Transcultural Poetics: Chinese Literature in English Translation

This book examines many facets of transcultural poetics in the English translation of Chinese literature from 12 different expert contributors.

Translating Chinese literature into English is a special challenge. There is a pressing need to overcome a slew of obstacles to the understanding and appreciation of Chinese literary works by readers in the English-speaking world. Hitherto only intermittent attempts have been made to theorize and explore the exact role of the translator as a cultural and aesthetic mediator informed by cross-cultural knowledge, awareness, and sensitivity. Given the complexity of literary translation, sophisticated poetics of translation in terms of literary value and aesthetic taste needs to be developed and elaborated more fully from a cross-cultural perspective. It is, therefore, necessary to examine attempts to reconcile the desire for authentic transmission of Chinese culture with the need for cultural mediation and appropriation in terms of the production and reception of texts, subject to the multiplicity of constraints, in order to shed new light on the longstanding conundrum of Chinese-English literary translation by addressing Chinese literature in the multiple contexts of nationalism, cross-cultural hybridity, literary untranslatability, the reception of translation, and also world literature.

The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of translation studies, Chinese literature, and East Asian studies.

Yifeng Sun is Chair Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Macau and Editor-in-Chief of Babel: International Journal of Translation. His recent publications include Translational Spaces (2021) and Translating Foreign Otherness (2018).

Dechao Li is Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Translation Quarterly, the official journal of the Hong Kong Translation Society.