Female voices in translation: an interrogation of a dynamic translation decade for contemporary Chinese women writers, 1980–1991

ABSTRACT

Contemporary Chinese women writers have long been underrepresented in English translation. However, they received considerable attention from Anglophone publishers during the 1980s. Such a dynamic translation scene was prompted by an upsurge of female writers in China after 1978, when political restrictions on literature were loosened, and an increased interest on the part of Western feminists in female experience from different ethnicities. This article adopts Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to analyse the selection and paratextual strategies adopted by two categories of translation agents: the dominant Anglophone publishers and the subversive feminist translators. It argues that Anglophone publishers were governed by a dominant political translation discourse that resulted from a dual patriarchal control: the Chinese nationalist agenda imposed on the writers’ feminist preoccupations and the predilection of Western ideology for the politics of China. This seemingly thriving translation turn for Chinese women writers was in fact still subject to a voyeuristic gaze that positioned China as the subaltern other. It was women translators who maintained a subversive position against the orthodox translation discourse, thus contributing to what could be called a predominantly feminist translation era for contemporary Chinese women writers.

KEYWORDS:

• Contemporary Chinese women writers
• field theory
• selection and paratextual strategies
• translation agents
• feminist translation

Acknowledgments

I am sincerely grateful to the reviewers and the editors for their constructive comments. I would also like to thank Prof Duncan Campbell, Prof Luise von Flotow, and A/Prof Marco Sonzogni for their helpful advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘New Era Literature’ refers to the reinvigorated Chinese literature after the Cultural Revolution since 1976.

2. Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art’ in 1942 advocated that literature and art should serve the masses, namely workers, peasants and soldiers, and ‘become a component part of the whole revolutionary machinery, so they can act as a powerful weapon in uniting and educating the people while attacking and annihilating the enemy, and help the people achieve solidarity in their struggle against the enemy’ (McDougall 1980, 58).

3. These were popular literary trends in China during the 1980s. 'scar literature' portrayed the devastating experience of cadres and intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution; ‘Introspective literature’ reflected upon the disasters brought about by the Cultural Revolution; ‘root-seeking literature’ traced the root of traditional national culture; ‘reform literature’ described the progress of the economic reform initiated after 1978; and ‘reportage literature’ recorded the social reality of China andday-to-day lives of Chinese people.

4. Partly because the Anglophone world became disenchanted with China after the Tian’anmen Square protests in 1989.

5. Love Cannot Be Forgotten is collected in an ideologically inflected anthology, Mao’s Harvest: Voices from China’s New Generation (1983), edited by Helen F. Siu and Zelda Stern. A more popular version is Love Must Not Be Forgotten (1986) translated by Gladys Yang.

6. ‘对红五类实行阶级报复’ literally means ‘class revenge against Five Reds’, namely revolutionary army men, revolutionary cadres, workers, poor and lower-middle peasants.

7. The feminist version Leaden Wings was retranslated as Heavy Wings two years later, mainly for its political implications, and was regarded as ‘virtually a fictional primer for the summer uprising in Tiananmen Square’ (Booklist, 15 September 1989).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mengying Jiang

Mengying Jiang is a PhD candidate in Literary Translation with the School of Languages and Cultures at Victoria University of Wellington. Her main research interests are the study of literary translation from Chinese into English; translation and gender; cultural and sociological approaches to literary translation studies; the role of paratexts in literary translation.