英譯中國文學選集中的女性形象

Project: Government MinistryMinistry of Science and Technology

Project Details

Description

Women poets play a rather important role in classical Chinese literature. There has been a great amount of research on their uniqueness and legacies in the past decades in the Chinese-speaking world. However, for most of the readers in the world, English translation of such work becomes the only means to get to know classical Chinese women’s literature. Thus, it is obvious that these English translations have a great impact on how non-Chinese speaking readers understand Chinese women’s writing, aesthetics and gender politics. This research takes a particular interest in exploring how the female images are represented in the English translations of classical Chinese literature. Since women were discouraged to write in a patriarchal society in the past, women writers/poets faced tougher challenges to create in a male-dominant tradition. It is imperative to translate different women’s voices for a wider readership and further shed new light on how women found/find their way to create and produce in literature. In 1972, American poet Kenneth Rexroth and Chinese poetess Ling Chung selected some women poets’ work and translated them into English, entitled, The Orchid Boat. After more than two decades, Kang-I Sun Chang and Haun Saussy selected the representative works from 130 poets from the Han dynasty to the early twentieth century and edited Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism in 1999. Not long after, in 2004, two sinologists Wilt Idema and Beata Grant compiled women’s writing in Imperial China and completed the ambitious translated work, entitled The Red Brush, which covered two thousand years of work and included nearly a hundred of women writers. There is no doubt that such effort contributed a lot to the visibility of Chinese women’s writing in world literature. However, how are these women’s images represented in their translation? As Gayatri Spivak famously claimed, in American-brokered anthology of world literature, the literary work by a woman in Palestine may resemble something by a man in Taiwan. The languages and gender differences can be hugely different but read alike. There is also another trap that the translators may fall into since the image of a Chinese woman may easily be “Orientalized” due to cultural and gender stereotypes. This research thus aims at examining how the works of these women writers get translated and how their images are portrayed in these three anthologies. While taking gender issues on board, the research also attempts to engage with the cultural politics of world literature and investigate how translation strategies are adopted to cater to a wider readership. By examining how women’s images are represented in these works and how translation transfers and transforms the original, it is hoped that world literature is not just about what it is and how to read it but also about how gender is shaped and re-shaped when world literature as translation travels.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date2017/08/012019/07/31

Keywords

  • classical Chinese literature
  • anthology of literature
  • English translation
  • woman's image
  • women's literature
  • world literature
  • translation aesthetics

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