Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Literature, Film, and Transnational Politics by Yuko Shibata (review)

Abstract

589 tion, reading it as a set of meditations on the “subtle forms of harm” that can come about when print culture is approached exclusively as a means of cultural transmission (193). Da argues that Eaton’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance stories are set “in a fictional space where you are socially legible only if the literature of others makes you act and acts on you”—a claustrophobic space wherein minor literary “tweaks and glitches” convey the costs of exaggerating literature’s transformative, subjectifying capacities (196, 201). A closer look at chapter four should convey the remarkable blend of erudition and precision that Da brings to the work of letting us experience scenes of apparently clichéd literary encounter anew (and more historically precisely). In this chapter, “The Things Things Do Not Have to Say,” Da lucidly sets forth the transnational context wherein Sino-U.S. relations were imagined as a balm to internal political tensions in both nations; she then rereads an oft-cited embodiment of literary exchange—in which Dong Xun inscribed a translation of Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” on a Mandarin fan, and gifted it to Longfellow—as a paradigmatic instance of intransitivity. She does this by recovering “outmoded genres” in both national literatures: the transfer between literature and objects that enables Longfellow’s poetry to substitute for human connections; the practices of poetic inscription, occasional poetry, and literary allusionism that informed Dong’s intransitive practice of translation (128). Ultimately, Da shows that Longfellow’s poem “encouraged its own nontranslation,” and that Dong approached it “as an opportunity to coordinate deeply resonant, transformative sentiments that were already available, and not as a point of delivery for deeply resonant, transformative concepts from the outside” (156). This revelatory account of an intransitive poem-object that commemorated (and substituted for) a highly visible occasion of cross-cultural exchange illustrates the immense stakes of Da’s argument in attending to literature’s limitations: they enhance our access to literary practices and modes of reading that have been obscured by a critical tendency to overemphasize cross-cultural reading as a pathway to deep and durable transformation—whether on the scale of nations or individual readers. Although its focus is on nineteenth-century transpacific exchanges, Intransitive Encounter’s methodological and theoretical contributions will resonate far beyond its field. At the heart of the book and the Sino-U.S. encounters it elucidates are a set of concerns—about the purpose of translation, the limits of cross-cultural communication, the dynamics of literary influence, the materiality and occasionality of literary objects, and what literature can make thinkable or actionable in the world—that are at the center of conversations in modernist studies, comparative literature, cross-cultural communications, and transnational literary studies