Translation and Literature 23 (2014)

Translation and Literature 23 (2014) National Identity’ and Antonella Braida’s ‘Dante and the Creation of the poeta vate in Nineteenth-Century Italy’ demonstrate in different ways how, as Jossa puts it, ‘Dante the symbol becomes less and less poetically appreciable and more and more ideologically oriented.’ Braida draws out continuities between the writings of Vincenzo Monti in the Napoleonic period and Giosuè Carducci in post-Risorgimento Italy, to show the poet becoming, in the terminology of Shelley that her essay invokes, a legislator, ‘a central figure of a civic literature that seeks to create nationhood through history’. The volume also includes particularly enterprising assessments of the mediation of Dante through drama, film, and music. ‘Politics and Performance: Gustavo Modena’s dantate’ by Michael Caesar and Nick Havely is a brilliantly researched piece on one actor-nationalist’s performances of Dante before and after 1861, while Nick Havely’s Epilogue on ‘Dante and Early Italian Cinema’ and Maria Ann Roglieri’s Appendix on ‘Dante and Nineteenth-Century Music’ are valuable both in themselves and as laying the ground for future research. The assessments of the place of Dante in German literature (Eva Hölter), Occitan culture (James W. Thomas), Turkey (Cüneyd Okay), and Bengal (Brenda Deen Schildgen) constitute particularly rewarding accounts of reception, as does Dennis Looney’s essay on the African American author Cordelia Ray, who he sees as making ‘a Colored Dante’ out of ‘the Italian poet and symbol of political independence, and liberal anticlericalism’. In many ways the boldest of the three volumes under review and the most originally conceived, Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century confidently demonstrates the potential for further research into Dante’s reception in this period both within and beyond the English-speaking world as well as across a variety of media. Michael Rossington Newcastle University DOI: 10.3366/tal.2014.0141 Lin Shu, Inc: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture. By Michael Gibbs Hill. Pp. xiii + 294. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hb. £55. ‘I do not understand Western languages. When I venture to translate, I depend on two or three gentlemen who convey the meaning of a text to me orally. My ears hear it, and my hand keeps pace.’ Here, in the 1907 preface to one of his most popular ‘renditions’ into Chinese – Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop – Lin Shu (1852–1924) 139 Reviews outlines the method which made him one of the most influential and formidably prolific translators of European literature in the late Qing dynasty (1895–1911) and early Republic (1912–1927). It is a suggestive snapshot of a process in which the ‘gentlemen’, trained in English and French, embody Dickens’ own passion for dramatic performance and ebullient public reading by staging the text for Lin Shu to write down. Did these ‘gentlemen’, as cultural and linguistic gobetweens, ‘convey the meaning’ by tailoring vocal timbre, facial tics, and other bodily mannerisms to the perceived needs of a translator who was also a watchful ‘audience’, responding to and abridging this audio version of an ‘original’? In this collaborative translation ‘event’, presumably filled with lively debate and disagreement, is it possible to ascertain whether editorial additions or omissions were made by either the ‘gentlemen’ or Lin Shu alone? A major disappointment of recent research into the modes of practice and cultural products synonymous with Lin Shu’s translation team has been the failure of sinologists fully to answer the complex questions this division of mental labour raises. Michael Gibbs Hill’s new book is incisive about these issues from the very outset. While there is critical consensus that Lin Shu’s output is unsurpassed both in terms of sheer volume and generic variety – in just over two decades, he and his collaborators presented to Chinese readers over 180 translations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western texts, including novels by Defoe, Scott, Dickens, and H. Rider Haggard – relatively few current pundits have elucidated why Lin Shu’s collaborative renditions were such game-changers. As Hill explains, Lin Shu raised the public profile of literary translation at a time when the Chinese educated elite was preoccupied almost exclusively with rendering Western political treatises and scientific primers, missionary travelogues, arcane diplomatic records, and legal edicts. Meng Yue’s Shanghai and the Edges of Empire (2006), for all its fluently theoretical argumentation, does not say enough about how Lin Shu and his assistants generated fresh meanings that infused the mental and material labours of other translating teams, commercial publishers, and audiences in China’s most cosmopolitan coastal city. Hill’s opening gambit proposes that Lin Shu was a ‘central force’ in what one contemporary wryly called his ‘factory of writing’. Indeed, the title of Hill’s book signals that we are dealing with a cultural impresario and networker of indefatigable industry, who irrevocably altered the institutional cachet of literary translation in China through astute dealings with sponsors, educationists, and missionary organizations. In Hill’s first three chapters Lin Shu emerges as a locally specific type of 140 Translation and Literature 23 (2014) highbrow celebrity among the urban cognoscenti, whose iconic status was bolstered through promotional puffs, booksellers’ catalogues, eyecatching magazine ads, and myriad editions of anthologies. Given that Hill depicts Lin Shu as a fiercely ambitious ‘entrepreneur of modern print culture’, my initial concern was that his account would embrace the too expansive, even woolly definition of ‘translation’ set forth by André Lefevere’s Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (1992). By recalibrating the translator’s craft to embrace various tactics of cultural mediation, borrowing, mimicry, and adaptation, the transit from one media to another or one discipline to another, Lefevere’s conceptual framework, in the hands of overzealous followers, often effaces or obscures the unique literary attributes of a translated text. Thankfully, Hill’s enterprise begins from ‘an insistently narrow definition’ of translation as the rendering of texts from one language to another. He wisely heeds the warning of Antoine Berman in L’épreuve de l’étranger (1992) which outlines the intrinsic dangers of construing translation as a wide-ranging traffic of narratives, literary concepts, and tropes, rather than as a particular historical exercise with far-reaching social, economic, and pedagogical implications. This is especially important when approaching Lin Shu’s translating team, whose Chinese renditions of European narrative prose fiction epitomized technical procedures that were not only out of kilter with what Gideon Toury calls ‘translational norms’ already devised for working between Western languages, but also those refined later in the twentieth century. Hill’s core chapters do much more than brood over the key conundrum of Western-language theories of translation: the link between the source-language text and the target-language text. Indeed, his book is an eloquent reminder of the value in patient historical re-evaluation, instilling a layered understanding of the cultural work Lin Shu performed during his own turbulent era, as variously filtered through subsequent scholarship, and as recalibrated today. Instead of construing Lin Shu’s voluminous translations as haphazard and sometimes deeply partisan documents (like the majority of previous pundits), Hill contends that Lin Shu’s adept ‘knowledge work’ confronted the most pressing cultural concerns of the late Qing and early Republic. Treating his subject with detailed attentiveness to the larger frameworks of social caste and political power, Hill offers a refreshing slant on what Lydia Liu terms (in Translingual Practice, 1995) the ‘condition of translation’ by canvassing the conceptual basis on which elite Chinese scholars debated and disseminated rival templates of equivalence between languages. 141 Reviews Hill’s research trumps Wanlong Gao’s and Feng Qi’s competing surveys of Lin Shu’s corpus by illuminating the riddling contradictions at the heart of his carefully cultivated role as a transmitter of modern European literature to a China in desperate need of cultural revitalization. This son of hard-pressed provincial merchants was able to rise through the ranks of itinerant village school-teaching to become a ‘brand name’ in elite Beijing circles. Yet Lin Shu’s stern advocacy of that lofty culture was principally through a modern press that rendered classical Chinese texts as cheap letterpress editions, so many ‘pulpy wares’ in a swiftly evolving marketplace of media commodities. Time and again, radical ambivalence seeps into his cultural commentaries, prefaces, and postscripts, in books made affordable by this new print technology. Angry bafflement at how foreign trespassers rode roughshod over his homeland co-existed with grudging respect for Western polity and military prowess. The ancestral customs which Lin Shu’s educational primers hailed as crucial markers of ethnic identity were also the insular atavisms that laid a dead hand on productive change. Eager to demonstrate via translation that Chinese and European aesthetic canons had much in common, he would lambast younger scholars as arrogant arrivistes whose progressive, ‘Westernizing’ literary agendas he saw as at best trivializing dilettantism and at worst as cultural vandalism – infecting a tradition of orthodox Confucianism with coarse vernacular forms. Hill paints a compelling portrait of Lin Shu as a vexed and vexing ‘media star’ who brought traditionalist cultural precepts into the domain of urban recreational reading. Lin Shu also stands, more importantly, for the unresolved tensions of Chinese cultural modernity – the fossils of feudalism against the new, the endemic versus the exotic, the authentic versus the fake, the spontaneity of speech versus the permanency of print – which shaped the very act of converting one text into another. Hill is convincing when tracking how Lin Shu’s desire to establish robust standards and practices of collaborative translation was inextricably tied to deep-rooted intellectual misgivings about the burgeoning of American, European, and Japanese colonialism and imperialism. What was at stake for Lin Shu and his assistants was the ability of translation both to exploit and contest the claims of ‘Western learning’ to universal legitimacy. This nuanced examination supplies a necessary and welcome counterweight to earlier biographical sketches which portray Lin Shu’s interventions in major cultural controversies – especially his patriotic focus on fostering through translation a sense of national ‘fellow-feeling’ – as the shrill outpourings of a virulent archconservative, or a stooge for constitutional Qing monarchy. 142 Translation and Literature 23 (2014) Like Jon Kowallis’ The Subtle Revolution (2006), with which it shares some critical affinities, Hill’s project is clearly targeted at scholars of modern and traditional Chinese fiction, Late Qing studies, and comparative literature. Yet informed non-specialist readers will find fascinating material here on how Dickens’ major works were translated in the early Republic as ‘a self-consciously international mode’ of comprehending and critiquing the worst excesses of predatory capitalism. It is through Lin Shu’s intense engagement with Dickens’ œuvre that Hill canvasses a hotly debated ‘problem’ in the translator’s long professional career: his reliance on an antique prose style (guwen) as well as ancient leitmotifs and genres to render texts distinguished by their innovative merging of modern European vernaculars and idiolects. The eminent sinologist Arthur Waley famously (or notoriously) remarked, in the 1958 Atlantic Monthly, that after Lin Shu’s ‘conversion’ Dickens became ‘a rather different’, indeed ‘a better writer’: All the over-elaboration, the overstatement and uncurbed garrulity disappear. The humour is there, but is transmuted by a precise, economical style; every point that Dickens spoils by uncontrolled exuberance, Lin Shu makes quietly and efficiently. This is some claim. Yet Hill’s brilliant fourth chapter, entitled ‘Double Exposure’, illustrates how the clipped precision and dry wit that Waley savoured was firmly tethered to a translation strategy whose aim was to ‘dislodge’ the source text from a tradition of anglophone realist fiction, creating an intellectual space for Lin Shu’s highly emotive and ideological reactions to China’s fraught entry into the global network of nation-states. This tactic was already established in Lin Shu’s version of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was published as A Record of the Black Slaves’ Plea to Heaven. Lin Shu’s text makes polemical comparisons between the nativist racism underpinning the callous treatment of African-Americans and the miserable fate of Chinese wage-slaves abroad. What I admired about this finely balanced phase of Hill’s enterprise was his refusal to present the textual encounter between Dickens and Lin Shu as a cosy marriage of incorrigible sentimentalists. Rather, in Lin Shu’s renderings of Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop, the strenuous activist agenda of the ‘Condition of England’ three-decker is cleverly refashioned as a vehicle for the thematic priorities of the late Qing social text, whose morally charged mission is to expose the daily hardships endured by the disenfranchised in Chinese society, so steering the audience to critical self-scrutiny. For Lin Shu and his 143 Reviews collaborators, Dickens is more than a byword for an urgent and exact verisimilitude. Hill shows that Lin Shu stresses Oliver Twist’s myriad panoramic vistas of casual brutality, squalor, and venality both in order to promote Dickens’ mimetic realism as a catalyst for social reform and to debunk the very credo of Western economic progress that liberal-minded Beijing literati saw as a guaranteed gateway to a more democratic, prosperous, and enlightened China. Lin Shu complicates these polemical and didactic effects in his Old Curiosity Shop by weaving Dickens as both historical figure and fictional personage into the imaginative fabric of his rendering, the opening words of which are ‘Dickens said’. In Lin Shu’s version Dickens offers careful testimony anchored in his own subjective impressions. The first three chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop, by contrast, position the eremitic and lonely Londoner Master Humphrey as the storyteller who meets the lost Nell and guides her home. Then he takes his bow and invites ‘those who have prominent and necessary parts’ in the text ‘to speak and act for themselves’. Lin Shu’s narrative has ‘Dickens’ extricate himself at the same juncture in these terms (as translated by Gibbs Hill): The previous text has all been narrated orally by me. Since each of the main characters has appeared on the page, for the sake of ease in narrating the story, I will step down from the stage and cease my oral narration . . . I will allow the principals to appeal directly [to the audience], and hope that you, gentle readers, will listen and watch attentively. Hill indicates that this striking use of ‘Dickens’ as first-person narrator in The Biography of Nell might be explained by Lin Shu and his collaborators simply not knowing that several of Dickens’ stories from this period employ the evocative framing device of Master Humphrey. But what if Lin Shu’s distinctive rendering is less about a lack of awareness regarding the range of narratives included in Master Humphrey’s Clock, for instance, and more about the independent exercise of creative brio? It is surely no accident that Dickens’ function at the start of Lin Shu’s Old Curiosity Shop mirrors, and comments impishly upon, the ‘oral narration’ or koushu which effectively launched the professional career of this monolingual translator, granting him privileged access to myriad foreign texts? Consequently, we may construe the appearance and then disappearance of a historical Dickens in The Biography of Nell as an authorization, even celebration, of the translational template – ‘listen and watch attentively’ – that subsequent scholars of Lin Shu deplored not just as unfaithful 144 Translation and Literature 23 (2014) representation, but as a cavalier and reductive wrenching of one discourse into another. Hill’s book ultimately gives us one of the most thorough and richly textured accounts of how classic realist anglophone narratives are transformed rather than diluted when, to adopt Lin Shu’s own phrasing at the opening of this review, the translator’s ‘ears hear’ and the ‘hand keeps pace’. Andrew Radford University of Glasgow DOI: 10.3366/tal.2014.0142 Complete Plus: The Poems of C. P. Cavafy in English. Translated by George Economou with Stavros Deligiorgis. Pp. 227. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2013. Pb. £12.95. C. P. Cavafy: Complete Poems. Translated, with introduction and commentary, by Daniel Mendelsohn. Pp. 673. London: Harper Press, 2013. Hb. £35. There are an astonishing number of translations of C. P. Cavafy. Why? It’s a mystery, like the number of people who feel it necessary to climb Everest. Do new ones add anything? It seems to me that varying the vocabulary slightly (‘to be sure’ instead of ‘certainly’ or even ‘the cinnamon colored suit’ instead of ‘the light brown suit’) is simply a waste of everybody’s time. For Cavafy wrote so openly and plainly that there is no chance of a meaning being missed – a translator can only mess about with the tone, the degree of colloquialness or rhetoric appropriate to a phrase. The historical imagination, the personal emotion and the sympathy, are unmistakable, and can be transmitted without much loss of actual meaning. What remains untranslated – and undiscussed – is the so often mentioned (by himself) poetic art, the metre (or other rhythm) and the rhyme or word that give power to the Greek text. You must try to read him in Greek, and there is an excellent parallel text of The Collected Poems in the Oxford World’s Classics paperback series (2007, with translations by Evangelos Sachperoglou). In Greek, ‘The Horses of Achilles’ will make you weep – as the horses are doing. Now you see why Rae Dalven and the translators under review print their versions with indents and as two stanzas: these are indeed almost Pindaric stanzas, with rhymes as well. The horror of the immortal horses is somehow brought out by the need to read more slowly, for metre and rhyme. Similarly, both translators preserve the 145