CREATIVE SUBVERSION IN HAO JINGFANG’S SHENGSI YU (生死域)/LIMBO

Abstract

In the introduction to his 1903 translation of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (De la terre à la lune, 1865), which he translated from an intermediary Japanese translation, Lu Xun (1881–1936) writes, “Science fiction [in China] is as rare as unicorn horns, which shows in a way the intellectual poverty of our times.” Yet China is now home to a legion of contemporary science fiction writers who wrestle with China’s historical past, explore the depths of the human psyche, and analyze the sociopolitical issues facing contemporary China through exquisite prose. However, English-language translations of contemporary Chinese women’s science fiction remain sorely lacking. My translation of Hao Jingfang’s novelette Shengsi Yu (生死域2016, lit. The Realm Between Life and Death) aims to fill this gap by extending the international influence of Chinese (women’s) science and speculative fiction. Hao Jingfang (郝景芳, b. 1984) has earned numerous accolades for her tales of Chinese urbanites struggling to forge meaningful connections amid looming social inequality and a repressive political regime. In 2016, Hao sent waves across China’s science fiction circles by beating Stephen King to the Hugo Prize for Science Fiction Literature, becoming the first Chinese woman to win the award in its sixty-five-year history. Hao tackles the implications of China’s socio-economic inequality and deftly fuses traditional Chinese folklore and modern cityscapes with a Western-style cinematic aesthetic and subtle political critique. Her novels and short stories also center around themes of existentialism, Chinese history, the human psyche, and humanity’s place in the cosmos. This article draws upon relevant translation theory to contextualize the practice of “creative subversion” in literary translation and applies these concepts to an examination of specific instances of subversion in my English translation of Shengsi Yu (Limbo), a tumultuous foray into a nameless narrator’s struggles to confront his innermost fears and desires, while hanging in limbo between life and death. The term “creative subversion” is derived from Professor Suzanne Jill Levine’s The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction, in which Levine hails literary translators as “subversive scribes” who destroy “the form of the original,” while retaining meaning, albeit “reproduced through another form.” Here, “creative subversion” is taken to mean creative infidelity toward the source text in order to adapt and transform the source text for an Englishspeaking readership. The translator mediates the dialogue between source and target texts by bending the source text through the prism of their particular interpretation. In