Abstract
This chapter starts by discussing the challenge of authority in postmodern writings and then moves on to discuss the modern sense of translation, where it assumes the role of writing and continual interpretation and performs therefore the function of continuing the life of the literary canon. In this sense one might say the author is dead and the translator is born, as is seen in works of postmodern and postcolonial writings. The chapter focuses on the appropriation of Chinese sources in Nicholas Jose’s novel The Red Thread: A Love Story and sees how the classical Chinese text is translated and appropriated by Nick Jose in his recontextualizing of a love story in modern situations where the racial lines are crossed, and in this case, the East and West, the ancient and modern, are in constant dialogue and transformation, and transcend the traditional dichotomies of time and space.
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Notes
- 1.
The unreliability of Freud’s narration prompted Australian novelist Brian Castro to translate the Freudian story into a novel entitled Double-Wolf, which was shortlisted for the 1992 Miles Franklin Award.
- 2.
Scholars have noticed both the intralingual and interlingual aspect of translation and appropriation in modern writings. Yang Jiang, both a writer and a translator in modern China, titled her cultural revolution narration (干校六记), which was translated as Six Chapters from My Life ‘Downunder’, alluding in a punning and humorous way to both Six Chapters of a Floating Life and Australia.
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Wang, G. (2019). Writer as Translator: On Translation and Postmodern Appropriation in Nicholas Jose’s The Red Thread: A Love Story. In: Translation in Diasporic Literatures. Palgrave Pivot, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6609-3_2
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