Abstract
The New Culture Movement of the mid-1910s and mid-1920s was referred to as the Chinese Renaissance (Zhongguo de wenyi fuxing) by Hu Shi and other participants at the time, being a multi-faceted intellectual and cultural movement frequently historicized as the “awakening” to individuality, freedom and other modern values associated with a Western democratic society. The movement was conducted through publications, in which translations from foreign works featured prominently. The producers and consumers of these publications were people who had been exposed to modern education in Western style schools in China and at universities overseas. In their teens and early 20s, they were immensely influenced by the modern ideas and concepts they acquired through the reading of late Qing translations of foreign works and modern education in general. They were products of important historical changes which enabled intercultural experience and new imaginings of the Chinese culture. This chapter traces the trajectory of identity formation of leading New Culture intellectuals, concentrating on their exposure to Western knowledge and their involvement in social and literary activism by way of translation practice in the 1900s and early 1910s.
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Notes
- 1.
The older of the two generations that made up the New Culture readership had some familiarity with old-style private schools (sishu) in their childhood while the younger generation, born in the 1900s, did not receive a traditional sishu education.
- 2.
Gimpel (2015: 152), for instance, uses the word “self-colonization” to describe the wish of one of the Chinese students studying abroad in the early twentieth century to follow what she imagined to be modern and Western modes of life.
- 3.
American missionary W. A. P Martin (Ding Weiliang) (1827–1916) is considered to be the first person to introduce Darwinism to China. However, his work was far less influential than Yan Fu’s translation.
- 4.
Hu Shi made the remark in “The Meaning of the New Trend of Thought” (Xin sichao de yiyi), published in New Youth in December 1919.
- 5.
Taken from Liang Qichao’s 1897 essay “On Translation” (Lun yishu).
- 6.
In Chinese scholarship, there is a popular account of how Lin Shu’s first translated work came about. In 1897, his wife died. Lin’s friends Wei Han and Wang Shouchang, in their attempt to assuage his bereavement, advised him to translate a foreign novel. Lin turned them down, apprehensive that he might not be capable of the work. His friends persisted and Wang Shouchang gave an oral interpretation of the French novel La Dame aux Camélias on their cruise along Gushan of Fujian Province. By the end of the journey Lin Shu had finished “translating” the novel. That was how the famous Bali chahuanü yishi came out. See, for example, A Critical Biography of Lin Shu (Lin Shu pingzhuan) (Zhang 2007).
- 7.
Guo Moruo (1892–1978) (1978: 113–4) observed that two of Lin Shu’s translated works that had exerted the most positive impact on his subsequent literary orientation were Joan Haste (Jiayin xiaozhuan) and Ivanhoe (Sakexun jiehou yingxiong lue), with the former being “the first Western novel I have ever read” and the latter “impressing me with its Romanticism.” Hu Shi (2003(32): 35) recalled that Lin Shu’s rewritings of European novels not only provided him with basic Western literary knowledge but also opened another window for him to gain a better understanding of the significance of such concepts as “the world,” “the mankind” and “humanism.”
- 8.
Lin Shu himself took greater pride in his grasp of classical Chinese than in his translated literature. In the 1930s, Lin’s friend Chen Yan (1856–1937) expressed his puzzlement when he learned that it was Lin’s translations that first inspired the interest in Western literature of Qian Zhongshu (1910–1998), a modern Chinese literary scholar. He said to Qian: “This is altogether reversed … After reading his translations, you should have picked up more classical Chinese from him. Why did you start to admire the foreign? Hasn’t Qinnan (Lin Shu) unexpectedly inclined you toward foreign literature [when he intended to develop your interest in classical Chinese]?” (in Qian 1994: 102).
- 9.
In the early twentieth century, there were criticisms regarding their way of looking at the Chinese culture. “They tend to view favourably what is foreign, no matter whether it is right or wrong and disregard whatever is in their home country. They fear they don’t look like foreigners when mimicking them” (in Wang Qisheng 1992: 246).
- 10.
The first ten chapters and the first part of Chap. 11 of the novel first appeared in installments in The National Daily in 1903. The complete “translation” of the novel, entitled Can Shijie, which literally means “the miserable world,” was published by Jingjing Press the following year.
- 11.
Mingbai nande literally means “sensible and rare” in Chinese.
- 12.
Chen Duxiu’s political beliefs are often considered to be complex. See, for instance, Tai (2007).
- 13.
A Chinese scholar calls in question the literary merit of Can Shijie, believing it can only be regarded as a piece of creative work written by a fledgling youngster who disfigured his characters in the novel because of their drastic legendry. See Yang (1986).
- 14.
See, for example, Mu Mutian’s (1900–1971) 1985 essay “My Recollections of May Fourth” (Guanyu wusi geren de huiyi).
- 15.
Taken from Hu Shi’s letter to his mother, written on 22 March 1915.
- 16.
Lu Xun (1981(13): 473) recollected in 1932 that in the late 1900s Lin Shu’s use of the classical language in his translation of foreign fiction was “very good indeed.” It was Lin’s many mistranslations that displeased the Zhou brothers, who eventually decided to carry out their own translation project in order to “set things right” (jiayi jiuzheng) (ibid).
- 17.
Lu Xun translated the short biographical piece, which was a restrained protest against official injustice, through the intermediary of Japanese. In the postscript to his translation, Lu Xun (1981(10: 437) attributed the original to Victor Hugo. According to James Pusey (1998: 13), however, it was actually written by Hugo’s wife.
- 18.
This is considered a pseudotranslation as Lu Xun failed to remember the origin of the source text. Scholars have tried in vain to locate the original. See, for example, Wong (1999).
- 19.
Zhou Zuoren (2005: 16) claimed in his 1944 essay “My Miscellaneous Learning” (Wo de zaxue): “Andrew Lang’s anthropological explications have helped me gain understanding not only of mythology and other related stories but also of cultural anthropology….The little interest I have in anthropology stems not from the study of it as a subject but from [its emphasis on] human beings.”
- 20.
See Lu Xun’s preface to Call to Arms (Nahan).
- 21.
Zhou Zuoren (1995: 272) explained in an essay “The Literature of Small and Weak Nations” (Ruoxiao minzu wenxue) why Russia fell under the brothers’ category of the “humiliated and oppressed/injured” nations: “Russia is not small or weak, but the people there are oppressed. Therefore, we have chosen to include it in the category. It might be more appropriate to call them nations where oppression is resisted and freedom is sought.”
- 22.
During the May Fourth period, Russian novels and short stories were still favoured by the Zhou brothers in their choice of source texts for translation. Lu Xun (1981(4): 253) claimed in a 1932 essay that 15 years earlier the literature of Russia, seen as a half-civilized country by the so-called civilized people in West Europe, had been triumphant in literary circles of the world. He wrote: “When I say ‘triumphant,’ I refer to the fact that it enjoyed a wide readership, with its remarkableness in content and technique, and that its readers derived substantial benefits from it. We were aware at that time that Russian literature was our guide and friend, as it enabled us to see the kind soul, sufferings and struggles of the oppressed …. Literature brought home to us the existence of two types of people in this world, that is, the oppressors and the oppressed.”
- 23.
Davies (2007: 203) quotes Shanghai-based Chinese historian Zhu Xueqin as asserting that when Lu Xun regarded China’s basic problem as one of national character, and sought to change the national character, he enlisted a form of cultural determinism to address what should have been specifically circumscribed instead as issues of institutional reform, adjustment, and innovation. Zhu also argues that both Lu Xun and Hu Shi were following in Liang Qichao’s footsteps when they explained China’s problems in totalizing culturalistic terms.
- 24.
The remark was made in the preface to the republished Collection of Short Stories from Abroad. The words “Written by Zhou Zuoren” (Zhou Zuoren ji) appeared after the preface. Zhou (1969: 234) recollected in the 1936 essay “About Lu Xun (II)” (Guanyu Lu Xun zhi er) that the preface had actually been written by Lu Xun.
- 25.
The term zhiyi was not used by Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren until 1920.
- 26.
Lu Xun (1981(12): 409) wrote in 1934: “In retrospect, I regret acting as a smart aleck and refusing to attempt literal translation when I was young.”
- 27.
- 28.
For all the efforts New Culture intellectuals made to the development of modern Chinese, studies of the Mandarin translations of the Bible produced by Protestant missionaries in China during the second half of the nineteenth century reveal a close connection between Protestant Bible translation and the rise of the modern vernacular. See, for example, Edward Gunn (1991), Yuan Jin (2014), and George Kam Wah Mak (2017).
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Chi, L. (2019). Making a “New Culture” Through Translation. In: Modern Selfhood in Translation . New Frontiers in Translation Studies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1156-7_3
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