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ABSTRACT
In Chairman Mao’s era, the politics of Chinese translation in general and literary translation in particular was played out in various and often incomprehensible forms. This was largely due to Mao’s conception of translation as political vaccination, which was derived from his political dialectics that had, in turn, been developed from diverse political and philosophical sources. By revisiting what actually happened to translation in the China of the time, the article examines Mao’s problematic and self-contradictory dialectics that constituted the larger Chinese context, which created different dimensions of the politics of translation, in an attempt to draw attention to what might be termed the political dialectics of translation.
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the support of China’s Ministry of Education’s Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities for the completion of this research. I also wish to thank my colleagues at Wuhan Textile University.
Note on contributor
Yangsheng Guo is professor and director of the Key Research Base for the Study of Translation and Globalization at the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, China. He received his PhD from the University of Alberta, Canada. Guo has published extensively in areas ranging from curriculum and pedagogy in English language and literature education to translation studies, including “The Politics of Translation in a Global Era: A Chinese Perspective” (2009). He has won a number of prestigious honours and awards for his teaching and research.
Notes
1. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
2. For more detailed information, see Lin (Citation2009), espec. pp. 477–559.
3. From 1950 to 1951, the only translation studies journal Fanyi tongbao (Translation Bulletin) published over 40 articles criticizing such translational phenomena. See Wen et al. (Citation2006), 16–28.
4. For more details, see Shen (Citation2008). In particular, chapter 8, titled “Drawing the Snakes out of Their Holes”, offers a bigger picture of the movement.
5. On 6 November 1967, the People's Daily carried an editorial titled “March on the Road Opened by the October Socialist Revolution”, which officially announced this slogan.
6. Apart from Ma (Citation2006) and Xie (Citation2009), other articles include Jin and Zhao (Citation2000), Tan (Citation2011) and Li (Citation2013).
7. The six Soviet works are: The Iron Flood by A. Serafimovich (1863–1949); The Mother, In the World and “January 9th” by M. Gorki (1868–1936); The Young Guard by A. Fadeyev (1901–1956); and How the Steel Was Tempered by N. Ostrovsky (1904–1936). The five Japanese works are: Kanikosen, Numajiri-mura and “Absentee Landlord” by the proletarian writer Takiji Kobuyashi (1903–1933), and two critical works by Kukai (774–835) and Yoshida Seichi (1908–1984).