Cold Mountain Poems (CMPs), which have been neglected in the history of Chinese literature for ages, captured the attention of most Americans immediately after its being translated into America by the American poet Gary Snyder in 1950s, however. It is Snyder that reconfigured and recreated a sagacious Chinese Chan Buddhist poet Han-shan (literally, Cold Mountain), the acknowledged author of Cold Mountain Poems, in his translation for the postwar Americans in the midst of varied social problems and cultural identity crisis after World War II. Snyder eventually found in his translation of Cold Mountain Poems a back-to-nature remedy of spiritual salvation and literary enlightenment for the beat generation and even the entire American literary community at large then and after, by means of his delicate transcreation of Han-shan images in line with American expectations at the time as well as by means of his skillful tradaptation of the realistic elements of self-expression, self-identification and self-actualization in Cold Mountain Poems and also by means of his profound exploration of the Chan Buddhism aesthetics and philosophical mediation in classical Chinese landscape poems and Chinese hermit culture
{"title":"On Gary Snyder’s Tradaptation of <em>Cold Mountain Poems</em> and its Spiritual Salvation and Literary Enlightenment in Postwar America","authors":"Hu Anjiang","doi":"10.7771/1481-4374.3937","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.3937","url":null,"abstract":"Cold Mountain Poems (CMPs), which have been neglected in the history of Chinese literature for ages, captured the attention of most Americans immediately after its being translated into America by the American poet Gary Snyder in 1950s, however. It is Snyder that reconfigured and recreated a sagacious Chinese Chan Buddhist poet Han-shan (literally, Cold Mountain), the acknowledged author of Cold Mountain Poems, in his translation for the postwar Americans in the midst of varied social problems and cultural identity crisis after World War II. Snyder eventually found in his translation of Cold Mountain Poems a back-to-nature remedy of spiritual salvation and literary enlightenment for the beat generation and even the entire American literary community at large then and after, by means of his delicate transcreation of Han-shan images in line with American expectations at the time as well as by means of his skillful tradaptation of the realistic elements of self-expression, self-identification and self-actualization in Cold Mountain Poems and also by means of his profound exploration of the Chan Buddhism aesthetics and philosophical mediation in classical Chinese landscape poems and Chinese hermit culture","PeriodicalId":44033,"journal":{"name":"CLCWEB-Comparative Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136357250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper examines the features and causal factors in constructing an idea of the tragic in modern Chinese literary discourse. It attempts at revisiting and reproducing the realities of misreading and variation upon modern Chinese introduction of the term “tragedy” (beiju) at different socio-historical periods, and has observed the interplay between two trends, namely, Westernization and localization, through the negotiation of “the tragic” into modern Chinese literary practice. These two trends have been integrated by a political and pragmatic perspective, which dominates the formation of a modern Chinese literary discourse on “the tragic”. This perspective offers both possibility and legitimacy for certain deliberate misreading, thus endows modern Chinese tragic tradition with unique features different from its Western models. This paper holds that modern Chinese intellectuals approached the idea of the tragic more at an instrumentalist level; they retained the connotation of the term in their attempt of Westernization, and altered and reconstructed the denotations of the term as their efforts of localization. For this reason, modern Chinese reading of “the tragic” is not so much as a pure passive acceptance as an active endeavor to deliberately misread this alien concept for the renovation of the then existing Chinese literary tradition.
{"title":"Westernization or Localization? The (Mis)reading of “the Tragic” in Modern Chinese Literary Discourse","authors":"Tian Gu","doi":"10.7771/1481-4374.3873","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.3873","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the features and causal factors in constructing an idea of the tragic in modern Chinese literary discourse. It attempts at revisiting and reproducing the realities of misreading and variation upon modern Chinese introduction of the term “tragedy” (beiju) at different socio-historical periods, and has observed the interplay between two trends, namely, Westernization and localization, through the negotiation of “the tragic” into modern Chinese literary practice. These two trends have been integrated by a political and pragmatic perspective, which dominates the formation of a modern Chinese literary discourse on “the tragic”. This perspective offers both possibility and legitimacy for certain deliberate misreading, thus endows modern Chinese tragic tradition with unique features different from its Western models. This paper holds that modern Chinese intellectuals approached the idea of the tragic more at an instrumentalist level; they retained the connotation of the term in their attempt of Westernization, and altered and reconstructed the denotations of the term as their efforts of localization. For this reason, modern Chinese reading of “the tragic” is not so much as a pure passive acceptance as an active endeavor to deliberately misread this alien concept for the renovation of the then existing Chinese literary tradition.","PeriodicalId":44033,"journal":{"name":"CLCWEB-Comparative Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136357800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s (1932-2018) first Islamic travelogue Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) contains his experience of a visit from August 1979 to February 1980 to the four non-Arab Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Similarly, his last Islamic travelogue Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998) has a description of another visit to the same countries for five-month in 1995. Concurrently, Daniel Pipes (1949-), an American historian, published his doctoral dissertation, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (1981), which represents Islamic culture as the first instigator of military slavery in the world. Then, he wrote an analysis of modern Islamic history In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (1983), which historicizes Islam as a politically failed force all over the world. These travelogues and history are generically different. But a common topological relationality can be mapped in the anecdotes of Naipaul’s travelogues and the historiography of Pipes’ history, as they use identical tropological configurations to historicize Islamic cultures. This similar tropological historiography, this article argues, is covertly an offshoot of the contemporary spatiotemporal context in which they were produced. The context was networked by certain ideological implications, ethnocentrism, and some cultural misapprehensions regarding Islamic/Muslim culture, making the historicism of both Naipaul and Pipes seem ahistorical.
{"title":"Topological Tropology of V.S. Naipaul’s Islamic Travelogues and Daniel Pipes’ Islamic History: Ahistorical Historicism","authors":"Md. Habibullah","doi":"10.7771/1481-4374.3965","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.3965","url":null,"abstract":"Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s (1932-2018) first Islamic travelogue Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) contains his experience of a visit from August 1979 to February 1980 to the four non-Arab Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Similarly, his last Islamic travelogue Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998) has a description of another visit to the same countries for five-month in 1995. Concurrently, Daniel Pipes (1949-), an American historian, published his doctoral dissertation, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (1981), which represents Islamic culture as the first instigator of military slavery in the world. Then, he wrote an analysis of modern Islamic history In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (1983), which historicizes Islam as a politically failed force all over the world. These travelogues and history are generically different. But a common topological relationality can be mapped in the anecdotes of Naipaul’s travelogues and the historiography of Pipes’ history, as they use identical tropological configurations to historicize Islamic cultures. This similar tropological historiography, this article argues, is covertly an offshoot of the contemporary spatiotemporal context in which they were produced. The context was networked by certain ideological implications, ethnocentrism, and some cultural misapprehensions regarding Islamic/Muslim culture, making the historicism of both Naipaul and Pipes seem ahistorical.","PeriodicalId":44033,"journal":{"name":"CLCWEB-Comparative Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136358799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The term neo-Zionism can be used to group ideologically much of contemporary Hebrew literature. However, since neo-Zionism shares similar critical tools with post-Zionism, while also sharing a common political vision with Zionism, it has been difficult to find the definitive signifiers of neo-Zionist writing. This paper offers a way to determine the nuanced ideological inclination of Hebrew literature: the presentation of time. First, this paper recognizes the metamorphosis of time in Israeli literary history that reflects the writers’ historical view of the Zionist agenda. Zionist Hebrew literature was engaged in re-establishing Jewish historical time by emphasizing the relationship between time and events. Post-Zionist writers fragmented, subverted, or eliminated historical time in their works to loosen the commitment to historical specificity. In the neo-Zionist literary generation, timelines are reassembled as the writers try to reinterpret the Zionist ideology that shapes the person, the nation, and the relationship between the two. Erich Auerbach’s observation that the Old Testament introduced realist writing to Western literature suggests two benchmarks to read neo-Zionist literature as realist writing: the first one is the writers’ moral duty and sense of responsibility to write reality; the second is the restoration of the omniscient narrator. This article uses these two parameters to further interpret the neo-Zionist historical narrative.
{"title":"Playing with Time: Writing History in Neo-Zionist Hebrew Literature","authors":"Huiruo Li","doi":"10.7771/1481-4374.4260","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.4260","url":null,"abstract":"The term neo-Zionism can be used to group ideologically much of contemporary Hebrew literature. However, since neo-Zionism shares similar critical tools with post-Zionism, while also sharing a common political vision with Zionism, it has been difficult to find the definitive signifiers of neo-Zionist writing. This paper offers a way to determine the nuanced ideological inclination of Hebrew literature: the presentation of time. First, this paper recognizes the metamorphosis of time in Israeli literary history that reflects the writers’ historical view of the Zionist agenda. Zionist Hebrew literature was engaged in re-establishing Jewish historical time by emphasizing the relationship between time and events. Post-Zionist writers fragmented, subverted, or eliminated historical time in their works to loosen the commitment to historical specificity. In the neo-Zionist literary generation, timelines are reassembled as the writers try to reinterpret the Zionist ideology that shapes the person, the nation, and the relationship between the two. Erich Auerbach’s observation that the Old Testament introduced realist writing to Western literature suggests two benchmarks to read neo-Zionist literature as realist writing: the first one is the writers’ moral duty and sense of responsibility to write reality; the second is the restoration of the omniscient narrator. This article uses these two parameters to further interpret the neo-Zionist historical narrative.","PeriodicalId":44033,"journal":{"name":"CLCWEB-Comparative Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136357795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ecocriticism is a field that is inherently cross-cultural, and poetry is an art form that creates bonds across cultural communities. This paper focuses on Gary Snyder, a prominent poet in his own right, who is famous for his translation of the works by Chinese poet Han Shan. His attraction to Chinese classical poetry and Eastern civilization offers an alternative to the Western developmental paradigm, and the ecopoetry he espouses is pertinent to today’s environmental debates. His references to nature do not function merely as reminders that nature should be respected but as an impetus to reflect on the coexistence of multiple temporalities and agencies. This paper examines Chinese poetry’s inspirational effect on Snyder and analyzes his translations of Han Shan’s poetry. Snyder’s ecocritical insights have had a wide influence, particularly on the work of Hong Kong poet Xi Xi. This circulation of poetry offers a means of bridging Western and Eastern cultures. The mutual enrichment achieved by such cultural translations provides a means of transcending the simplistic dichotomies of the East and West.
{"title":"Ecopoetry as Method: Reading Gary Snyder as a Cultural Mediator between China and the World","authors":"Winnie L M Yee","doi":"10.7771/1481-4374.3926","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.3926","url":null,"abstract":"Ecocriticism is a field that is inherently cross-cultural, and poetry is an art form that creates bonds across cultural communities. This paper focuses on Gary Snyder, a prominent poet in his own right, who is famous for his translation of the works by Chinese poet Han Shan. His attraction to Chinese classical poetry and Eastern civilization offers an alternative to the Western developmental paradigm, and the ecopoetry he espouses is pertinent to today’s environmental debates. His references to nature do not function merely as reminders that nature should be respected but as an impetus to reflect on the coexistence of multiple temporalities and agencies. This paper examines Chinese poetry’s inspirational effect on Snyder and analyzes his translations of Han Shan’s poetry. Snyder’s ecocritical insights have had a wide influence, particularly on the work of Hong Kong poet Xi Xi. This circulation of poetry offers a means of bridging Western and Eastern cultures. The mutual enrichment achieved by such cultural translations provides a means of transcending the simplistic dichotomies of the East and West.","PeriodicalId":44033,"journal":{"name":"CLCWEB-Comparative Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136357063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) is an immensely popular author of numerous science fictions and fantasy classics. A number of critics have noticed the influence of Taoism on Le Guin’s writing.critical insights offered by Translation Studies and Walter Benjamin’s comments on storytelling and translation, this paper argues that storytelling and translation are similar discursive practices that aim at the exchange of experiences, creating knowledge, and shaping culture. Taking Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) as a case study, this paper delves into how her storytelling serves as a unique form of translation, bridging the thought of ancient Chinese Taoist sages to narratives and fantasies that resonate with contemporary English readers. More specifically, the paper examines how Le Guin utilizes her protagonist's passivity to embody Lao Tsu's philosophy of non-action. This exploration aims to shed light on the complex relationship between storytelling and translation, emphasizing their importance in shaping our perceptions, broadening our horizons, and fostering a more interconnected global landscape of ideas and narratives.
{"title":"Storytelling as a Way of Translation: The Rendition of Taoism in Ursula K. Le Guin's <em>The Lathe of Heaven</em>","authors":"Xiulu Wang","doi":"10.7771/1481-4374.3927","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.3927","url":null,"abstract":"Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) is an immensely popular author of numerous science fictions and fantasy classics. A number of critics have noticed the influence of Taoism on Le Guin’s writing.critical insights offered by Translation Studies and Walter Benjamin’s comments on storytelling and translation, this paper argues that storytelling and translation are similar discursive practices that aim at the exchange of experiences, creating knowledge, and shaping culture. Taking Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) as a case study, this paper delves into how her storytelling serves as a unique form of translation, bridging the thought of ancient Chinese Taoist sages to narratives and fantasies that resonate with contemporary English readers. More specifically, the paper examines how Le Guin utilizes her protagonist's passivity to embody Lao Tsu's philosophy of non-action. This exploration aims to shed light on the complex relationship between storytelling and translation, emphasizing their importance in shaping our perceptions, broadening our horizons, and fostering a more interconnected global landscape of ideas and narratives.","PeriodicalId":44033,"journal":{"name":"CLCWEB-Comparative Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136358691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hwang Sun-mi’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly has become a contemporary classic children’s story in Korea since its original publication in 2000. Since then, the story has been translated and redesigned with new illustrations in almost thirty different countries (Y. Kim). The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly centers on a hen that raises a duckling as her “baby,” with the story drawing upon a rich reservoir of cultural associations between humans and nature in East Asian traditions. In this story, the hen leaves the human-dominated barnyard, based on profit, exploitation, and competition, for a reconnection with moral virtues in the natural world. By leaving the human-organized society, the hen Sprout realizes her name’s potential for vitality and growth. This paper explores cultural connections between the animal and nature in Hwang’s story within a Korean context, inviting comparisons between Western and Eastern environmental perspectives.
{"title":"The Animal in the Wild in <em>Hwang Sun-mi’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly</em>","authors":"Sarah Yoon","doi":"10.7771/1481-4374.3788","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.3788","url":null,"abstract":"Hwang Sun-mi’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly has become a contemporary classic children’s story in Korea since its original publication in 2000. Since then, the story has been translated and redesigned with new illustrations in almost thirty different countries (Y. Kim). The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly centers on a hen that raises a duckling as her “baby,” with the story drawing upon a rich reservoir of cultural associations between humans and nature in East Asian traditions. In this story, the hen leaves the human-dominated barnyard, based on profit, exploitation, and competition, for a reconnection with moral virtues in the natural world. By leaving the human-organized society, the hen Sprout realizes her name’s potential for vitality and growth. This paper explores cultural connections between the animal and nature in Hwang’s story within a Korean context, inviting comparisons between Western and Eastern environmental perspectives.","PeriodicalId":44033,"journal":{"name":"CLCWEB-Comparative Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136357931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As an emerging literary subgenre in the twenty-first century, Children’s Gothic challenges and blends the norms of both children’s literature and Gothic literature, featuring child characters’ self-empowerment in the face of fears and dark impulses. The foreignness and strangeness that pertain to the genre haunt the border of its translatability. Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999–2006), written under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, poses a chain of translational challenges due to its linguistic creativity, paratextual art, and mixed style of horror and dark humor intended for a child readership. To investigate the interplay between Children’s Gothic and its (un)translatability within the context of cross-cultural communication, this study compares the Gothic manifestations in the original English-language series and its Chinese translations. A comparative analysis shows that the Gothic elements are diluted in the Chinese version’s translation, re-illustration, and repackaging of the original, reflecting a tendency towards moral didacticism and localization. Taking together the educational emphases of Chinese children’s literature with François Jullien’s aesthetics of blandness, this paper argues for the commensurability of the diluted translation with the Chinese cultural-educational system, as well as draws poetic implications from the translation of a literary genre that is simultaneously pedagogical and transgressive.
{"title":"Children’s Gothic in the Chinese Context: The Untranslatability and Cross-Cultural Readability of a Literary Genre","authors":"Chengcheng You","doi":"10.7771/1481-4374.4044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.4044","url":null,"abstract":"As an emerging literary subgenre in the twenty-first century, Children’s Gothic challenges and blends the norms of both children’s literature and Gothic literature, featuring child characters’ self-empowerment in the face of fears and dark impulses. The foreignness and strangeness that pertain to the genre haunt the border of its translatability. Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999–2006), written under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, poses a chain of translational challenges due to its linguistic creativity, paratextual art, and mixed style of horror and dark humor intended for a child readership. To investigate the interplay between Children’s Gothic and its (un)translatability within the context of cross-cultural communication, this study compares the Gothic manifestations in the original English-language series and its Chinese translations. A comparative analysis shows that the Gothic elements are diluted in the Chinese version’s translation, re-illustration, and repackaging of the original, reflecting a tendency towards moral didacticism and localization. Taking together the educational emphases of Chinese children’s literature with François Jullien’s aesthetics of blandness, this paper argues for the commensurability of the diluted translation with the Chinese cultural-educational system, as well as draws poetic implications from the translation of a literary genre that is simultaneously pedagogical and transgressive.","PeriodicalId":44033,"journal":{"name":"CLCWEB-Comparative Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136358644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The purpose of this article is twofold: first, it endeavors to understand the vagaries of the notion of diversity as it travels from one national and political context to the next; and second, it shows how two major fiction writers and essayists have used that notion in their work and to what ends. The first part focuses on the work of Ralph Ellison, who put diversity at the heart of his reflection on what a truly democratic American society should be. Kenzaburō Ōe initially borrowed the notion of diversity from Ellison himself, but as the second part demonstrates, Ōe did not merely transpose Ellison’s notion of diversity onto his work. Instead, Ōe translated it, adapting it to his political and cultural environment, and expanding its meaning to be consonant with the substance of his literary universe. In Ōe’s work, the notion of diversity changes according to both Ōe’s evolution as a person and a writer and the development of Japanese society and politics since the postwar era. Ultimately, Ellison’s and Ōe’s respective notions of diversity are very dissimilar, and yet both authors concur on the key role diversity should play in shaping a more democratic world.
{"title":"Translating Diversity from Ralph Ellison to Kenzaburō Ōe","authors":"Raphaël Lambert","doi":"10.7771/1481-4374.4007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.4007","url":null,"abstract":"The purpose of this article is twofold: first, it endeavors to understand the vagaries of the notion of diversity as it travels from one national and political context to the next; and second, it shows how two major fiction writers and essayists have used that notion in their work and to what ends. The first part focuses on the work of Ralph Ellison, who put diversity at the heart of his reflection on what a truly democratic American society should be. Kenzaburō Ōe initially borrowed the notion of diversity from Ellison himself, but as the second part demonstrates, Ōe did not merely transpose Ellison’s notion of diversity onto his work. Instead, Ōe translated it, adapting it to his political and cultural environment, and expanding its meaning to be consonant with the substance of his literary universe. In Ōe’s work, the notion of diversity changes according to both Ōe’s evolution as a person and a writer and the development of Japanese society and politics since the postwar era. Ultimately, Ellison’s and Ōe’s respective notions of diversity are very dissimilar, and yet both authors concur on the key role diversity should play in shaping a more democratic world.","PeriodicalId":44033,"journal":{"name":"CLCWEB-Comparative Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136358554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
François Cheng (1929- ), elected to the Académie Française in 2002, structurally introduced the lexicological, syntactic, and semiotic form of Tang poetry to the French academia via his academic works. In the late 1980s, François Cheng shifted his focus from academic writing to creative writing, both in French, winning the 1998 Prix Femina for his novel Le Dit de Tianyi (1998) and Prix Roger Caillois for his collection of poems Double chant (2000). Focusing on his less-discussed poetry, which reveals higher congruity of his understanding of Chinese literary classics with creative representation, this paper argues that, as an analyst of Tang poetry, Cheng also acts as a contemporary translator of the classical Chinese aesthetic ideology into French modern verses. His subjective creation of poetry is both transcultural and trans-temporal, ambiguously corresponding to his lingual, racial, cultural, and national belonging, and appropriating a new valid form of French literary style. This ambiguity both transcends national identification and universalizes the international flow of knowledge. Beyond Feng Lan's (2017) recognition of François Cheng as a special representative of Chinese diasporic intellectuals who mediate between institutionalized French discourses and Chinese classical philosophy, a close reading of Cheng’s poems in the paper will support an investigation of his successive and transformative production of text.
2002年当选法兰西学术学院院士的郑弗朗索瓦(1929-)，通过他的学术著作，从结构上向法国学术界介绍了唐诗的词汇学、句法和符号学形式。在20世纪80年代后期，francois Cheng将他的写作重心从学术写作转向创意写作，都是用法语写的，他的小说Le Dit de Tianyi(1998)赢得了1998年的Femina奖，他的诗集Double chant(2000)获得了Roger Caillois奖。本文以其较少被讨论的诗歌为研究对象，揭示了他对中国文学经典的理解与创造性表达的高度一致性。本文认为，作为唐诗的分析者，程先生同时也是中国古典美学思想对法国现代诗歌的当代翻译者。他的主观诗歌创作是跨文化和跨时间的，模糊地符合他的语言、种族、文化和民族归属，并挪用了一种新的有效的法国文学风格形式。这种模糊性既超越了国家认同，又使知识的国际流动普遍化。冯兰(2017)承认francalois Cheng是在制度化的法国话语和中国古典哲学之间进行调解的中国流散知识分子的特别代表，除此之外，仔细阅读本文中Cheng的诗歌将有助于研究他的连续和变革的文本生产。
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