The Global Afterlife: Sino-French Literature and the Politics of Translation

2019, French Cultural Studies

Following the critical acclaim of Sino-French literature in recent years, an increasing number of Chinese presses have solicited translations of prize-winning novels written in French by authors of Chinese descent. Yet as the work of authors like François Cheng, Shan Sa, Ya Ding and Dai Sijie travels from French into Chinese, it also undergoes a transformation via the politics of translation and publication in China. This essay exposes the inner workings of translation between French and Chinese, as well as the politics that colour its publication and reception between France and China. The act of translating these works back into their authors’ native tongue signals a return to the national paradigms the writers initially sought to evade by writing in French. Translation here functions as a form of aggression, a forced return home that ultimately breaks with the poetic ethos that animates the original creative works.

See full PDFdownloadDownload PDF Born Translated? On the Opposition Between “Chineseness” and Modern Chinese Literature Written for and from TranslationLucas KleinThe Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation, 2023

Investigating the relationship between Chineseness and modern Chinese literature written for and from translation, this chapter goes beyond the modern: tackling a single topic of translation to connect writers from classical, modern, and contemporary times, the chapter questions the critique of literary works perceived as being created for translation into other languages as less “Chinese,” arguing against any a priori essence of Chineseness. It also points out the possibly alarming effects that the PRC’s inward-turning policies could have on translation, a worry shared by many contemporary translators of modern Chinese literature.

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightTranscultural Novels and Translating Cultures: François Cheng’s Le Dit de Tianyi and L’Éternité n’est pas de tropShuangyi Li2017

This article examines the two French-language novels by the Franco-Chinese migrant writer François Cheng, Le Dit de Tianyi (1998) and L’ Eternité n’est pas de trop (2002), and proposes to conceptualize them as two novelistic models of cultural translation. Cheng’s engagement with, and departure from, canonical Western novelistic models such as Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu in Le Dit reveals his ‘comparatist’ ambition to reorient Western cultural heritage by putting it into dialogue with that of the East. L’ Eternité, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with a translingual rewriting of Chinese literary traditions such as that of classical romance. While the first model applies principles of analogy, the second reflects a more traditional conception of translation that emphasizes faithfulness and authenticity. The two models are mutually complementary rather than exclusive. The study pays special attention to Cheng’s ‘Chinese-inked’ French language and style, highlighting the aesthetic innovations and challenges in Cheng’s transcul-tural writings.

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightWorld literature, global culture and contemporary Chinese literature in translationBonnie McDougallInternational Communication of Chinese Culture, 2014

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightTravel, Translation and Transmedia Aesthetics: Franco-Chinese Literature and Visual Arts in a Global Age (Palgrave Macmillan 2021) - Shortlisted for R. Gapper Book Prize 2022Shuangyi Li2021

This book examines the works of four contemporary first-generation Chinese migrant writer-artists in France: François CHENG, GAO Xingjian, DAI Sijie, and SHAN Sa. They were all born in China, moved to France in their adulthood to pursue their literary and artistic ambitions, and have enjoyed the highest French and Western institutional recognitions, from the Grand Prix de la Francophonie to the Nobel Prize in Literature. They have established themselves not only as writers, but also as translators, calligraphers, painters, playwrights, and filmmakers mainly in their host country. French has become their dominant—but not only—language of literary creation (except for Gao); yet, linguistic idioms, poetic imagery, and classical thought from Chinese cultural heritage permeate their French texts and visual artworks, reflecting a strong translingual and transmedial sensibility. The book provides not only distinctive literary and artistic examples beyond existing studies of intercultural encounter, French postcolonial, and Chinese diasporic enquiries; more importantly, it formulates a theoretical model that captures the creative dynamics between the French/francophone and Chinese/sinophone spaces of articulation, thereby contributing to contemporary debates about literary and artistic production, interpretation, and circulation in the global development of comparative/world literature, as well as intermediality studies.

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightTranslingualism and Autoexotic Translation in Shan Sa’s Franco-Chinese Historical NovelsShuangyi LiEssays in French Literature and Culture , 2018

The Franco-Chinese migrant woman writer Shan Sa left Beijing for Paris in 1990 at the age of seventeen. After her settlement in France, French soon became her additional, increasingly dominant language of literary creation. This article examines Shan’s three French- language novels that explicitly engage with Chinese historical and transhistorical narratives: Les Quatre Vies du saule (1999), La Cithare nue (2010), and Impératrice (2003). The former two were adaptively (self-)translated into Chinese and diegetically re-organized, truncated, and expanded in their Chinese versions. The latter rewriting of the intriguing legend of Empress Wu during the Tang dynasty showcases the incorporation of Chinese calligraphic aesthetic into the French novelistic fabric in Shan’s transcultural writing. Drawing on Steven Kellman’s “translingual imagination”, this article argues that the translingualism inherent in Shan’s (re-)creative process manifests itself as an autoexotic literary aesthetic and a continuous source of fabulation, opening up possibilities of narrative alterity.

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightBook Review “Modes of Translation and Dissemination for Chinese Literature: With Special Reference to Modern Chinese Fiction in EnglishZiye QingInternational Journal of Chinese and English Translation & Interpreting

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightAlors, la Chinoiserie? The Figure of China in Theorizations of World LiteratureLucas KleinLiterature Compass (Global Circulation Project), 2015

Chinese writing occupies a privileged position in current academic discussions of world literature. While China as defined within world literature serves as a test-case for questions of nativist and universalist values, in the process it finds itself defined as a nation par excellence. Arguing that such definition constitutes a kind of twenty-first century chinoiserie, I proceed to question the place of China in the literary theories that inform the discussions of world literature, pinpointing part of this chinoiserie on confusion about the role and performance of translation. I then offer a tactical approach to how China and Chinese literature can be re-translated and re-theorized, pointing a way forward from its current confinement within the chinoiserie described.

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightBetween the Transnational and the Translational: Language, Identity, and Authorship in Ma Jian’s NovelsNicoletta PesaroCadernos de Tradução, 2018

This paper aims to explore the power exerted by the translator to form cultural identities and to build literary images that often overlap or blur national borders. The sinophone writer Ma Jian’s identity is challenged both in terms of authorship and readership, as his public is a culturally undistinguished “western reader”, and the translator de facto becomes the author. As a representative of the Chinese diaspora, he not only lives in a “deterritorialized” literary space, his novels also share a similar textual instability. Due to his bitter criticism of Chinese government and his internationally recognised role as a dissident writer, his works do not circulate in the People’s Republic of China, and are mainly distributed thanks to the English renditions by Flora Drew. Keywords: Translation. Identity. Narrative mode. Sinophone.

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightForeignized translation and the case against “Chinese vernacular fiction"Clement TongLawrence Venuti’s concept of foreignized translation challenges the notion of fluency and localization in translation, and encourages translators to retain the “foreign” linguistic and stylistic features of the source materials, in order to preserve their contextual integrity against the process of domination and assimilation by a hegemonic culture through translational activities. This article argues that the concept of foreignizing translation is also helpful in generating new knowledge – by forcing readers out of their comfort zone and by, using Friedrich Schleiermacher’s language, “moving them towards” the source culture. The case study examines the English term “Chinese vernacular fiction”, which is commonly used to refer to a genre of Chinese fiction writing popular during the Ming and early Qing dynasties (15th-18th century), but can create confusion with the truly modern Chinese vernacular writing which gained dominance only in the early 20th century. This article argues for the replacement of “Chinese vernacular fiction” by the foreignized translation gudian xiaoshuo (“classic novel” or “classic fiction”), so that the English readers will be forced to understand the concept from the perspective of Chinese literary genre tradition, and to refrain from applying a western understanding of “vernacular fiction” to the term too quickly.

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightReview: Travel, Translation and Transmedia Aesthetics: Franco- Chinese Literature and Visual Arts in a Global Age by Shuangyi LiYunfei Bai Recherche littéraire / Literary Research, 2022

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightTranslating and publishing French theatre in ChinaKailun Wang, Xiaoyan Liang, Dominic GlynnFrancosphères, 2021

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightIntroduction: Translating Chinese Art and Modern LiteratureChris SongTranslating Chinese Art and Modern Literature, 2019

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightA Discussion between Two French Translators of Chinese Science FictionLoïc AloisioHAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2020

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightMediated and Marginalised: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature Translations in Spain (1949-2010)Maialen Marin-Lacarta （瑪婭蓮）Meta, 2018

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightChina as Dystopia: Cultural Imaginings Through TranslationTong King LeeTranslation Studies, 2015

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightThe Writing of the Unwritten and the Translation of the Untranslatable: Alexandra David-Néel’s Reception in ChinaYunfei BaiComparative Literature Studies, 2017

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightA Dissonance of Discourses: Literary Theory, Ideology, and Translation in Mo Yan and Chinese Literary StudiesLucas Klein2016

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightTranslation as a Motor of Critique and Invention in Contemporary Literature: The Case of Xiaolu GuoFiona Doloughan2017

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightCelan’s “Deathfugue” in Chinese: A Polemic about Translation and Everything Else Title: Chinese Poetry and Translation Book Subtitle: Rights and WrongsJoanna KrenzChinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs, 2019

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightTranslation Ideologies of American Literature in ChinaJoe LockarddownloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightProust, China and Intertextual Engagement: Translation and Transcultural Dialogue (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) - ICLA Anna Balakian Prize 2019Shuangyi Li2017

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightCreolization, Translation, and the Poetics of Worldness : On Wu Ming-yi’s French TranslationGwennaël Gaffric2019

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightBeyond Chineseness: De-Nationalising and De-Sinicising Modern Chinese LiteratureIrmy SchweigerRead Book Online Read EPUB Now World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange, 2018

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightDiscovering the Modern Regime of Translation in China: Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past and Wuhe’s Remains of LifeJon SolomonJournal of Translation Studies, 2019

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightA Brief History of Translations of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature in Spain (1949-2009)Maialen Marin-Lacarta （瑪婭蓮）2012

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightGenre and Image in Francophone Chinese WorksRosalind SilvesterContemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2006

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightChapter 19: A “Spiritual Journey” Through the “Middle” Kingdom: Travel and Translation in François Cheng’s Translingual NovelShuangyi LiNarratives Crossing Borders: The Dynamics of Cultural Interaction (Stockholm University Press), 2021

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightAlex Hughes, France/China: Intercultural Imaginings (London: MHRA and Maney Publishing, 2007 – Legenda Series Research Monographs in French Studies, 22). 115 pages. ISBN–13: 978–1–904350–90–3. £35.00Haun SaussyComparative Critical Studies, 2010

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightProust and China: Translation, Ideology and Contemporary Intertextual PracticeShuangyi LiComparative Critical Studies 11.2-3 (2014), 295-314, 2014

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightLanguage Ideologies in Gao Xingjian’s Literature: a Linguistic Anthropological Study of Chinese Diaspora Literature in EuropeLijing PengResponsibilty and Language Practices in Place, eds. Laura Siragusa and Jenanne K. Ferguson (Helsinki: University of Helsinki), 2020

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightWestern Reinvention of Chinese Literature (sample chapters)Zong-qi CaidownloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightTranslating Chinese Literature to Reach an Audience in China: Lin Yijin and Lu Xun’s Stories in English_2022 (proofs)Baorong WangdownloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightThe Western Reinvention of Chinese Literature, 1910-2010 Preliminary MaterialMartina Cascherathe_Western_Reinvention_of_Chinese_Literature_1910_2010, 2022

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightHistoriography Via Translation: Chinese New Historical Fiction in the WestHuawen LiuChinese Literature in the World, 2022

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightLiving between languages: The politics of translation in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for LoversRachael GilmourJournal of Commonwealth Literature, 2012

downloadDownload free PDFView PDFchevron_rightFrench LiteratureTranslation StudiesFrancophone LiteratureGlobalization and literatureSino-French relations