The Promethean translator and cannibalistic pains: Lu Xun's “hard translation” as a political allegory

Abstract

This essay revisits a crucial moment in the modern Chinese history of translation: Lu Xun's “hard translation” of Marxist theories in the late 1920s and the ensuing debate on translation in the early 1930s. It questions the simplistic application of the paradigm of literalism to the case of “hard translation”, and focuses instead on the translator's self-allegorization as a vital rhetorical surplus of Lu Xun's translation practice. In particular, this essay scrutinizes Lu Xun's rewriting of the Prometheus myth in his response to his critic, Liang Shiqiu. Lu Xun's Prometheus is a translator embodying cannibalistic self-torment. I trace the theme of cannibalism in his other works, and compare the allegory of the cannibalistic translator to the Brazilian theory of translation as cannibalism. I argue that it is within this self-referential rhetoric that “hard translation” becomes a figure of the translator's subjectivity and “labor of the negative”.

Keywords:

• “hard translation”
• Lu Xun
• Promethean allegory
• cannibalism
• political subjectivity
• relay translation

Acknowledgement

I would like to dedicate this article to Professor Richard Sieburth, with whose encouragement I wrote its earliest version in 2007.

Notes

1. The title of this important essay is hard to translate into English in its own right. For the meaning of yingyi 硬译, see later discussions. The phrase wenxue de jieji xing 文学的阶级性 refers to a central topic of Chinese intellectuals’ debates over revolution and literature during the late 1920s, and, following the example of Leo Lee (1987), I translate it here as “the class nature of literature” (Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang, two pioneering translators of Lu Xun's works into English, translated the phrase as “the class character of literature”; see Lu Xun [1930] 1960). By the thesis of “the class nature of literature,” the leftists of that period meant that all literature, along with its aesthetic essence, is conditioned or determined by the social dynamic of class and class struggle (see Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 1981). In contrast, their opponents such as Liang Shiqiu (1929b) denied the social-historical nature of literature, believing that literature represents universal humanity and has nothing to do with social class. Though this phrase sounds idiosyncratic in English, “the class nature of literature” should be recognized here as a code name of the Marxist view of literature as social and historical existence.

2. Liang Shiqiu (1903–87) was a modern Chinese critic who studied at Harvard University and was under the influence of Irving Babbitt. He was a major member of the Crescent Moon Society (Xinyue she; for details, see note 4 below).

3. I borrow the famous phrase “labor of the negative” from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit ([1807] 1977, 10).

4. Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), Lu Xun's younger brother, was also a towering cultural figure in modern Chinese history. He was a leading essayist and intellectual from the late 1910s through the 1940s, and also worked as a prominent translator, collaborating with Lu Xun on a number of projects. Zhou Zuoren's political attitude, however, was different from his brother's.

5. The Crescent Moon Society was a modern Chinese literary group active from 1923 through the early 1930s. It was composed primarily of Western-educated, liberal-minded and anti-leftist intellectuals and poets, who published the magazine Crescent (Xinyue), founded in 1928.

6. Translations of the Chinese citations in this article are mine unless otherwise indicated.

7. I would like here to acknowledge Dr Philip J. Kaffen, who helped me work on this Japanese passage, and Satoru Hashimoto, who supported me in gaining access to the reference.

8. For Lunacharsky's citation of this poem, also see Lunacharsky [1928] 1947, 181–183; Lunacharsky [1929] 2008, 267–269.