Organizer and Chair: Cecile Chu-Chin Sun, University of Pittsburgh
Discussant: Shuen-Fu Lin, University of Michigan
By its very nature, this "Cultural Dimensions in Translation" Panel is both comparative and cross-disciplinary in as much as it deals with three fundamental issues related to translations out of and into Chinese. Three issues focus on "cultranslation," i.e., the cultural dimensions in translation, locating some of the crucial distinctions between Chinese and Anglo-American cultures.
For example, certain aspects of classical Chinese poetry are basically untranslatable because they are so deeply rooted in the epistemological dimension of the two cultures involved. Hence exploring this type of translation problem becomes an exploration of the cultural differences imbedded in the two literatures.
Another issue is the reception of Western culture by Chinese readers through translation. A representative example is the mistranslation and deliberate misappropriation of Edward Bellamy’s influential book, Looking Backward, 2000–1887, which had an enormous impact on intellectual movements in modern China.
An even broader issue related to the poetics of translation is the contention that while notions of beauty, form, and aesthetics may cut across cultural barriers, yet different cultures affirm different values. What is embraced by one culture may be rejected by another and different cultural paradigms often interfere with one’s appreciation of a work from a foreign culture even when the translation is near perfect.
The Panel’s probing of the complex differences found in Chinese and Western cultures are expected to stimulate a lively discussion.
Cultural Dimensions of Comparative Poetics
Eugene Eoyang, Lingnan University
Notions of beauty, of form, of aesthetic enjoyment are often assumed to be universal. Perdurability in beauty, "organic unity" or symmetries in form, an "epic" register—these are often cited as the hallmarks of great literature. Yet, the poetics of translation, and the specifics of translational "slippage," would seem to indicate that alternative criteria for literary value may be equally apposite. Cultural values vary: what is prized in one culture may appear tedious to another; what is effectively emphatic in one language strikes one as irritatingly redundant in another. But, even when a rendering is near-perfect, there are cultural paradigms that interfere with one’s appreciation of a work from a foreign culture. This paper will explore these alternative paradigms.
Looking Backward: Reception of Edward Bellamy’s Utopian Vision in the Chinese Context
James Chang-fang Chen, National Chengchi University
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward was introduced into China in an abridged version in 1891, three years after its first publication in Boston. This version and several full-length later renditions were familiar to some prominent reform-minded Chinese intellectuals, including K’ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao. Bellamy’s text probably generated the America-as-millennium vogue in China at the turn of the century, as evidenced by the proliferation of futuristic novels, such as Book on the Grand Unity (Ta-t’ung shu, 1902), The Future of New China (Hsin Chung-kuo wei-lai chi, 1902), The Future World (Wei-lai shih-chieh, 1906), The Spirit of the Constitution (Hsien-chih hun, 1907), and so on. Most of these utopian texts, mutatis mutandis, attempted to draw grand blueprints for the future of China modeled upon Bellamy’s scheme. This paper tries to raise and answer the following questions: How does this translation/transportation happen? How do literary works get a new start in a new language and within a new culture? Just how does this transfer "take place"? How does a work of literature cross borders, occupy a new territory, and make a new place for itself in a new language?
Limits of Translation and Their Cultural Implications: The Case of Translating Classical Chinese Poetry into English
Cecile Chu-Chin Sun, University of Pittsburgh
Virtually all poetry, whether it be Chinese or Western, involves a search for vivid means to articulate what is felt within. Yet, the way in which a poet relates his/her feelings to outer reality is both intensely individual and culture-specific.
In Chinese poetry, external reality is presented as both a setting and a corresponding expression of the poet’s emotion as in these lines about old age: "The yellow-leafed tree in the rain,/The white-haired man under the lamp." Much of the ever renewing vitality of Chinese poetry comes from this mutually illuminating interplay between external reality and the poet’s emotion.
In the West, on the other hand, external reality does not normally have this double function. It does not occupy as important a role, both grammatically and semantically, as the expression of emotion itself. It is primarily a physical setting, not as an internal part of the poet’s emotion unless it is internalized as such. A similar autumnal scene about old age in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 is, for example typical: "That time of year thou may’st in me behold/When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang . . . . "
Because of such a difference in the view of external reality in the West, lines about external reality in Chinese poetry are frequently mistranslated as simply background scenery or merely as adverbial phrases to set off the tenor of the poem. Such mistranslation often stems—consciously or unconsciously—from imposing on Chinese lines about external reality a Western epistemological view of outer reality vis-à-vis human emotion.
By locating this type of mistranslation, the author hopes to probe into the fundamental differences between Chinese and Western cultures of which poetry is an essential expression.
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