Towards a Socio-Cultural Account of Literary Canon’s Retranslation and Reinterpretation: The Case of The Journey to the West

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to chart the diachronic progression of the English retranslations of Xi You Ji (The Journey to the West) and the intercultural trajectories of this ancient Chinese fictional canon. Empirically informed by WorldCat, the world’s largest library catalogue, this study shows that retranslation progressively enables a national literature from a third world to exert a global influence. The century-long retranslation of The Journey to the West has undergone four cohesive phases from religious hybridism, secularisation, religious restoration to multimedia adaptation, registering an enormous proliferation since the twenty-first century. In addition, inter-semiotic translation, in the form of children’s books, films, and television products, contributes strikingly to the literary impact of the source text. Reformulation and reinterpretation are also important themes in the process of retranslation, and they can be regarded as an intricate result of the relevant ideology, poetics, patronage and other socio-cultural factors.

KEYWORDS:

• Retranslation
• refraction
• The Journey to the West
• Chinese literature

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the two reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments that improved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The success of Fu’s translation can be attributed to three elements: first, his domesticated translation drew this example of American literary canon close to the Chinese readers, most of whom knew little about America. Second, the translation was issued in the social backdrop of the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1931–1945). Readers felt great empathy with the characters involved in the American Civil War. Third, the subtitled American film directed by Victor Fleming released in Shanghai in tandem with the publication of Fu’s translation. The film thus favoured the popularity of Fu’s translation.

2 There are many other synonymous terms with a similar denotation of “intersemiotic translation”, mainly found in the literature of the “manipulation school”, such as “rewriting” or “manipulation” (Lefevere 1992), “refraction” (Lefevere 1982). To fractionise the genres of translations, we use the term “intersemiotic translation” referring to translations in the form of film, TV series, comics, animation, etc.

3 Anthony C. Yu was Carl Darling Buck Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and Professor Emeritus of Religion and Literature in the Divinity School; also, in the Departments of Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and English Language and Literature, and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago

4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_media_adaptations_of_Journey_to_the_West Accessed February 8, 2020.

5 Henry Chamberlain, “Review: ‘Adventures from China: MONKEY KING’” Comics Grinder, February 8, 2020, https://comicsgrinder.com/2014/06/05/review-adventures-from-china-monkey-king/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by State Language Commission [Grant number ZDI 135–63]; Excellent Young Talents Fund Program of Jilin University [Grant number 2019FRLX03].