. Austermu¨hl (ed.) Electronic Tools for Translators (pp. 38
51). Manchester: St. Jerome. Baker, Mona (1995) Corpora in translation studies: An overview and some suggestions for future research. Target 7 (2), 223
243. Baker, Mona (ed.) (1998) Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London/ New York: Routledge. Becker, Alton L. (1995) Beyond Translation: Essays towards a Modern Philology. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. Bennett, Paul (2003) The relevance of linguistics for machine translation. In H. Somers (ed.) Computers and Translation (pp. 143
160). Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bergeron, Manon and Susan Larsson (1999) Internet search strategies for translators. ATA Chronicle 28 (7), 22
25. Bowker, Lynne (2002) Computer-aided Translation Technology: A Practical Introduction. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.

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Chan, Sin-wai (1993) A Glossary of Translation Terms. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Chan, Sin-wai (2001) Translation in Hong Kong: Past, Present and Future. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Chan Sin-wai (ed.) (2002) Translation and Information Technology. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Chan, Sin-wai (2004) A Dictionary of Translation Technology. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Chan, Sin-wai and David E. Pollard (eds) (1995/2001) An Encyclopaedia of Translation: Chinese-English.English-Chinese. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Chan, Tak-hung, Leo (2001) Translation studies in Hong Kong-China and the impact of ‘‘new translation theories’’. In Chan Sin-wai (ed.) Translation in Hong Kong: Past, Present and Future (pp. 157
174). Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Classe, Olive (ed.) (2000) Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English. London/ Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. Delisle, Jean and Judith Woodsworth (eds) (1995) Translators Through History. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Delisle, Jean, Hannelore Lee-Jahnke and Monique C. Cormier (eds) (1999) Translation Terminology. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Granger, Sylviane, Jacques Lerot and Stephanie Petch-Tyson (eds) (2003) Corpusbased Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies. Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi. Kenny, Dorothy (1998) Corpora in translation studies. In M. Baker (ed.) Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (pp. 50
53). London/New York: Routledge. Larson, Mildred L. (1994) Translation and linguistic theory. In R.E. Asher (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (pp. 4685
4694). Oxford: Pergamon Press Ltd. Laviosa, Sara (2003) Corpora and the translator. In H. Somers (ed.) Computers and Translation: A Translator’s Guide (pp. 105
117). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Li, Defeng (2001) Translator training in Hong Kong: What professional translators can tell us. In Chan Sin-wai (ed.) Translation in Hong Kong: Past, Present and Future (pp. 85
95). Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Nesbitt, Scott (1997) Web translation made easy. MultiLingual Communications and Technology 8 (14), 20
21. Pearson, Jennifer (1996) Electronic text and concordances in the translation classroom. Teanga 16, 85
95. Robinson, Douglas (1991) The Translator’s Turn. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Rose, Marilyn Gaddis (1992) The hermeneutic turn. In E. Losa (ed.) Frontiers: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the American Translators Association (pp. 261
268). Medford, NJ: Learned Information Inc. Shuttleworth, Mark and Moira Cowie (1997) Dictionary of Translation Studies. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Snell-Hornby, Mary (1988/1995) Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Snell-Hornby, Mary (1990) Linguistic transcoding or cultural transfer? A critique of translation theory in Germany. In S. Bassnett and A. Lefevere (eds) Translation, History and Culture (pp. 79
86). London/New York: Pinter Publishers. Snell-Hornby, Mary, Franz Pochhacker and Klaus Kaindl (eds) (1994) Translation Studies: An Interdiscipline. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ulrych, Margherita (1997) The impact of multilingual parallel concordancing on translation. Practical Applications in Language Corpora: The Proceedings of PALC97 (pp. 421
435). Lo´dz´, Poland. Vasconcellos, Muriel (ed.) (1988) Technology as Translation Strategy. New York: State University of New York at Binghamton. Venuti, Lawrence (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London/New York: Routledge. Yang, Jin and Elke Lange (1998) Systran on Alta Vista: A user study on real-time machine translation on the Internet. In D. Farwell, L. Gerber and E. Hovy (eds) Machine Translation and the Information Soup (pp. 275
285). Berlin: Springer.

Chapter 12

Translating Alien Sources from and into Chinese: What does the Translator do, and why? HE YANJIAN

Introduction Based on a recent study on how Chinese discourses are translated into and from other languages, we have found that variation in language pairs, the translator is observed to employ four strategies in translating alien sources (i.e. information unique to the source system and thus non-accessible to the target system) in the following patterns (where ‘ ’ reads as ‘is used more than’): for fictional texts: paraphrasing  transcoding  substitution  deletion; for politically sensitive texts: transcoding  paraphrasing/deletion, with no substitution. ‘‘System’’ is defined as a speech community and its associated cultures. In this chapter, I investigate how such patterns are derived from the translated texts and how they may be determined by any cognitive mechanisms behind them. In other words, I look into the distributional tendencies as to ‘which translating strategy is adopted more than another in translating which type of alien source, and in which type of text?’ In addition, a cognitive perspective may shed light on ‘why there are such strategies at all, vis-a`-vis none other?’

Alien Sources in Translation In translating, there are two types of source. One type is conceptually shared also by the target system (i.e. speech community and culture). There isn’t much of a problem to translate this type of source. For example, ‘I got up at eight this morning’ in English has a ready ’, and vice versa. transferable counterpart in Chinese ‘ In this case, there is no conceptual barrier between the English and the Chinese culture for the notion of ‘humans rise from sleep in bed at certain time in the morning’. Considerable conceptual barriers, however, are posed 207

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by sources that are only found in the source system, thus being foreign or alien to the target system. Alien sources do not as a rule have ready interpretations in the target system, and the translator has to face the issue of how to translate them all the time. They fall roughly into two categories, covering a wide spectrum from which an alien source can be named. Category One: artifacts. For example, artifacts of history, geography, nationhood, ethnicity, costume, cookery, architecture, music, art, martial arts, folklore, religion, ideology, politics, government, law, electoral system, particular ways of daily living such as staple food and drink, and many others. Category Two: particular ways of perceiving and measuring the world. For example, perceiving ‘a stone’ rather than ‘an arrow’ hitting two birds at the same time, or vice versa; perceiving ‘no purpose of cooking is served without flour’ rather than ‘without rice’, or vice versa. Artifacts reflect on the physical, observable or recorded objects of the world, and the perceptual measurement of the world is related to the cognitive patterns, or the mental or notional processes, of people in a given culture. And the two categories, artifactual and cognitive, may influence one another. The issue of alien source transfer is not new, but rather as old as translation has ever existed. Scholars advocate different approaches. Nida (1964), for instance, suggests that when translating such sources, one must be ‘dynamic’ enough, so as to achieve what he calls ‘dynamic equivalence’. For example (Nida 1964: 159
160): (1)

a.

Traveling over waves in a sea voyage [ Traveling over swamps in a desert trip

b.

Greet one another with a holy kiss [ Give one another a hearty handshake all round

‘ [ ’ means ‘is translated into’. These examples clearly indicate a process of ‘concept substitution’, as Reiss (1971/2000: 42) and Beekman and Callow (1974) point out. Namely, the source concept is being replaced by a home-grown concept from the target system. For literary scholars like van Den Broeck (1981), concept/imagery substitution best illustrates the limits of translatability. For others, it helps achieve functionally oriented cross-cultural communication (Basil, 1997;

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Nord, 1997, 2005), or facilitate ideological shifts from source to target (Mason, 1994: 23) or shape typological shifts between source and target (Toury, 1980; Basil & Mason, 1991; Schaffner, 1997; Trosborg, 1997). In early Chinese offerings of foreign religions, Chinese concepts were used to substitute alien ones (Chu, 2006, 2009), e.g. (2)

a.

Siddhartha Gautama Buddha [ man)

b.

Holy Mother [

(very capable Confucius

(the emperor’s mother in Heaven)

Even Buddha was used to replace the Pope: (3)

The Pope [

(the highest Buddha)

The reason probably being that Buddhism came to China much earlier and had become part of the Chinese ethos when Christianity was knocking on the door. In addition to substitution, paraphrasing, trans-coding and deletion in the offer. Wong (1997) observes all four strategies in the English translation of Chinese martial art fictions:1 (4)

a.

Paraphrasing:

(jade belt round waist) [ the whip forms a great whirling loop, coiling itself around the opponent’s waist

b.

Substitution:

(river lake) [ Brotherhood

c.

Trans-coding:

(white snake spit tongue) [ Spitting Snake

d.

Deletion:

(move/pose pattern) [ move/Ø

‘Ø’ means ‘no translation’. Here, ‘ ’, meaning ‘martial arts fighting movements’, is sometimes rendered simply as ‘move’, but mostly as nothing. The closer the TT (target text) can bring itself to the ST (source

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text) in cultural gaps, Wong (1997: 120) believes, there is more ‘dynamic equivalence’ between them. But how such ‘closeness’ can be measured or gauged is not mentioned. According to Sun (2004: 216
218), deletion is necessary for ‘redundant source cultures’. For example, (sink fish fall wild swan, close moon shy flower)

(5)

[ stunningly beautiful The two Chinese idioms describing female beauty (someone so beautiful that her beauty could even make fish sink to the bottom of the river, flying swans fall from the sky, the moon go away and flowers whither) are simply paraphrased as ‘stunningly beautiful’. For Sun (2004), this is already sufficient for the target reader, thus, in effect, deleting the source in its metaphorical sense. Deletion and trans-coding can be exploited to the extreme. Hermans (2004, 2007) reported that in certain translated religious texts, physical blanks are left in the TT for original passages expressing sensual pleasures, or original passages themselves appear in the TT, as if they were cut and pasted, for words of God/Prophets. From the target receptor point of view, substitution results in domestication, trans-coding in foreignization and paraphrasing or deletion in neutralization (cf. Venuti, 1995). In short, all four strategies reflect a mental process that strives to reach a conceptual equilibrium in crosscultural transfer of indigenous cultures between source and target.

Patterns for Translating Alien Sources As shown in the previous section, an alien source can be translated by any of the four strategies mentioned above: (6)

Deletion:

No translation

Paraphrasing:

Go for the meaning

Substitution:

Replace the alien source with a home-grown counterpart

Trans-coding:

Literal translation following SL (source language) forms, with or without an accompanying annotation

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Take for example how a Chinese idiom could be translated into English: (7)

Deletion:

(escape sheep mend pen) [ Ø

Paraphrasing:

[ never too late to mend one’s ways

Substitution:

[ lock up the stable after horses bolted

Trans-coding:

[ mend the pen after sheep escaped

By deletion, the idiom is not translated at all and we may assume that the context in which the idiom appears will make up for it. By paraphrasing, the underlying meaning of the idiom is rendered, but not the carrier
sheep escaped and the pen was mended. By substitution, the source idiom is replaced by an English counterpart. By trans-coding, the SL form is trans-coded into its TL (target language) counterpart, leaving the target reader to figure out what it might mean. The translator may or may not provide an annotation if trans-coding is offered. If there is one, it could be something on the lines of ‘This is a Chinese idiom depicting a man mends a faulty pen whence his sheep escaped, implying that the sooner a mistake is corrected, the better’. But it seems entirely up to the translator’s judgment whether an annotation is appropriate. In the data we collected (see below), footnotes are not common. But elsewhere in the Chinese translation of the classical Japanese novel by Lin Wen Yue (1975
1978), Yuanshi Wuyu (The Tale of Genji), the translator provided over 70 footnotes in the first chapter alone, reduced to over 50 in a later edition (1982
1983), mostly for cases of trans-coding (He, 2001).2 The crucial question is: are there any distributional tendencies as to which strategy is adopted more than another in translating which type of alien source, or in which type of text? To answer the question, we have collected systematic sets of examples from parallel bilingual corpora: three sets of C-E translations; two sets of E-C translations from the same source. For the benefit of those readers without prior knowledge of Chinese, an English glossing is provided for all the Chinese data, some in the main text and most in the Appendix to save space. The white papers We collected 150 examples of Chinese political and ideological notions and their English translation from a parallel bilingual corpus containing

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36 Chinese government white papers and their English translations (from Chinese government websites). Conceptually, these notions are alien to the English-speaking world at large. Among the 150 examples, there is one without any English translation: (strengthen propaganda intensity) [ Ø

(8)

And one example is paraphrased: (9)

(three big mountain) [ imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism

The remaining 148 instances are all trans-coded, with some of the following examples: VO construction across source and target:

(10) a.

[ build socialism with Chinese characteristics b. [ upholds the absolute leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) c. [ complete the socialist transformation of agriculture, handicraft industry and capitalist industry and commerce

Modifier-head construction across source and target:

(11) a.

[ state or collective enterprises b.

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[ leaders of party committees and government departments c. [ deputies of people’s congresses; members of political consultative conference committees; the youth league; the women’s league

Clause constructions across source and target:

(12) a.

[ In the semi-feudal, semi-colonial China of the past, prisons were tools of the feudal, bureaucratic and comprador classes who used them to persecute and slaughter revolutionaries and the oppressed people b. [ After the founding of the People’s Republic, the people’s government established a new type of socialist prison The trans-coded examples, as we can see, invariably lack semantic coherence compared to the source. In (12), for instance, the average English reader would find it difficult to comprehend what a ‘socialist prison’ is in the first place, let alone a ‘new type of it’. Such semantic incoherence is caused by, as de Groot (1997) has argued, a lack of conceptual mediation between source and target in terms of cognitive processing. And a lack of conceptual mediation between source and target is the salient feature of trans-coding. The fortress besieged This English text is translated by J. Kelly and N.K. Mao (1979) from the Chinese novel Wei Cheng by Ch’ien Chung-shu (1947/1991).3 The Chinese original and its English translation are made into a parallel corpus, from which a total of 89 translations of Chinese

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cultural expressions are collected.4 Among the 89 translations, 42 are via trans-coding, 33 are by paraphrasing and 14 by substitution. Examples are: Transfer by trans-coding, with no notes provided:

(13) a.

[ We just weren’t meant to ‘raise the bowl to the eyebrows’. (‘ ’ is paraphrased as ‘not meant to’.) b. [ Even now he still hasn’t gotten away from the styles of Huang Chung-tse and Kung Ting-an of the Ch’ien-lung and Chia-ch’ing periods. I started right off writing in the style of the T’ung chih and Kuang-hsu periods. c. [ Li lamented that it was as unnecessary as wearing brocaded clothes at night . . .

Transfer by paraphrasing:

(14) a.

[ I wish you immediate success. b. [ spend all day beating the bush trying to flatter her, . . . (‘

’ is substituted as ‘beating the bush’;)

c. [ crammed for an examination . . .

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Transfer by substitution:

(15) a.

[ This may be a blessing in disguise. b. [ You are nothing but an armchair strategist. c.

! [ Everything is figured out to the last nickel!

Again, trans-coding appears to be the most frequently used method in this particular Chinese-English translation, while paraphrasing ranks the second most frequently used method, followed by substitution, which is not found in white papers. The story of the sword This is the English translation (by Graham Enshaw, 2004) from the Chinese martial arts novel Shu Jian Enchou Lu (Louis Cha, 1975).5 A total of 122 Chinese concepts and their English translations are extracted, many related to expressing Chinese martial arts.6 Among the translations, 82 are found paraphrased, 33 deleted and 7 trans-coded. For example: Transfer by paraphrasing:

(16) a.

[ Dispatching a general on a mission isn’t as effect as challenging him to do it as a mission impossible, . . . b. [ (She was) eager for a history lesson. ’ are deleted.) (‘ c. [ ‘You pick things up very quickly. It is fitting that I should teach you this kind of kung fu’.

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Transfer by deletion:

(17) a.

[ There’s probably no one better at Black Sand Palm kungfu than those two. (‘ ’ are deleted; ‘ ’ is trans-coded.) b. [ Ø (No translation at all for this sentence.) c. [ Amidst the group, he noticed a graceful young girl, dazzlingly beautiful, dressed in yellow robes and riding a ’ black horse. (‘ are deleted.)

Transfer by trans-coding, without notes:

(18) a.

[ Another two years passed as Lu taught Yuanzhi the Soft Cloud Sword Technique and the secret of the Golden Needles. b. [ the old principle that ‘small crooks hide in the wilderness, middling crooks in the city and big crooks in officialdom’, . . . c. [jumped across with a leap known as ‘Swallow Gliding Over Water’ . . . (‘ ’ is paraphrased as ‘jumped across with a leap’.)

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The 33 instances of deletion amounts to nearly a quarter of the total number of examples we examined. This seems to reflect the difficulty of translating any Chinese martial arts concept at all into another language. The fact that there is no substitution in the translation also points to this difficulty. Namely, it is probably hard to come up with conceptual substitution in English for Chinese martial arts notions, and if the translator could not make sense of them by either paraphrasing or transcoding them, deletion is perhaps a handy option.

The Da Vinci code For this English fiction (Dan Brown, 2003), there are two Chinese renditions (Zhu et al., 2004, Shanghai; You, C.L., 2004, Taipei). Two separate corpora were thus built with each Chinese translation and the original, respectively. From the corpora, a total of 69 instances of English and European cultural concepts are collected, together with their Chinese translations from two separate Chinese texts. In one case (Zhu et al., 2004), 35 European cultural concepts are found trans-coded with no annotations provided, 21 substituted and 13 paraphrased. In the other case (You, C.L., 2004), 36 European cultural concepts are found transcoded with 11 annotations, 22 substituted and 11 paraphrased. Examples are:7 (19)

Transfer by trans-coding, with/without notes: (a) when did the tail start wagging the dog? (Zhu)

[ [ (You)

(b) Sophie questioned whether she had done the right thing by cornering him here in the men’s room. (Zhu)

[ [

(You)

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218

(c) I was looking forward to picking his brain. (Zhu)

[

(You) (‘

[ is a substitution.)

’ is trans-coding; ‘

’

Transfer by paraphrasing:

(20) a.

where they received nothing more than a slap on the wrist. (Zhu)

[

(You)

[ b.

And Fache is a man who wears only the finest shirts. (Zhu)

[

‘lost his shirt’ ) (You) (‘ ’ is also a ’ is trans-coding.)

[ substitution; ‘ c.

trying to shake off the cobwebs of sleep. [

(Zhu)

[

(You)

Transfer by substitution:

(21) a.

It’s your circus. [ [

b.

(Zhu) (You)

Sophie felt a knot tighten in her stomach.

Translating Alien Sources from and into Chinese

(Zhu)

[

(You)

[ c.

219

Most likely, some religious scholar had trailed him home to pick a fight. (Zhu)

[

(You)

[

As we see, the patterns in which the two Chinese translated texts deal with the European cultural concepts are very similar to each other, both showing the pattern of trans-coding  substitution  paraphrasing, with slight variations and with one text providing some annotations for trans-coded passages. This seems to suggest that multiple translations converge on translating strategies for alien sources from the source text.

Translating patterns To sum up, five collections of data present a total of 497 instances of alien source and their translations, either from Chinese into English or vice versa. Specifically, to repeat, 150 instances are drawn from white papers and 347 from fictions, the latter of which include two renditions of a same source (The Da Vinci Code). The data in relation to how the alien sources are translated warrant the statistics shown in Figure 12.1 and Figure 12.2. 160 140 120 100

Dele: 1/0.7%

80

Para: 1/0.7%

60

Trans: 148/98.6%

40 20 0

Total:

150

/100%

Figure 12.1 Translating pattern in white papers

Translating China

220 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0

Para: 139/41% Trans: 120/36% Sub: 57//18% Dele: 13/5% Total:

347

/100%

Figure 12.2 Translating pattern in fictions

Two descriptive generalizations can be drawn from the charts. Firstly, the overwhelming use of trans-coding in translating white papers indicates that such texts are of a sensitive nature, i.e. they belong to the category of sensitive documents, sensitive precisely because the semantic core of this type of text conveys alien sources of one type or another, political and ideological ones in this case. The translator presumably did not have much freedom to paraphrase, substitute or delete the alien sources, and thus had very little choice other than trans-coding them. Secondly, on the other hand, he/she has more room to maneuver for alien sources that occur in fictions, and appears to have manifested the pattern or tendency of deploying translating strategies as follows: Paraphrasing  Trans-coding  Substitution  Deletion (again, ‘ ’ reads as ‘is used more than’). In the next section, I will try to interpret these patterns from a cognitive perspective, which views translating as a cognitive bilingual process.

A Cognitive Perspective Assuming in theory with Holmes (1978/1988) and de Groot (1997) that the translator is the ideal reader-writer and the ideal bilingual and bi-cultural in taking on the task of translating, the key phase in the translating process is what is previously referred to as conceptual mapping or conceptual mediation between source and target, in the sense that a coherent semantics of the target text is derived from that of the source text, while the syntax of the source text is completely lost in the process (de Groot, 1997). The three phases of translating may be illustrated as in Figure 12.3 (cf. Holmes, 1978/1988; de Groot, 1997).

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221

The inner language faculty of the translator takes care of decoding and encoding, and the conceptual-intentional system in his/her brain is presumably where the conceptual mediation between source and target takes place. Then, the issue of alien sources invokes the question of what happens in conceptual mediation. We assume that the human cognitive systems are organized as in Figure 12.4 (cf. Pinker, 1999, Chomsky, 1995, 2000). Figure 12.4 illustrates how the major components of the cognitive systems may be interrelated for the purpose of bilingual processing, such as translation. One point worth noting is that the memory systems are presumably related to the rest of the constituting systems. The same systems are used for both incoming processing, i.e. the source speech or text, and outgoing processing of the same, i.e. the target speech or text. Depending on which sensor-motor systems are used, there is a switch between translation and interpreting. Questions are Incoming Processing (Decoding) – Translator as Reader FormS-to-ConceptS Conceptual Mediation (Mapping) – Translator as Deriver ConceptS-to-ConceptT Outgoing Processing (Encoding) – Translator as Writer ConceptT-to-FormT

Figure 12.3 The three phases in translating

Source Text

Target Text

Articulatory-Perceptual System phonetic analogues

phonological analogues Language Faculty

meaning analogues

concept-intent-analogues

Conceptual-Intentional System Memory Systems

Figure 12.4 Human cognitive systems for translation/interpreting

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sometimes raised about whether the language faculty is ‘partitioned’ for the source and the target language system. So far, there is no evidence that this is the case, though bilingual speakers may appear to be more asymmetrically represented in their language performance (Paradis, 2002: 19
20). In light of the organization of the human cognitive systems as well as the fact that source form decoding must precede source-target conceptual mediation, which is then followed by target form encoding, translating/ interpreting should, in theory, involve two processing routes, as illustrated in Figure 12.5. Normal processing ought to operate in all cases of translating where there is source-target conceptual mediation, thus deriving a coherent semantics of the target text from the source text. Exceptional processing applies to memory-based encoding only, which implies an absence of source-target conceptual mediation. Such a situation often occurs in simultaneous interpreting, where target verbalizations could be produced in such rapid procession, e.g. they are out even before the completion of the incoming speeches, that the time span between hearing and speaking is so short that there is no time for conceptual mediation between source and target. In cases like this, the larger the stock of source-target form pairings the interpreter has stored in memory, the better-skilled he/she is, or the stronger his/her cognitive signature is (Paradis, 1994, 2004). In translation, there is usually sufficient time for source-target conceptual mediation to take place before target encoding. As a result, even when trans-coding takes place, it is likely to be the outcome of a deliberate strategy of the translator, e.g. copying the source form into the target text, and therefore can hardly be attributed to memory-based encoding. So far, there is only circumstantial evidence for memory-based trans-coding (Eskola, 2001; He, 2004, 2006, 2007). S-Decoding

S-T Form-Pairing

S-T Conceptual Mediation

T-Encoding

Normal processing route: LFS

CIS

Exceptional processing route: LFS

Figure 12.5 Two processing routes of translation

LFT MS LFT

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B

A

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C

Figure 12.6 The conceptual-intentional system compartmentalization

To understand the way the conceptual-intentional system may deal with source-target conceptual mediation, particularly when an alien source is involved, let us assume that the system is as it were ‘compartmentalized’ in three sections, as in Figure 12.6. Technically, something is interpretable to us when it invokes a mental representation in the conceptual-intentional system, be it in Section A/B/C. When a source concept-intent is also interpretable to the target conceptualization (as is realized by the target speech community and culture), it is presumably represented in Section A, where, in this case, the source-target conceptual mediation takes place. After conceptual mediation, the now target concept-intent will then be verbalized via the language faculty, eventually producing the target text. However, where an alien source is involved, it is interpretable only to the source conceptualization (as is realized by the source speech community and culture), but non-interpretable to the target conceptualization. Then, the source-target conceptual mediation could yield only four outcomes in terms of target verbalization. Firstly, the mediation stops due to a lack of mutual representation between source and target and the system simply gives up target verbalization, resulting in deletion in target text. Secondly, a mutual representation is recognized by using a homegrown target entity (presumably from Section C) to replace the source, giving out a substitute in verbalization. Thirdly, where the source has an underlying meaning (apart from its formal semantics), mediation could be achieved by interpreting this underlying meaning to the benefit of the target conceptualization, thus neutralizing the source and producing its paraphrased target version. Fourthly, mediation is based entirely on the formal semantics of the source text, which will produce a source-formoriented target verbalization, i.e. trans-coding. This is how we may understand the way alien sources are negotiated over the conceptual-intentional system in a cognitive manner, and I believe that such an analysis is on the right track of probing how translation strategies like deletion, paraphrasing, substitution and trans-coding that

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we observe in real translations as we have seen before may be at work in translation. Cognitively speaking, those strategies are none other than the outcomes of the covert cognitive operations. This offers us a different angle from any traditional view to understand the nature of those strategies. The most important issue is to realize is that they are not at all random, ad hoc or piece meal, but rather manifestations of the translator’s cognitive operations. Certainly, underlying cognition includes more than conceptual mediations, and extends to bilingual performance in all aspects. The translating patterns in relation to how translating strategies may be deployed also reflect a relative priority system of language-cognition performance, where pragmatics is at work too. For instance, given the fact that the task of translating is to get what there is in the source text verbalized as much as possible in the target text, it is not always a viable option to give up verbalization whenever there is an alien source; or to use a potential substitute that may not be acceptable to the context; or to weigh up between paraphrasing and trans-coding for the purpose of the production. The fact that we have two patterns of deploying these cognitive strategies indicates that pragmatic factors do play a part. There remains a lot to be better understood in future researches, with the help of largesize bilingual parallel corpora and possibly functional MRI into the study of the cognitive process of translation.

Concluding Remarks The working translator usually develops ingenuous and entrenched ways to treat a good number of text types, as well as tactics of sorting out individual texts. The more experienced he/she is, the faster he/she comes up with a strategy to solve a particular problem, by cognitively going through various options, even memory accessible form-pairings. Despite the variations in language pairs and in text typology, the question is how we may understand the translational cognition/ psychology that goes on in the brain of the translator. This can only be gradually achieved within the realm of empirical studies on translation competence and performance (Holmes, 1988; Nida, 1993; de Groot, 1997; Bell, 1998; Paradis, 1994, 2004; Shreve, 1997, 2006, among others). What I have offered in the current study is to take the commonly recognized translating strategies as the cognitive signatures that the translator has left in the target text, and try to use them as the window to view what might be at work during the translating process, focusing on how alien sources might be negotiated into the target verbalization. In

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addition, I believe that the biological and functional make-up of the human cognitive systems is universal, and the conditions and constraints the systems impose on the translating process are also universal. How alien sources may be processed is just one factor for us to gain some insight into how the translational cognition/psychology goes on in the brain of the translator. Such researches will be particularly beneficial to the changing landscape of translator training. For instance, any method of cognitively building up memory stocks across source and target should be pursued proactively in programs training interpreters. In programs training translators, the strategic patterns we have observed earlier for processing alien sources could be taken as principled cues in developing teaching materials and measuring learning progress. The reason is simple. Vis-a`vis alien sources, sources that are shared also across target do not pose as complex cognitive challenges, but simply a matter of applying bilingual knowledge (e.g. syntax and lexicon). The challenge begins only when the student starts to face alien sources. As we know, the traditional wisdom and practice in language teaching/learning is to put as much effort as possible in actual translating. The practical drive is that the more translation one does, the better one’s new language skills will become. There is an element of truth in it precisely for the cognition behind it. Namely, translating requires and thus develops bilingual awareness as well as conceptual mediation between source and target, particularly when alien sources are at work. But the indiscriminating technique of training also often lends support to the notion that translating is all intuition and needs no methodology to teach it. But at least we now know, based on the strategic patterns for translating alien sources we observe from real translations, that there is a cognitive demarcation as to where the language learner ends and the translator takes over. The translator is the one who can better handle the issue of alien sources, though he/she may level with the language learner in other aspects of bilingual processing (e.g. same syntactic and lexical knowledge). This suggests that we need to make alien sources a focal point of translation teaching and learning, so as to depart from training methods undistinguishable, though sometimes inevitable, from language learning. This departure gives us a practical sense of where and what to look for in the vast sea of translated works and references, be you a researcher or a teacher, and will lead to fresh insight into translation training. Needless to say, research will continue.

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Notes 1. The source is Jin Yong’s (also known as Louis Cha) Lu Ding Ji (Hong Kong: Minghe, 1995, originally 1969
1972), translated into English (The Deer and the Cauldron: The Adventures of a Chinese Trickster) by John Minford (Canberra: Institute of Advanced Studies, Australian National University, 1994; reprinted from East Asian History 5). 2. Yuanshi Wuyu (The Tale of Genji) was translated by Lin Wen Yue and published by the Foreign Literatures Monthly, Taipei, 1974
1978. 3. Ch’ien Chung-shu’s Wei Cheng (The Fortress Besieged) was first published in 1947 and then by the Sichuan Literature Press, Chengdu, 1991. The English translation by J. Kelly and N.K. Mao was published by the Indiana University Press in 1979. 4. The data is collected by Ge Lingling, a PhD candidate at my department. 5. Jin Yong, also known as Louis Cha, published Shu Jian Enchou Lu (The Story of the Sword) in 1975 (Hong Kong: Minghe), and its English version, by Graham Enshaw, was published by the Oxford University Press in 2004. 6. The data is collected by Alan Tan, an MPhil candidate at my department. 7. The data is collected by Zhao Xin, an M.Phil. graduate in my department. The original styles of Chinese characters, the simplified style in Zhu et al. (2004) and the traditional style in You (2004), are preserved for original authenticity.

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Jerome Publishing and the American Bible Society (first published in German in 1971, E.F. Rhodes, trans.). Schaffner, Christina (1997) Strategies of translating political texts. In A. Trosborg (ed.) Text Typology and Translation (pp. 119
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87. Venuti, L. (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge. Wong, K.P. Laurence (1997) Is marital arts fiction in English possible? With reference to John Minford’s English version of the first two chapters of Louis Cha’s Luding Ji. In Liu Ching-chih et al. (eds) The Question of Reception: Martial Arts Fiction in English Translation (pp. 105
124). Hong Kong: Centre for Literature and Translation, Lingnan College.

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Appendix: English Glossing for Chinese Data (part.  particle, asp.  aspect, ba preposition) (10)

a. build have China characteristics part. socialism b. uphold China Communist Party part. absolute leadership c. complete-asp. to agriculture handicraft industry and capitalist industry commerce part. socialist transformation

(11)

a. state enterprise and collective enterprise b. various level party committees government department leader c. people’s congresses deputies; political consultative conference member; youth league; women’s league

(12)

a. at semi-feudal, semi-colonial part. China, prison be feudal, bureaucratic and comprador classes persecute and slaughter revolutionaries and oppressed people tool b. New China found after, people government establish-asp. part. new socialist prison

(13)

a. we not have ‘raise bowl level eyebrow’ part. fortune b. he to now still not rid Huang, Kung those Ch’ien-lung Chia-ch’ing hapit, I once start begin thus do part. T’ung Kuang style c. Li sigh he clothes bright night walk

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Appendix: English Glossing for Chinese Data (Continued) (14)

a. wish two horse arrive succeed b. turn round smack others half day horse bottom c. face exams embrace Buddha feet

(15)

a. old man lost horse, not know not fortune b. you be paper on talk battle c.

! one-five-one-ten do what b

(16)

a. send general not like challenge general b. morning teacher finish-asp. Zizhitongjian on ‘Chibi battle’ part. a passage, talk-asp. some Zhu Geliang, Zhou Yu part. story c. you intelligence, learn my school of kung fu ever good not-asp.

(17)

a. they be Qingcheng School Luhui Master’s student. Luhui Master once die, Black Sand Palm part. kungfu, river-lake-on most not person at them two on. This two brother be Sichuan river on famous part. bandit b. this five year in, Li ba gold needle, sword skill, light skill, fist skill, all learn, less part. thus be degree not to, experience not enough c. that girl sweet in -asp. one-cl. brave, bright shine people, real be

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Appendix: English Glossing for Chinese Data (Continued) (18)

a. further pass two year more, Lu ba Soft Cloud Sword Technique and Golden Needle also teach her b. ‘big hide at court, middle hide at city, small hide at wild’ notion . . . c. raise breath one-cl. ‘swallow three glide water’ . . .

(19)

a.

(Zhu) tail when begin wag dog part. (You) when begin tail can wag dog part.

b.

(Zhu) she begin suspect ba him force to male toilet corner, if appropriate act (You) Sophie self ask ba him lure come toilet stuck at here if correct

c.

(Zhu) I expect see able dig his brain (You) I plan from his body pick tooth food

(20)

a.

(Zhu) but at US they only receive slight part. punishment (You) at US, this crime only receive slight punishment

b.

(Zhu) but Fache be most need face, most not conceit part. person (You) but Fache be that kind only wear top-quality shirt part. person

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Appendix: English Glossing for Chinese Data (Continued) c.

(Zhu) meantime also try drive away sleep (You) want drive away full-brain sleep

(21)

a.

(Zhu) this be your trick (You) you have-to self deal this-cl. hot potato part

b.

(Zhu) Sophie feel heart being grabbed more tightly part (You) Sophie feel as if stomach in made a knot

c.

(Zhu) most likely be have religious scholars come seek trouble part (You) most possible part. be, some religious scholars all-way follow him return hotel, want seek him quarrel

Index Subjects alienation effect 104 Arabic translation 194 articulatory-perceptual system 221 authentic interpretation 163 automatic translation 192, 194 Bactria 53 Barlaam and Iosaphat 82 bible translation 159, 190 bilingual information 203 bilingual processing 221ff, 225 bilingual society 203 Buddhism 16-18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 27, 41-42, 44, 46, 47-48, 49, 52, 53-55, 61, 64, 65, 133, 142, 209 Cathay 23, 112-118, 122, 167 Chinese modernity 136-137, 142, 144-145, 146, 150, 152-153 Chinese national identity 14, 16, 36 Chineseness 14, 27, 36, 97, 98 Christian missionaries 21, 26 classical Chinese poetry 101, 107, 110, 112119, 121-122 cliché translation 194 commedia 84 communication science 198-199 communicative approach 197 computational linguistics 192, 194 computer translation 189-192, 194, 196 conceptual mediation 220, 222 concordancer 190 Confucius (Confucian, Confucianism) 15, 17, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 32, 33, 35 cooperative translation models 110-117 corpus-based translation studies 189 court interpreter 201 cultural equivalent 197 cultural gap 54, 200, 210 cultural identity 13, 157 cultural turn 95, 171, 191 Damascene 82

database 190 ‘De Vento et Sole’ 71 Decalogue 90 deletion 207, 209, 210, 211, 216, 217, 220, 223 dictation tool 190 discourse 34, 95, 99, 106, 107, 108, 136, 148, 152, 168, 170, 172, 174, 179-182, 186 displacement 137, 145 document processing 190 documentary translation 202 domestication 45, 49, 111, 117, 157, 159, 210 Equilibrium 210 e-text translation 202 field of consciousness 104, 105 financial translator 201 focal points of translation 28ff. foreignization 157, 161, 164, 168, 210 forward-looking approach 199 hermeneutic approach 191 hermeneutics 198-199 Hinayana compendium 20 hybridization 137, 138, 141 imitation 130 information processing 192, 194 information technology 202 informational translation 190 intercultural communication 157 intertextuality 103, 105-6 intervention 171, 172, 173, 177-183, 185 Jesuit translation activities 16, 26, 27 Jiren Shi Pian (JSP) 72, 74, 75, 76, 79, 80, 84, 86, 91 Karashahr 64, 65 Kashgar 53, 64 Koushu-biyi model 111 legal translator 201

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234 linguistic and cultural diversity 15 linguistic approach 191 literary translation 131, 190, 194, 199, 201-202 machine translation 192, 194-197 manipulation 130, 131 May Fourth Movement 28ff., 30, 33, 34 mediation 171, 172, 173, 183-184, 185 metaphase 130 multilingual translation 204 national identity 14, 16, 36 neutralization 210 new terminology 126, 129 Non-Chinese translation 16 online dictionary 190 oral interpreting 15 Orientalism 98, 105-8 the Other 171, 173, 174, 183 ‘pair-work’ cooperation 110, 112, 122 paraphrase 130 parlance 52, 54, 55, 66, 67, 69 parsing 192, 194 Parthamasiris 42-46 philological approach 190 physiologurs 76, 92 political novels 124, 126, 131, 133 postmodernism 137, 145, 148, 149 practical translation 194-195, 199, 202 proactive translation studies 189, 196, 200-204 religious text 190 representation 171, 172, 173-177, 182, 183, 185 resignification 137, 138, 141 rewriting 130, 132, 157, 164 Rupa 67 sameness 163, 164, 165, 166, 170

Translating China the Self 171, 172, 174 semantic incoherence 213 status of translation 14, 17, 19 substitution 210, 215, 218 subtitle 194, 199 target verbalization 222, 223, 224 terminology17, 48, 49, 55, 126, 127, 128, 129, 192, 194 text-specific context 202 text type 190, 224 textual analysis 190 Tianzhu Shiyi (TZSY) 73, 81, 83, 87, 93 Tocharian A/B 54, 61, 64, 65 trans-coding 209-211, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 222, 223, 224 translation agency 151, 203 translation approach 21, 29, 31, 167 translation gloss 63 66 translation Sinicization 68 translation memory system 190, 204 translation process 14, 21, 27ff, 100, 115, 116, 138 translation-related discipline 197, 198, 199 translation research 14, 33, 36, 183, 184 translation software 204 translation strategy 45, 50, 166 translation studies 36, 48, 95, 106, 107, 110, 135, 158, 171, 182, 184, 189, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 197, 199-201, 203, 204 translation teaching 194, 195, 225 translation technology 189-190, 192, 194, 196, 204 translation tool 176, 190 translational authenticity 157, 158, 162, 163 transliteration 43, 52, 55, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 67, 68 webpage translation 202 Western civilization 13, 33 Western learning 16, 23, 27, 28, 29, 30

Authors Abel 87 Abraham 87 Aesop 75, 78 Ai Qing 34 Aleni, Giulio (or Ai Rulue) 72, 92, 79, 80 Alexander, M. 112 An Shigao 16 Andreyev, Leonid 33 Aristotle 35

Ba Jin 34 Babbitt, Irvin 33 Babrius 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 84, 85 Balzac, Honoré de 31, 34 Barlaam and Iosaphat 82 Bassnett-McGuire, Susan 14 Bloom, Harold 72, 74, 88, 91, 92 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George 31 Byron, George Gordon 32

235

Index Cao Yu 34 Cao Baohua 35 Cervantes, Miguel de 31, 35 Chekov, Anton 33 Chen Duxiu 32, 136, 144 Clavius, Christopher 25, 26, 38 Crane, Thomas Frederick 75, 76, 82 Crouzel, Henri 83 Cuddon, John Anthony 88 Culler, Jonathan 90 Curley, M.J. 76, 87 Dai Wangshu 34 Dante 84, 166 Dao’an 42, 56, 57, 59 Daudet, Alphonse 33 De Francis, John 15 de Man, Paul 139, 154 Defoe, Daniel 31, 144 Derrida, Jacques 76, 80, 90 Diaz, Emmanuel (or Yang, Manuo) 87, 94 Dong Qiusi 34 Dostoevsky, Fedor 33 Douglas, Robinson 175, 191 Dreiser, Theodore 33, 35 Dunne, Goerge H. 90, 92 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 35 Encheiridion, or Ershiwu Yan 79, 80, 93 Eoyang, Eugene 13, 99 Fa Xian 54, 57, 58 Fenollosa, Ernest 112, 116, 167 Feng Menglong 89 Fiction Monthly 126, 132 Foucault, Michel 72, 164, 181 Fu Lei 34 Galsworthy, John 33, 34 Ge Baoquan 34, 92 Gentzler, Edwin 54, 55, 65, 66, 171 Gernet, Jacques 23, 80 Giles, Herbert 15, 16, 18, 35 Gladys Yang 35, 111 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, von 32, 33, 35, 145 Gospel of John 90 Guo Moruo 32, 34, 110, 122, 161 Habermas, Jürgen 153 Haggard, Henry Rider 31 Hart, Roger 23 Hatim, Basil 13 Hegel, Georg Friedrich 33, 35 Heine, Heinrich 35

Henderson, Arnord Clayton 78 Horace 84 Hu Shi 136 144, 145 Jesus 73, 88-91 Kumaraj§va 17, 18, 19, 46, 47-49, 56, 60, 68 Lamb, Charles 31, 144 Lancashire, Douglas 73, 81, 83, 84 Lao She 34 Lefevere, André 2, 9, 67, 142, 171 Legge, James 35, 167 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 35 Liang Qichao 15, 29, 48, 124-133, 144, 145 Lin Shu 29-32, 67, 111, 130, 136, 144, 167, 169 Li Oufan 81, 93 Li Zhizao 24, 25, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 91 Lin Zexu 143 Liu Xie 19 Lokaksin 44, 45, 46 Louie, Kam 32 Loyang Qielan Ji 55, 56, 63, 64, 65, 68 Lu Hsun 81 Lü Cheng 15, 17, 42, 44, 45, 46 Lyotard, Jean François 148-149, 152 Ma Zuyi 15, 16, 29, 32, 33 Mahayana 53, 54, 60, 65 Mao Dun 32, 33, 34, 35 Marcrobius, Teodosius 71 Matthew 88 Maudgalyana (mulian) 60, 61 Maupassant, Guy de 33 McDougall, Bonnie S. 32 Meiji Reformation 127 Mickiewicz, Adam 33 Migne, Jacques Paul 71 Morrison, Robert 27 Mungello, David E. 23, 90 Norris, Richard Alfred, Jr. 90 Oldather, W. A. 80 Outlaws of the Marsh 131 Pelikan, Jaroslav Jan 73 Perry, Ben Edwin 74-75, 85 Plato 82-84 Pound, Ezra W. L. 112-117 Propp, Vladimir 85 Qian Zhongshu 15, 111

236 Ricci, Matteo 22-26, 72-87, 91 Schiller, Friedrich 32 Snell-Hornby, Mary 13, 171, 191, 197, 202 Socrates 82 Spalatin, C.S.I. 80 Spence, Jonathan D. 23, 82 Stevenson, Robert Louis 31 Sun Shangyang 80, 81 Tang Yongtong 15, 43, 44, 45, 47 Trigault, Nicholaus 71, 72, 81, 82 Vagnoni, Alfonsus 76, 77, 94 Vitry, Jacques de 75-76, 78, 81 Waley, Arthur 17-21, 35

Translating China Wang Guowei 128, 129 Wen Yiduo 145, 161 Wenzel, Siegfried 78 Witter Bynner 35, 111 Xavier, Francis 22, 24 Xuan Zang 42-46, 54 Yan Fu 67, 126, 127, 132 Yang Xianyi 35 Yang Xuanzhi 55, 57, 58, 63, 68, 70 Yu Anthony C. 77, 94 Zhang Zidong 128 Zhao Nanxing 89 Zheng Zhenduo 31, 32, 89 Zhi Qian 46-48