Speaker: Prof. Jan Walls

Speaker: Prof. Eugene Eoyang

'Human' in the Age of Disposable People

Speaker: Prof. Rey Chow

Speaker: Prof. David Der-wei Wang

Speaker: Prof. Leo Ou-fan Lee

Speaker: Prof. Thomas Luk

Thick Translation or Translation that is Simply Thick? – Some Thoughts on Translation as Cultural Representation

Speaker: Prof. Martha Cheung

LECTURE 1
Prof. Jan Walls, Form and/or Content: An Argument for Stylistic Diversity in English Translation of Chinese Poetry

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

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

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

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

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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