This study analyzes the cultural memory of the An Lushan Rebellion, a pivotal political event in Silk Road history of the mid-eighth century, as it has become sedimented and aestheticized in the Chinese and Japanese literary traditions. Specifically, this study investigates the poetic resonance between the figure of a “daoshi” (a daoist magician) in Bai Jiyu’s “The Song of Everlasting Sorrows” (ca. early 9th C.) and its later manifestation in the form of a “maboroshi” (a seer or a wizard) in Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (ca. early 11th C.). In so doing, this study delineates the Japanese author’s creative employment of “maboroshi” as the figure of a connector-cum-translator on various levels within The Tale of Genji. Differently put, the term “maboroshi” itself is mined as a productive linguistic site for illuminating the author’s profound exploration of the relationship between desire and imagination—an exploration inflected by the complex process of cultural translation and transformation along the Silk Roads. As such, this study ultimately aims to elucidate the literary legacy of The Tale of Genji not only within Japanese cultural history but also as part of the Silk Road imaginaire. Glossing the term “Silk Road imaginaire” specifically as a conceptual lens through which to reassess the received notion of globalization as the circulation of ideas, objects, and people, this study takes into consideration the permeable nature of such categories themselves and the very notion of circulation as a critical paradigm rather than merely as a pattern of exchanges.
When Ezra Pound first fashioned modernist poetics from notions of classical Chinese poetry, he did so without significant attention to the sound of the Chinese. Yet by the end of his writing career, Pound came to realize the full ideological potential of “Chinese sonority” and sought to integrate cosmological ideas into his “Confucian Odes.” The story of Ezra Pound’s late awakening to the centrality of classical Chinese prosody and the central role poetic sounds played as a conduit of Chinese state ideology reveals a great deal about the conflict between Modern Chinese Poetry (with its centrifugal roots in various modernisms) and its dynastic forerunners (with its centripetal roots in correlative cosmology and Confucian metaphysics etc), and may well provide us with a glimpse into possible ways of synthesizing classical and modern poetic forms. In the second section, I will offer a brief tour of Chinese poetic forms from the 30’s, 60’s, and 80’s in order to build the architecture I need to pose the central question of the paper: how will Chinese poets grapple with the resurgent interest in classical literature, culture, aesthetics, and poetics (which can be seen everywhere from consumer culture, to the rise of guoxue schools, and national political rhetoric of “harmony” etc)? Are modern and classical Chinese poetics and forms irreconcilably allergic to one another? Or is it possible that future Chinese poets will follow in the steps of Pound (and Fenollosa) but under different historical circumstances that may prove more fertile for Modernist cosmologies.
Should contemporary Rajasthani writer Vijay Dan Detha’s “alekhon hitlar” (“Untold Hitlers”) be read as fiction or nonfiction? In India Detha’s award-winning prose has confounded set distinctions between folklore and literature since so many of his baatan (understood as tales or stories) are adapted from oral sources. In this case “alekhon hitlar” was based on a tale of a local murder recounted by his fellow villagers on a bus. How do our rituals of interpretation help us to understand this baat once it has moved from oral to written form? How do these rituals translate across languages and cultures when this mutable genre has no counterpart (and therefore no interpretive tradition) in English?
Apparently one cannot find terms such as “li” or “qi” in Aristotelian or Cartesian languages, but can you say that Chinese never had “philosophy” or “religion”? It is true though, these two terms may not be used in the same sense as they are in the Western cultural context. As a matter of fact, any word or term philosophical, religious, and closely related with a cultural tradition, cannot be easily translated, because such word or term is charged heavily with semantic connotations and cultural meanings. Using words of another culture with a long historical tradition to translate Chinese cultural terms will inevitably encounter such difficulty and dilemma of how to convey the meaning behind these terms. This study examines the problems related to translating Chinese cultural terms, discussing why transliteration is considered as a possible solution to these problems. Through a corpus-based analysis of the concepts and history of transliteration in China, the researchers described the etymological studies of words that have been assimilated into English from Chinese, examined transliterated terms identified in classical works translating and introducing Chinese philosophy, religion history and literature.
The cultural renaissance amongst Chinese urbanites reveals how traditional thoughts still hold the key to understanding China even in her post-Marxist ideological vacuum. Zhuangzi, the single most important work to the highly influential Taoism’s comprehension, however has only started to attract scholarly discussion on the scores of difficulties usually encountered in its translation and cultural dissemination a century after its initial translation.
The on-going discussion’s perspectives have been largely literary-philosophical, with emphasis exclusively on linguistic and cultural untranslatabilities; this limited approach, whilst directs attention to hermeneutics, semiotics and semantic studies on the Chinese traditions of metaphor use, blinds researchers to areas beyond the text’s meanings.
This paper seeks to demonstrate, through a practical case study, how such deficiency can be addressed via a dual methodology both
(A) micro-philological and (B) macro-sociological:
(A) through textual-positivist contrasting between different editions of Zhuangzi, historical comparison between the rhymes used and the figures mentioned therein with the linguistic and historical documents available in the existing literature, and the idiosyncratic Chinese classical studies on punctuation and paragraphing, philologically proves the decisive influence the choice over the source text’s editions and annotations exercise on the actual target text; and
(B) through a socio-historical exploration brings to light the background environments wherein the translation is embedded, including the perlocutionary purposes of the specific translation, translation traditions, interaction between the academia and the general audience, the receiving culture’s attitude and strategy towards heterogeneous thoughts, ideologies interplay, and such institutional factors as education system, publishers and sponsors, etc.
When fully developed, this dual strategy may couple with the dominant hermeneutic approach and bring together literature, philosophy, history, translation and sociology of knowledge, erecting not only the principles for Chinese classics’ translation but translation and cultural exchange in general.
Apparently one cannot find terms such as “li” or “qi” in Aristotelian or Cartesian languages, but can you say that Chinese never had “philosophy” or “religion”? It is true though, these two terms may not be used in the same sense as they are in the Western cultural context. As a matter of fact, any word or term philosophical, religious, and closely related with a cultural tradition, cannot be easily translated, because such word or term is charged heavily with semantic connotations and cultural meanings. Using words of another culture with a long historical tradition to translate Chinese cultural terms will inevitably encounter such difficulty and dilemma of how to convey the meaning behind these terms. This study examines the problems related to translating Chinese cultural terms, discussing why transliteration is considered as a possible solution to these problems. Through a corpus-based analysis of the concepts and history of transliteration in China, the researchers described the etymological studies of words that have been assimilated into English from Chinese, examined transliterated terms identified in classical works translating and introducing Chinese philosophy, religion history and literature.
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