Translated Literature And Competing Narratives

As Cold-War narratives swept across the world of letters in Mao’s China during the period from 1949 to 1966,American literature was translated into Chinese for political rather than poetic reasons.Jerome David Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye can be one of the cases in point.To conduct an in-depth analysis of translated literature in political conflicts,the thesis has,by weaving together relevant historical materials,explored the translation and circulation of The Catcher in the Rye in China(1949-1966)from a very powerful yet less discussed perspective—renarration(and,sometimes,imagology).This project also investigates relevant renarrators within the stories that informed their discursive behavior,hence disclosing those human agents’ variable distance from the original,the politics and the society.Starting out as one of the Yellow Cover Books,The Catcher in the Rye’s very first Chinese version circulated internally within the clique of high-class officials and scholars in China(1949-1966).By renarrating this novel into a degenerate work of the Beat Generation,Dong Hengxun,along with other spokesmen for Chinese authorities,demonized the US as an amoral nation,challenged Western capitalist modernity,and legitimized its socialist counterpart.Yet the translator Shi Xianrong recreated the original’s reflection on an unfinished and precarious modernity,thereby reframing The Catcher in the Rye as an avant-garde novel and smuggling an alternative story from the West into Mao’s China.And it was this story that later helped not only subvert the ruling elite’s dominant discourse but also reshape the Chinese readers’ narrative positions.In essence,the work’s conflicting images epitomized a motley variety of contrasts—politics vs.poetics,the East vs.the West,domestic identity vs.foreign otherness,and,ultimately,socialist modernity vs.capitalist modernity.By combining textual inquiry with an up-close scrutiny of the broader context,the thesis has reconceptualized the cultural politics of translated literature,which hopefully might contribute to future works on translation,renarration and imagology.