Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out by Haun Saussy (review)

Haun Saussy's Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out is a major contribution to translation studies and comparative literature. Saussy uses Zhuangzi, a collection of early Daoist writings, to show how Chinese culture, or more broadly, any culture, communicates with other cultures. The thesis of the book is that the fragmentary, piecemeal quotations from the Zhuangzi text, which occupy the outside position inside the Chinese cultural tradition, help facilitate the introduction of foreign texts and ideas.

The book is divided into an introduction and five chapters. In the introduction, Saussy explains that this book examines "non-translation" (2), meaning translations that intentionally speak to certain currents of the target culture—which Saussy terms "citation" (3)—and introduce new expressions to the target language. The introduction then outlines the structure of the book. The chapters focus on the case studies of Chinese-language translations that refer to Zhuangzi to facilitate the entry of the source text into Chinese. These examples reveal that the "transliteration-and-citation" (5) model can offer new insight to translation studies. In addition, the process of "citation and rewriting" (6) plays a significant role in the formation of the Chinese text of Zhuangzi.

The first chapter, entitled "Norns and Norms," begins with a discussion of the female divinity Norn. In Stefan George's poem, the being of foreign objects is contingent upon Norn's naming of the objects in her native language. Saussy disapproves of this act of "[n]ativizing translation" (13), but points out that his book goes beyond the concepts of binary opposites essential to translation theories and examines "language hybridity" (15). He proposes that hybridity takes place "in a territory askance of translation" (15; italics in original). By askance of translation, the author means that transliteration is a common form of exchanges between cultures and through digital media. Translation can be understood as part of this "transliteration relation" (22).

The title of the second chapter, "Death and Translation," is closely related to the epigraph that Saussy quotes from Jacques Derrida—"Traduire, c'est perdre le corps (To translate is to lose the body)" (23). The chapter aptly begins with an example of Xu Zhimo's Chinese translation of Charles Baudelaire's "Une Charogne (a decaying carcass)." Saussy pays close attention to a quote from Zhuangzi regarding music in Xu's preface to his translation. He argues that this Zhuangzi reference is used to "digest" Baudelaire's poem, selectively assimilating and discarding the poem at the same time (39-40). This process of digestion gives a literary work different bodies in different languages and cultures, which is what is gained through translation (44).

The third chapter, "Matteo Ricci the Daoist," begins with a question: "Who was Ricci…in a Chinese context?" (46). In analyzing Li Zhi's poem, Saussy argues that a reference to Zhuangzi in the description of Ricci presents him as a Daoist to the readers. Saussy further suggests that the word jiren (strange man) in the title of Ricci's famous work Jiren shipian (Ten Chapters of a Strange Man) can be understood as a gesture indicating the "new and strange" of his identity and of the knowledge that he brings (54). The word also suggests his participation in the late-Ming intellectual currents that deviated from the mainstream Confucian tradition. In addition, Zhou Bingmo's preface to Jiren shipian places Ricci in the context of the "late-Ming counter-culture" (57). Allusions to Zhuangzi allow for the nativization of Ricci, but still indicate his foreignness (60).

"The 'First Age' of Translation," the fourth chapter, deals primarily with the early translation and transmission of Buddhist writings. The first part of the chapter demonstrates that the term geyi, which can be roughly translated as "a method of borrowing concepts from existing Chinese philosophical discourse to explain Buddhist ideas," serves as an example of "translation-as-citation" (76-77). Saussy acknowledges the different assessments of the significance of geyi in the transmission of Buddhism in China and shows that it indeed played a role...