论著推介｜沈安德 著 Translating China as Cross-Identity Performance

编者按

Translating China as Cross-identity Performance 是香港中文大学翻译系沈安德教授（Professor James St. André）新著，本书最重要的理论贡献在于提出从隐喻（metaphor）的角度来思考翻译活动及翻译史，作者借鉴文化研究、酷儿研究以及人类学的方法理论，以“跨身份表演(cross-identity performance)”这一隐喻框架来探讨一系列中文作品从十八世纪至二十世纪的外译（以英语和法语为主）个案：包括早期欧洲的伪译（pseudotranslation）和改编作品、早期欧洲汉学家对中国文学作品的翻译、对中文文字语音的再现、更有华人作者如辜鸿铭和林语堂的翻译和写作。本书所探讨的深度和范围都远超传统翻译研究，在钩沉史料、还原译史的基础上，也是一次大胆的理论创新，作者认为从“跨身份表演”的角度思考翻译活动，能够丰富乃至颠覆翻译研究（enrich the field of translation studies and to radicalize it）。

Author: James St. André

Publisher: University of Hawai’i Press

Publication date: MAY 2018

Language: English

Pages: 300

Price: US$68.00

ISBN: 9780824869878

作者简介

James St. André is an Associate Professor in the Department of Translation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; previously he held a joint appointment in Chinese and Translation Studies at the University of Manchester (2006-2014), and an appointment in the Department of Chinese at the National University of Singapore (1999-2005). After an undergraduate degree in English and French Language and Literature from Boston University (1986), he pursued graduate studies in comparative literature at the University of Chicago, obtaining his MA in 1987 and his PhD in 1998. Publications include Thinking through Translation with Metaphors (edited volume, St. Jerome Publishing, 2010), China and Its Others, co-edited with Peng Hsiao-yen of Academia Sinica, Taiwan (Rodopi, 2011), and many articles.

内容简介

James St. André applies the perspective of cross-identity performance to the translation of a wide variety of Chinese texts into English and French from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Drawing on scholarship in cultural studies, queer studies, and anthropology, James St. André argues that many cross-identity performance techniques, including blackface, passing, drag, mimicry, and masquerade, provide insights into the history of translation practice. He makes a strong case for situating translation in its historical, social, and cultural milieu, reading translated texts alongside a wide variety of other materials that helped shape the image of “John Chinaman.”

△书内插图：Stanislas Julien, TCHAO-CHI-KOU-EUL (1834) 书页

A reading of the life and works of George Psalmanazar, whose cross-identity performance as a native of Formosa enlivened early eighteenth-century salons, opens the volume and provides a bridge between the book’s theoretical framework and its examination of Chinese-European interactions. The core of the book consists of a chronological series of cases, each of which illustrates the use of a different type of cross-identity performance to better understand translation practice. St. André provides close readings of early pseudotranslations, including Marana’s Turkish Spy (1691) and Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1762), as well as adaptations of Hatchett’s The Chinese Orphan (1741) and Voltaire’s Orphelin de la Chine (1756). Later chapters explore Davis’s translation of Sorrows of Han (1829) and genuine translations of nonfictional material mainly by employees of the East India Company. The focus then shifts to oral/aural aspects of early translation practice in the nineteenth century using the concept of mimicry to examine interactions between Pidgin English and translation in the popular press. Finally, the work of two early modern Chinese translators, Gu Hongming and Lin Yutang, is examined as masquerade.

△书内插图：John Francis Davis, Chinese Moral Maxims (1823) 书页

Offering an original and innovative study of genres of writing that are traditionally examined in isolation, St. André’s work provides a fascinating examination of the way three cultures interacted through the shifting encounters of fiction, translation, and nonfiction and in the process helped establish and shape the way Chinese were represented. The book represents a major contribution to translation studies, Chinese cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and gender criticism.

本书目录

书评

St. André’s book is a bold theoretical intervention in the current discourse of translation studies. It offers a delightful account of the “making of China” through translation and pseudotranslation, as well as a fascinating portrait of the conceptual, linguistic, aesthetic, social ethnographic, and political encounters between Chinese civilization and its European counterparts.

—David Der-wei Wang,

Harvard University

This provocative book is an innovative study of the construction of the Western image of China through translations and pseudotranslations. Its comparative analysis of different genres truly problematizes the idea of authenticity and the status of the original, offering a major contribution to translation studies, Chinese cultural studies, and imagology.

—Brian James Baer,

Kent State University

书摘

Introduction: Translation as Cross-Identity Performance

All societies in all time periods have members who pretend to be something they are not. Altering one’s appearance, one’s clothes, or one’s voice; dissembling regarding one’s past; or lying about one’s intentions are all common traits. Indeed the ability to produce counterfactual statements may be one of the few truly universal features of human language. Cross-identity performance is an umbrella term for a variety of such practices that relate mainly to crossing racial, ethnic, gender, or class boundaries.

I first developed the metaphor of cross-identity performance in an earlier article, and I will not repeat the argument here. Rather, I will simply delineate quickly the range of metaphors as they relate specifically to the history of translation between Chinese and European languages under consideration in this book.

△书内插图：Philippe Couplet, Confucius Sinarum Philosophus(1687)书页

△书内插图：Du Halde, Description of the Empire of China (1738), Vol.1书页

Perhaps the best-known type of cross-identity performance is “passing,” traditionally used to describe African Americans pretending to be white, lesbians and homosexuals pretending to be heterosexual, men pretending to be women, or women pretending to be men. In gender and queer studies, this term is mainly rooted in the experience of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American society. Therefore, the main features that are highlighted are that this type of cross-identity performance is normally an attempt to deceive, that it may be either short-term or long-term, and that it has potentially high stakes. Unmasking could result in ridicule, social ostracism, prosecution, or even violence. In addition, if we compare passing to “being closeted,” a type of cross-identity performance not used in this study, the issue of agency arises. The passive construction indicates that this is more of a passive, victimized role. Unlike being closeted, passing is conceptualized as an active choice used by individuals to achieve their own ends, such as freedom from slavery.

Passing usually involves members of disenfranchised groups crossing as members of more empowered groups in order to enjoy certain privileges or escape persecution. In contrast, slumming involves members of an empowered group pretending to be disempowered, such as members of the upper class crossing as lowerclass, or members of educated classes crossing as uneducated. While there is also an element of danger and the intent to deceive, this cross-identity performance usually emphasizes an investigative or reporting aspect: The crosser intends to gather information about the other group and then report back Judge Bao in Chinese fiction disguising himself as a commoner to investigate crimes and Jack London living in East London and writing about his experiences are both examples. This form of cross-identity performance, since it does not necessarily involve crossing racial, ethnic, or gender lines, highlights the role of voice or accent. In particular, England has a long tradition of accent as a marker of both class and region, as immortalized in Shaw’s Pygmalion. The desire of the slummer to reproduce an authentic voice may lead to an exaggeration or concentration of linguistic features as a sort of over-compensation; the issue of a similar over-representation in translation will be discussed in chapters two, four, and five.

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