Yu Hua’s works in English translation: an interview with Allan H. Barr

ABSTRACT

This interview with Allan Barr was conducted via email by Baorong Wang between January and April 2020. Throughout the entire process, altogether seven batches of questions were sent out to the interviewee. The interview was designed by the interviewer with a slant on sociological approaches to literary translation, focusing more on the people involved and the contexts of the translations than on the texts. Specifically, the concept of the “translator’s habitus” developed by Daniel Simeoni was used to probe into Allan Barr’s personal decisions and choices, while Bruno Latour et al’s actor-network theory was drawn on to investigate the network of actors – American publishers, literary agents, editors, translators, etc. – involved in introducing Yu Hua’s works to the United States. The dialogue between the two provides the reader with personal observations about Allan Barr’s professional habitus and perceptive insights into the entire history of bringing Yu Hua’s works to English readers and their reception in the United States.

KEYWORDS:

• Yu Hua
• Allan Barr
• translator’s habitus
• translation into English
• reception

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For more personal information about Allan Barr, see Barr and Yang (2019).

2. See also Gao and Yu (2014).

3. See also Bai (2012).

Additional information

Funding

This research work was supported by Research Institute for Literary and Art Criticism, Hangzhou Normal University; Research Center for Hangzhou Culture’s International Dissemination and Discourse Strategies.

Notes on contributors

Baorong Wang

Baorong Wang received his Ph.D. in Translation Studies from the University of Hong Kong in 2012 and is currently Professor of Translation Studies at Hangzhou Normal University in Zhejiang, China. He is the author of a monograph entitled The Experience of the Foreign: English Representations of Shaoxing Culture in Lu Xun’s Fiction《异域的体验: 鲁迅小说中绍兴地域文化英译传播研究》 (Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2015). He has also published numerous articles in both Chinese and international journals. His research interests include socio-translation studies, the translation and dissemination of Chinese literature, and Chinese translation history.

Allan H. Barr

Allan H. Barr is Professor of Chinese in the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures at Pomona College (Claremont, California). As a longtime scholar of classical Chinese literature, he is the author of a Chinese monograph on a notorious literary inquisition in 17th-century China - Trauma in Jiangnan: the Zhuang History Inquisition in the Eyes of Qing Authors 《江南一劫:清人笔下的庄氏史案》 (Hangzhou: Zhejiang Ancient Books Publishing House, 2016). He has also published numerous articles on pre-modern Chinese literature in both Western and Chinese journals. As an acclaimed translator of contemporary Chinese literature, he has translated five books by Yu Hua, one of the internationally famed contemporary Chinese writers. In 2012 he also edited and translated a collection of Han Han’s blog posts under the title This Generation.