The Bloomsbury Handbook to Modern Chinese Literature in Translation

Offering the first systematic overview of modern and contemporary Chinese literature from a translation studies perspective, this handbook provides students, researchers and teachers with a context in which to read and appreciate the effects of linguistic and cultural transfer in Chinese literary works.

Translation matters. It always has, of course, but more so when we want to reap the benefits of intercultural communication. In many universities Chinese literature in English translation is taught as if it had been written in English. As a result, students submit what they read to their own cultural expectations; they do not read in translation and do not attend to the protocols of knowing, engagements and contestations that bind literature and society to each other. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation squarely addresses this pedagogical lack.

Organised in a tripartite structure around considerations of textual, social, and large-scale spatial and historical circumstances, its thirty plus essays each deal with a theme of translation studies, as emerged from the translation of one or more Chinese literary works. In doing so, it offers new tools for reading and appreciating modern and contemporary Chinese literature in the global context of its translation, offering in-depth studies about eminent Chinese authors and their literary masterpieces in translation. The first of its kind, this book is essential reading for anyone studying or researching Chinese literature in translation.

Cosima Bruno is Senior Lecturer in China Studies, SOAS, University of London, UK. She is the author of Between the Lines: Yang Lian’s Poetry through Translation (2012), and co-editor (with Francesca Tarocco) of the anthology of contemporary Chinese fiction Made in China (2008). She has published literary translations and several essays on contemporary Chinese, Sinophone, and bilingual poetry.

Lucas Klein is Associate Professor in Chinese Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He is author of The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness ( 2018), and of essays appearing in Comparative Literature Studies, LARB, Jacket, CLEAR and PMLA, among others. His translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan (2012) won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize. Other translations include Mang Ke’s October Dedications (2018), and poetry by Li Shangyin and Duo Duo. He co-edited (with van Crevel) Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs (2019).

Chris Song is Research Development Manager at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. An award-winning poet and prolific translator, he has published five books of poems and many volumes of literary translations. He has co-edited Translating Chinese Art and Modern Literature (2019) and has been managing editor of the Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, and its successor Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature. He is editor-in-chief of the Hong Kong-based Chinese-English bilingual Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, and executive director of the International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong.