Writer as translator: Cultural translation in Han Suyin’s A Many-Splendoured Thing

ABSTRACT

Read in terms of postcolonial translation theories, literary writings by cosmopolitan anglophone writers of Chinese background can be seen as acts of cultural translation, as in the case of Han Suyin’s 1952 autobiographical novel, A Many-Splendoured Thing. By employing different strategies to translate textual and non-textual culture-specific elements, Han’s work has fostered cross-cultural communication between east and west. On the one hand, by adopting a foreignizing strategy which retains the foreignness of the original text for translating non-political elements including Chinese literary works, philosophy, and folklore, she highlights differences between Chinese and western cultures. On the other hand, her domestication of the Chinese revolution, by comparing its political ideologies to Christianity, facilitates western readers’ understanding of the politics of China after 1949. Analysis of this “writer-as-translator” role sheds light on the complexities of postcolonial writing and moves postcolonial translation studies beyond binary oppositions based on political or discursive power relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Han Suyin
• A Many-Splendoured Thing
• postcolonial writing
• cultural translation
• China
• Christianity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Han’s second husband revealed later that some MPs in the UK intended to submit the ethically questionable book for parliamentary debate (see Zhang 2016, 49–50).

2. The song poem, or ci词 in Chinese, is a type of lyric poetry in the tradition of Classical Chinese poetry.

3. Daniel Bryant (1942–2014), Chinese name 白润德, was Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. He was a well-published scholar of Chinese classical poetry and fiction. This translation is cited from Wen (1989, 212–213).

4. An article by Jozef Marián Gálik (2011) is the only discussion of the relation between Han’s A Many-Splendoured Thing and Psalm 98.

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Chiyuan Zhuang

Chiyuan Zhuang received her PhD in translation studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is currently a lecturer at the School of English Studies, Shanghai International Studies University. Her research interests include translation history in China, translation and intellectuals, and legal translation. She has published in journals including Chinese Translators Journal, Shanghai Journal of Translators, and Foreign Language Education. She has (co-)translated two books from English into Chinese about Sino–foreign cultural exchanges in 20th-century China: The Old Burma Road (2019) and Draft Official History of the China War, 1840–1842 (2020). She is the principal investigator of the research project “Translation and the Construction of Academic Discourse: The Translation and Introduction of American Sinology in Contemporary China”, funded by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2018–20).