China Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces

4. Lu Xun, Cultural Internationalism, Leftist Periodicals and Literary Translation in the 1930s

I Introduction: Translating internationalism Literary translation is a much-discussed subject in Chinese studies, but, for reasons that demand investigation, translations of foreign literature into Chinese tend to get far more attention from Chinese studies scholars than translations of Chinese literature into foreign languages. This happens in spite of abundant evidence of a long history of translation and circulation of Chinese literature in the other direction, beyond linguistic and national borders. For example, according to Donald Gibbs and Yun-chen Li’s A Bibliography of Studies and Translations of Modern Chinese Literature, 1918–1942, anglophone translations of modern Chinese literature were done as early as during the Republican period (1911–49) when the Chinese versions of this literature had just been published, often with the help of Chinese writers themselves. The works of at least thirty Chinese writers and poets of the contemporary period were translated into English within the three decades between 1919 and 1949 (Gibbs and Li). These translations were published in journals such as Asia, Life and Letters Today, People’s Tribune, T’ien Hsia, and China Forum, based in such different places as New York, London, and Shanghai. In addition, close to twenty poetry and short story anthologies as well as individual collections were published in these same cities. Although these figures cannot represent the entire picture of the global circulation of modern Chinese literature since only English translations are counted, they still give us a glimpse of how active translingual and transnational cultural activities were during the Republican era. 4 Lu Xun, Cultural Internationalism, Leftist Periodicals and Literary Translation in the 1930s Shuang Shen 64 Shuang Shen In Writing Diaspora and her other work, Rey Chow criticizes area studies’ nationalistic tendency of privileging China or Mandarin Chinese as the fetishized object of study. The neglect shown towards foreign language translations is a manifestation of this problem; however, there are also some other complex issues involved. For instance, what was the motivation behind the translation of Chinese literature, particularly that of the contemporary period, during the Republican era? Why was translation more frequently conducted from Chinese into certain target languages (English, Russian, Japanese, etc.), and not others? Why were some writers translated more frequently than others? These questions are related to the geopolitical world order of that particular time period and the understanding of culture’s relationship to this geopolitical order from the perspective of translators and writers. Therefore, addressing these questions demands a broader perspective than that which is offered by the traditional approach to translation as “a system of meaning-value.” In their preface to a special issue of Public Culture, Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli criticize the flaws of traditional theories of translation “as an exemplar of theories of meaning,” stating that: [t]hese theories of meaning-value continually orient us toward a theory of the sign, mark, or trace and away from a theory of the social embeddedness of the sign, of the very social practices that these histories wish to describe. In other words, no matter the richness of these social studies, theories of translation continually return to the question of how to translate well from one language to another. . . . (Gaonkar and Povinelli 393–94) In lieu of this traditional conception of translation, they suggest that translation can perhaps be thought of as “a complex, multifaceted signal phenomenon—signaling the interior content of aesthetic form and message and exterior political and social commitment to the circulation of this form and message as well as entailing the cultural logic of the circulatory matrix itself” (393). They also propose to approach translation as “transfiguration” to emphasize “the functions of indexicality and mimesis” in the process of transmitting a cultural sign from one context to another (395). Taking the cue from Gaonkar and Povinelli, I argue in this chapter that the anglophone translations of modern Chinese literature in the 1930s can be read as a case of circulation and movement of cultural materials across national and linguistic borders. This movement not only challenges the traditional and conceptual divide between “China” and “abroad” as separate geographic regions, but also draws critical attention to the oftentimes unquestioned connection between Chineseness and Chinese literature, for “What counts as the Chinese Lu Xun, Cultural Internationalism 65 language?” and “How does literature in circulation inspire nationalist or internationalist consciousness?” are questions that arise in the process of movement. Although both the left and the non-left...