The (re)presentation of national literature in translation has been discussed time and again in studies of world literature. The latest volume of essays, Transcultural Poetics: Chinese Literature in English Translation has brought fresh insights into this problem, touching upon the panoramic view of the relation between Chinese literature and world literature, as well as the handling of hybrid cultural background and heteroglossia in translation.
By reviewing the status quo and predicament of Chinese literature translated into the world market, the volume has first demonstrated significant discussions about the translatability and untranslatability of Chinese literature. Although untranslatability seems inevitable in accommodating a national literature to another language and cultural context, the volume shows both caution and optimism in the transcultural representation of Chinese literature. For many authors in this volume, Chinese literature is overall translatable because of the universality of literature. In the second essay, Todd Foley redefines “world literature” as a genre aiming to “impress as a self-sufficient aesthetic entity”Footnote1 instead of “a mode of circulation and of reading”Footnote2.The redefinition implies a universal criterion for national literature to be recognised as member of world literature which transcends the untranslatability of poetics. The essay written by Xiulu Wang suggests the existence of such a universal aesthetical standard in the compiling of English anthologies of Chinese literature. Similar arguments are found in Ersu Ding’s justification of The Injustice to Dou E as a legit tragedy as defined by the Western critics, which suggests the poetic universals of drama. The following essay about the English adaption of The Peony Pavilion also shows that although Pai’s version has to some extent simplified the original drama for the stage, the core idea of the original has been retained.
The volume also addresses the important problem of untranslatability, especially in a more complicated cultural context. The four chapters on the translation of Singaporean and Hong Kong literature offer some good examples. As Yi-Chiao Chen stresses the typical lexical and cultural features relating to the mother tongue anxiety and national trauma in the translation of Singaporean fictions, Chris Song and Dechao Li further explore the “impurity” of language in Hong Kong literature and its manifestation in translation. The mixture of cultures and the complexity of the historical backgrounds of these regions have fostered the linguistic hybridity and rich contexts of the local literature. All of the researchers reach the conclusion that there are often losses of cultural features in the existing translation of the literary works from these regions and some even deem the untranslatability to be inevitable. Similarly, in another essay about the English anthologies of Hong Kong literature, Marin-Lacarta finds that the “marginality” of Hong Kong literature is rarely highlighted as the representational value in the related translation anthologies and the linguistic specificities of Hong Kong literature are almost absent in the prefaces of the translation anthologies reviewed.
The untranslatability of the literature from these regions is essentially cultural. “Untranslatability” can also be interpreted as the unique cultural features which distinguish a national literature in the universality of world literature and thus should be made visible in the translation. Some other studies in this volume are dedicated to promoting ways to disseminate Chinese literature and culture through translation. In order to avoid the oversimplification of the cultural and poetic characters in translating Chinese literature, creative and appropriate translation is then called for in Yifeng Sun’s essay, in which Sun cites Evan King’s translation of Luotuo xiangzi as a warning for transcreation which hinders reader’s access to the original style. The function of translation in presenting cultural images is further elaborated in Xuanmin Luo’s essay, where a strategy of “big translation” is advocated to form the collective cultural memory of Chinese literature. In the last essay of the volume, Ning Wang articulates the urgency for Chinese scholars and translators to produce English publications with international influence in order to make their voices heard and their cultural representations visible.
The twelve chapters together form a polychrome picture of Chinese literature in translation and its place in the structure of world literature, with both macroscopic overviews and microscopic observations of the translated texts. The volume covers research of various genres and regions, probing into the universality of world literature as well as the cultural untranslatability of Chinese literature. By reading this volume, one can be enlightened about the holistic picture of translated Chinese literature and how different members of Sinophone literature are presented and represented in translation. These analyses also provoke new thoughts and indicate new directions for future transcultural studies with their provision of refreshing definitions for familiar terms, intriguing case studies and new problems awaiting further exploration.
Notes
1 Lau J. S., & Goldblatt, H. eds. 2007. The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature. 2nd ed., xxiv. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
2 Damrosch, David. 2003. What is World Literature, 5. Princeton , NJ: Princeton University Press.