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ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship has witnessed a burgeoning interest in the interwoven relationship between Cold War Studies and Translation Studies. However, Hong Kong during the Cold War remains largely neglected. Hong Kong in the 1950s had a political significance from a temporal and spatial perspective and was the scene where the British colonizer, the United States Information Services (USIS) and Communist China fought a hidden battle. World Today, a less studied but major periodical that was sponsored by the USIS in Hong Kong, was published between 1949 and the 1980s. This paper investigates the literary translations in World Today from 1949 to 1952, and finds that they were part of the US propaganda and cultural war against Communist China. These foreign literary works, chiefly American literature and writings on the US, were characterized by appropriation and mediation through the purposeful selection of translated literary works from the outset and selective manipulation within the text via omissions and alterations thereafter.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions and careful reading of the manuscript. I am particularly grateful to my PhD student, Miss Meilong Liu, for her help with the preparation of the manuscript.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For recent literature in the broader field of Cold War cultural diplomacy, please refer to Osgood (Citation2006); Scott-Smith and Krabbendam (Citation2003).
2 America Today will be mentioned while referring to articles from the periodical under this name.
3 For further studies on the Cultural Cold War, please refer to Saunders (Citation2000) and Saunders (Citation2013).
4 For more information, please refer to Mark (Citation2004, p. 180).
5 Hong Kong Government Records, “Liaison with U.S. Information Services, Hong Kong,” File No. 96575/33/C (C0537/6578).
6 Ibid.
7 For more discussion about the intellectuals and writers from the mainland and their writings in Hong Kong, please refer to Shum (Citation2020).
8 Wang Jiankai noted that “The total number of Chinese translations of literary works from UK and USA is 452, with 224 from UK and 228 from USA respectively, between October 1949 and December 1958. Meanwhile, the figure for the Russian literature from former USSI reaches 3526” (Citation2003, p. 4).
9 Lefevere defines patrons as “something like the powers (person, institutions) that can further or hinder the reading, writing, and rewriting of literature” (Lefevere, Citation1992, p. 15). According to Lefevere, a person can exercise control by imposing ideological constraints, conferring economic provisions, and bestowing status on translators and rewriters (Citation1992, p. 16). Eileen Chang’s translation of Fool in the Reeds earned her over 10,000 US dollars, which was much higher than average translation fee during the 1960s. For more information, please refer to Wang (Citation2015).
10 Look to the Mountain is one of the most popular and enduring novels of the last century, and it is the epic story of two young settlers who start a new life in the foothills of New Hampshire's White Mountains on the eve of the American Revolution. The publication of this novel in 1942 made immediate success and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It is the first novel to be serialized in WT. The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse was a short story by William Saroyan, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940. Saroyan wrote extensively about the American immigrant life in California. In line with the selection criteria by USIS, Anything can Happen was written by two immigrant authors to the USA.
11 Iron Curtain refers to the political, military and ideological barrier created by the former Soviet Union after World War II to seal off itself and its dependent eastern and central European allies from open contact with the West and other noncommunist areas. Bamboo Curtain was the Cold War political demarcation between the Communist states of East Asia, particularly the People’s Republic of China, and the capitalist and non-Communist states of East, South and Southeast Asia.
12 Looking back on the selection criteria stated in the editor’s note from American Children’s Literature, we might have a brief glimpse of how these literary works went through the filtering and framing process even before the translation process. Every single chapter in the collection was selected to inform young readers of a certain theme, for instance, stories including The Last Mohican were selected to familiarize readers with the pioneering spirits of America in early years.
13 The last issue of America Today, the 56th issue, was published on February 20, 1952, after which the 1st issue of World Today was released on March 15, 1952.
14 According to a report written in 1959 by Public Affairs officer Robert J. Clarke: In Hong Kong, we must operate within the limits imposed by Colony government policy, which might loosely be called a policy of “don’t rock the boat” (quoted in Wang, Citation2015, p. 52).
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Bo Li
Bo Li, PhD in Translation, is currently a Research Assistant Professor at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. His research interests include translation history, literary translation, translation and gender. He is the Principal Investigator of three research projects funded by the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong, investigating “Serialized Literary Translation in Hong Kong Chinese Newspapers (1900–1911)”, “USIS-Commissioned Translations in Hong Kong against the Background of the Cold War in the 1950s” and “Transadvertising Western medicine in The Chinese Mail (1895-1940)”.