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LEWI Lectures 2005: The In's and Out's of East-West Translation and Adaptation
The lecture series for this year, entitled “The In's and
Out's of East-West Translation and Adaptation”, runs from
March to November 2005. The lectures aim to provoke thinking
about the stakes of contemporary translation and adaptation.
Locally and internationally renowned scholars of translation,
literature and cultural studies have delivered impressive
talks on interactions among various disciplinary tools
and methods in East-West translation and adaptation. A
total of 7 lectures in the series were held in the spring
and the fall semester and have attracted hundreds of academics,
students and general public.
Introduction
Translation, broadly speaking, is a key mediator in discursive arenas. It wields
enormous power in constructing—and even inventing—representations
of the other. Translation is an epistemological, not just a
linguistic, philological or even poetic endeavor. It would
not be too much to argue that translation, in its widest sense,
is no different from thinking itself, the act of transposing
language, symbols, concepts and expression. In the East-West
context, translation is always a cross-cultural and “inter-lingual”
practice, mining the veins of semantic and syntactic structures
running beneath ordinary language. East-West translation, then,
is not merely linguistic conversion but also a cultural adaptation,
either by domesticating a foreign tongue or “foreignizing”
a local vernacular. On “Translation and adaptation” should
we portray them as “two sides of the same coin,” or as “two
points on a continuum,” where “adaptation” pays more attention
to the existing conventions of a different medium in the receptor language-culture, whereas “translation” may try to replicate as much of the original
medium as possible? For example, the first sonnets were written
in Italian and in Spanish, and were introduced into English
through translations that tried to replicate the original structure
of the source language medium. Translations actually transformed
English poetic conventions. The same is currently happening
with the haiku verse form.
Translation and adaptation as two sides of the same coin entails
a sense of unity that is misleading. The transformations take
place painstakingly and simultaneously, particularly in moments
of East-West contact and bear witness to sometimes turbulent
exchanges across cultural and linguistic divides. These East-West
interactions occur in many languages and multiple forms, so
they can be approached from various (inter) disciplinary tools
and methods: linguistic, literary, visual, cinematic, electronic
and performative.
The lectures in this series aim to provoke thinking about the
stakes of contemporary translation and adaptation. What has
been gained and lost in the practices of East-West translation/adaptation?
On whose terms do these transpositions take place and on what
grounds may they be considered legitimate (or not)? What subjectivities
are implicated in the translation/adaptation process? Is translation
the end, in the sense of a destination, of East-West contact?
“The In's and Out's of East-West Translation and Adaptation”
takes aim at developing a thick description of the terms, conditions
and stakes of cross-cultural translation, in its practical
and theoretical dimensions.
Past Lectures of the 2005 Series:
LECTURE 1
Prof. Jan Walls, Form and/or Content: An Argument for Stylistic Diversity in English Translation of Chinese Poetry |
Date |
March 18, 2005 |
Time |
4:30 – 6:00 pm |
Venue |
NAB 209, Lam Woo International Conference Centre, HKBU |
Speaker |
Prof. Jan Walls, Simon Fraser University |
| Chair |
Prof. Martha Cheung, HKBU |
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About the Speaker
Professor Jan Walls is the Director of the David Lam Centre for International
Communication, the Director of the Asia-Canada Programme
of Simon Fraser University, and also the Director of
North America-China Research Programme of LEWI. He
is also a multi-talented performing artist, known for
his bilingual (English/Putonghua) performance of bamboo
clappertale.
Abstract
Robert Frost was not kidding when he once defined poetry as "that which does not come through in translation." Some translators historically have preferred to render the verse (rhythms and
rhymes), and hope that some of the original poetry
comes through; others have chosen to focus on the poetry
(images, metaphors and ironies), paying little or no
attention to the structure of the original verse; still
others have taken the royal road to schizophrenia,
trying to maintain loyalty to both the sublime experience
and the literary structure of the original work. I
will argue that English readers who are innocent of
all knowledge of the Chinese language derive great
benefit from having a rich diversity of translation
styles available for their enjoyment. Examples of the
various styles will be examined and intoned to illustrate
various points. A case will also be made for the need
to produce "performable" translations, since Chinese poetry was never "written" to be read, but was "made" to be chanted.
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LECTURE 2
Prof. Eugene Eoyang, Of 'Invincible Spears and Impenetrable Shields': The Possibility of Impossible Translations |
Date |
April 15, 2005 |
Time |
4:30 - 6:00 pm |
Venue |
DLB 802, David C. Lam Building, HKBU |
Speaker |
Prof. Eugene Eoyang, Lingnan University |
| Chair |
Prof. Leo Lee, The Chinese University of Hong Kong |
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About the Speaker
Professor Eugene Eoyang is a renowned scholar in comparative literature and
translation. Before joining Lingnan University, Professor
Eoyang taught literature in Indiana University. His
recent publications include: "The Ethics and Aesthetics of Literature: a Comparative Perspective" in Elogio da Lucidez: A comparaçao Literária em Âmbito Universal — Textos em
homenagem a Tania Franco Carvalhal (Porto Alegre: Evangraf
2004, pp. 51-66) and "The Theme of Mutability in Three Chinese Poems" in Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, Vol. 50 (2002-2003).
Abstract
Beginning with a consideration of the logical and illogical notions of impossibility,
the paper examines two kinds of contradiction: the
categorical and the dialectic, especially as it relates
to the Chinese word maodun. Theoretical absolutes
are pitted against realistic relativities; abstract
strictures are examined in conjunction with concrete
improbabilities. A brief survey of the phenomena
of "impossible" translations follows - translations which are theoretically precluded but realizable
in reality. The phenomena of translations of James
Joyce's Ulysses – surely one of the texts that would
be considered "impossible" to translate - belies the theoretical assumption that precludes its rendering
into other languages. This yields a dictum which
constitutes a maodun, not a contradiction, on translation:
the more impossible the text the more it demands
translation, the more imperative that it be translated.
Sometimes the translation of a text is the only surviving
version of a text - its only nachleben, in Walter
Benjamin's formulation. For example, the Septuagint
conveyed the text of the Bible for nearly two millennia
before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948.
Other, more recent examples are cited (and solicited).
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LECTURE 3
Prof. Rey Chow, 'Human' in the Age of Disposable People |
Date |
May 27, 2005 |
Time |
4:30 - 6:00 pm |
Venue |
DLB 802, David C. Lam Building, HKBU |
Speaker |
Prof. Rey Chow, Brown University |
| Chair |
Prof. Georgette Wang, HKBU |
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About the Speaker
Professor Rey Chow is one of the world’s leading scholars in cultural theory,
media and feminist studies. She is an Andrew W. Mellon
Professor who teaches in the Comparative Literature
and Modern Culture and Media Departments at the Brown
University, and currently serves on the editorial and
advisory boards of thirty academic publications and
research centers in North America, Europe, Asia, and
Australia.
Professor Chow has written extensively on film, feminism,
fascism, pedagogy, and the “modernism-postmodernism
problematic”. She is the author of six books, including
the widely acknowledged Woman and Chinese Modernity:
The Politics of Reading Between West and East (University
of Minnesota Press, 1991), the James Russell Lowell
Prize awarded Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality,
Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Columbia
University Press, 1995) and The Age of World Target:
Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative
Work (forthcoming from the Duke University Press,
2006). Her works have been translated into several
Asian and
European languages.
Abstract
This lecture explores certain suggestive concepts proposed by Martin Heidegger
– specifically, homelessness as a modern world condition
and the oblivion of Being – in relation to the contemporary
Chinese film Blind Shaft (Mang Jing, 2003), adapted
from Liu Qingbang's novella "Shen mu," and directed and produced by Li Yang.
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LECTURE 4
Prof. David Der-wei Wang, The Three Epiphanies of Shen Congwen
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Date |
June 13, 2005 |
Time |
4:30 - 6:00 pm |
Venue |
DLB 802, David C. Lam Building, HKBU |
Speaker |
Prof. David Der-wei Wang,
Harvard University |
| Chair |
Prof. Chung Ling, HKBU |
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About the Speaker
Professor David Der-wei Wang, the authority on modern Chinese literature, is
the Edward C. Henderson Professor of East Asian Languages
and Cultures at Harvard University. He also serves
as the Director of Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Inter-University
Center for Sinological Studies.
A worldwide recognized leading scholar in modern
and contemporary Chinese literature, late Qing
fiction
and drama, and comparative literary theory, Professor
Wang is the author of more than twenty English and
Chinese books. His important publications in English
include Fictional Realism in 20th-Century China:
Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (Columbia University
Press,
1992), Fin-de-Siecle Splendor: Repressed Modernities
of Late Qing Fiction 1849-1911 (Stanford University
Press, 1997), and The Monster That Is History: History,
Violence, and Fictional Writing in 20th-Century China (University of California Press, 2004). He also edited
or co-edited more than ten other books in English
or Chinese, including From May Fourth to June Fourth:
Fiction and Film in 20th Century China (Harvard University
Press, 1993), Chinese Literature in the Second Half
of A Modern Century (Indiana University Press 2000)
and The Last of the Whampoa Breed: Stories of Chinese
Diaspora (Columbia University Press, 2003). Professor
Wang is currently working on a project examining the artistic representation of China
in painting, theater and cinema during the mid-20th
century.
Abstract
Shen Congwen (1902-1988) underwent a profound crisis during the Second Sino-Japanese
War. Faced with the calamities the war had brought
to Chinese life and culture and realizing the limitations
of literary realism in registering the calamities,
Shen Congwen sought desperately for a way to reposition
himself as intellectual and as writer. Given the
mainstream discourse of his time, however, Shen’s
efforts proved to be too feeble and too “irrelevant”.
Shen’s misgivings about China’s future were compounded
by the chaos of post-war existence. So in the spring
of 1949, right after the Chinese Communist takeover
of Peking, Shen was driven to a nervous breakdown
and even tried to end his life. His literary career
came to an end at the very moment the new China was
established.
This lecture describes the life of Shen Congwen
from 1947 to 1957, a time that witnessed a
most painful
transformation for many Chinese intellectuals, literati,
and artists in the modern century. Through a series
of woodcut prints, a photo, and a set of sketches,
I describe the way by which Shen Congwen faced his
despair, redefined his artistic vision, and most
significantly, reached a compromise with the
tyranny of history. I
argue that Shen’s achievement as an art historian
in the second half of his career points not
so much to
his personal triumph as to an ironic twist of his
time. The lecture addresses the following three
issues: the
dialogic manifestation of visual and textual media;
the rethinking of historical violence and individual
agency; and the politics of historical representation.
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LECTURE 5
Prof. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Translation as Cultural Mediation: Reflections on Late Qing Translation and Urban Culture
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Date |
September 16, 2005 |
Time |
4:30 - 6:00 pm |
Venue |
DLB 802, David C. Lam Building, HKBU |
Speaker |
Prof. Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Chinese University of Hong Kong |
| Chair |
Prof. Thomas Luk,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong |
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About the Speaker
Currently Professor of Humanities at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Professor
Leo Ou-fan Lee is one of the most distinguished scholars
in modern Chinese literature and culture. An authority
on modern Chinese intellectual history, literature,
and film, Professor Lee has publications in both English
and Chinese. He is the author of The Romantic generation
of Modern Chinese Writers (Harvard University Press,
1973), Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Indiana University Press, 1987) and the celebrated
Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture
in China, 1930-1945 (Harvard University Press, 1999).
He also wrote a dozen volumes of essays in Chinese
as well as two Chinese novels, including Confessions
of a Profligate, Fan Liuyuan (范柳原懺情錄).
Professor Lee received his MA and PhD from Harvard
University and has taught at UCLA, Chicago, Indiana,
Princeton, and Harvard. Abstract
In this talk Professor Lee plans to discuss some interesting samples from the large corpus of Chinese translations of Western--largely Victorian--fiction in the late Qing period (1885-1910) and place them in the context of the rise of popular fiction at that time. Of particular interest to Chinese readers were Lin Shu's translation of Dumas fils' La Dame aux camélias and other translations of Sherlock Holmes stories. This loose form of translations did not adhere to fidelity but rather served to establish inter-cultural connections. The "mediation" role needs to be explored as a new way of doing cultural history and "post-colonial" studies.
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LECTURE 6
Prof. Thomas Luk, Translation and Adaptation of Western Drama in Hong Kong: A Socio-cultural Study of Hong Kong Repertory Theatre's Production
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Date |
October 14, 2005 |
Time |
5:30 - 7:00 pm |
Venue |
DLB 802, David C. Lam Building, HKBU |
Speaker |
Prof. Thomas Luk, The Chinese University of Hong Kong |
| Chair |
Prof. Leonard Chu, Hong Kong Baptist University |
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About the Speaker
Professor Thomas Luk, now teaching at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, is a renowned scholar in modern, contemporary and comparative drama.
Professor Luk is known for his numerous research projects on both Western drama and Cantonese Opera in Hong Kong, intercultural performance and theatre studies. His recent publications include "Hong Kong as Imaginary in The World of Suzie Wong, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, and Chinese Box" in Before and After Suzie: Hong Kong in Western Film and Literature (New Asia College, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002), and "Novels into Film: Liu Yichang's Tête Bêche and Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love" in Chinese-language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (University of Hawaii Press, January 2005). He has also published a number of essays in local and China academic journals on drama.
Abstract
The overwhelming number of productions of western plays in translation or their adaptations on the Hong Kong stage reflects a very active level of acculturation, and in a sense, interculturalism, very becoming to a place like Hong Kong. Not only does it not suggest cultural imposition, rather, it brings about artistic/theatrical invigoration, and opens up potential for open dialogue between cultures. However, these productions are not without their problems, cultural, social and linguistic, etc. This lecture purports to look at the Hong Kong Repertory Company's past productions, with a view to addressing some important issues in the theatre, concerning adaptation and translation. These are:
1. How does the theatre of translation and adaptation in Hong Kong serve as an intercultural transference, “a unique machinery for overcoming cultural differences and reaching out towards other cultures” (Scolnivoc, Hanna and Peter Holland)
2. The dynamics or mechanics of transferring a play from one culture to another.
3. What are the criteria, aesthetic, cultural, linguistic, for transfer?
4. What is the purpose of choice and aim of putting on a play in translation for a local audience?
5. How is meaning to be conveyed or adapted to a new cultural environment, or create new meaning?
In its twenty seven years of operation, Hong Kong Repertory Company has evolved from a translation dominated production company to one that celebrates Hong Kong featured productions as well as occasional production of translated western work. It is time to take stock of some of its major productions of translated plays, in order to investigate how these works on the stage have helped forge contemporary Hong Kong theatre, constructed its hybrid identity integral to Hong Kong as a meeting place of cultures, East and West.
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LECTURE 7
Prof. Martha Cheung, Thick Translation or Translation that is Simply Thick? – Some Thoughts on Translation as Cultural Representation
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Date |
November 18, 2005
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Time |
5:30 - 7:00 pm |
Venue |
DLB 802, David C. Lam Building, HKBU |
Speaker |
Prof. Martha Cheung, HKBU |
| Chair |
Prof. Zhang Longxi, City University of Hong Kong |
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About the Speaker
An acclaimed scholar in the field of translation, Professor Martha Cheung is the Director of Centre for Translation and Head of the Translation Programme, Hong Kong Baptist University. Her main areas of research interest include Chinese and Western translation theories, history of translation, and translation of Chinese medicine texts. She edited (with Jane Lai) An Oxford Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama (Oxford University Press, 1997). She is Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Children's Encyclopedia , Vols 1-9 (Oxford University Press, 1998), and An Illustrated Chinese Materia Medica (School of Chinese medicine, HKBU, 2004). She also edited Hong Kong Collage: Contemporary Stories and Writing (Oxford University Press, 1998) and Travelling with a Bitter Melon – Selected Poems (1973-1998) by Leung Ping-kwan (Asia 2000, 2002). Professor Cheung has translated many Chinese literary works into English and written journal articles and book chapters on translation.
Abstract
Concepts are deeply rooted in culture. The translation of concepts is therefore intimately related to the translation of culture. Moreover, the translation of concepts brings out, in sharp relief, the politics and problematics of the representation/self-representation of culture. This talk explores the issues relating to this topic by focusing on an anthology of translation the author is compiling – an anthology, in English translation, of Chinese discourse on translation, from ancient times to the Revolution of 1911, which marked the end of feudal rule in China. Specifically, this paper discusses the use and usefulness of what Kwame Anthony Appiah calls “thick translation” in the rendering of Chinese translation concepts into English.
Conventionally, Chinese translation concepts are rendered into another language by the use of already existent translation concepts in that language. The well-known Chinese translation concept of ‘ xin ' 信 , for example, is often translated into English as ‘faithful'. This facilitates immediate perception of similarity. But what differences there are between ‘ xin ' and ‘faithful' would be eliminated. And if, as is the case here, the differences are caused by the fact that ‘ xin ” and ‘faithful' each has behind it a cultural tradition of its own, then the cultural tradition that has given rise to the concept of ‘ xin ' would not be represented at all. Worse, if the English concept used to represent the Chinese concept happens to have acquired a special load of meaning, as for example the concept of ‘fluency' has in the hands of Lawrence Venuti, then the source concept (in this case “ da ” 達 ) would lose what identity and meaning it might have of its own.
The question is, how useful is ‘thick translation' as a strategy in bringing out the unique otherness of these translation concepts, and how does one practise ‘thick translation' in real terms? ‘ Xin ', and a host of other translation concepts such as “ da ” 達 , “ ya ' 雅 , “ wen ” 文 , and “ zhi ” 質 all being terms deeply rooted in the Chinese cultural tradition, how thick should ‘thick translation' be to give presence to such a tradition? How is culture to be represented in translation? Through an investigation of these and related questions, it is hoped that the discussion will have a theoretical relevance beyond the confines of Chinese-English translation.
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