Chinese Literature Walking Toward The World Through Literary Translating

From the last decades of Qing Dynasty to the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, few Chinese people attempted to get Chinese literature"walk toward the world"via translation. After 1949, the Foreign Language Bureau, a government-manipulated institute, took the lead in translating Chinese literature to the outside world in a large and systemic scale. In 1981, the Panda Books Series was initiated by Chinese Literature Press, a branch under the leadership of China International Publishing Group (the Foreign Language Bureau its antecedent), to enable a wide dissemination of both Chinese literature and culture among major western countries through translation, in which modern and contemporary Chinese novels were given a top priority. Since then, governmental institutes played a dominant role in making Chinese literature"walk toward the world", however, whether such practice can be successful remains to be questioned, especially when Chinese Literature Press, opened in 1987 to take a full charge of the translation and publication of the Panda Books Series, was closed in 2000 for a couple of problems, with its financial crisis in book marketing as one. It is obvious that the project of translating Chinese literature to foreign countries by governmental institutes meets an unprecedented dilemma, which calls for a systemic analysis from empirical and theoretical perspectives. The dissertation, taking the Panda Books Series characteristic of institutional translation project as its research object, attempts to probe into the theoretical and empirical mechanisms in translating Chinese literature by governmental institutes from the perspectives of medio-translatology and newly-developed theories in Translation Studies. As a positive response to the national strategy of introducing Chinese culture to foreign countries, the study will further provide a series of suggestions over how to better disseminate Chinese literature globally. Judged from medio-translatology and newly-developed theories in Translation Studies, the practice of Panda Books Series for actual fact can be viewed more as a quintessence of literary communication, influence and dissemination than a simple lingual translation. To ensure a better distribution and dissemination of Chinese literature in western countries, we had better take the whole translation process into consideration because besides the lingual translation from the original text to the target, what really counts here is a couple of questions to be answered like what texts according to which criteria are selected, for whom the texts are translated and how they are read and interpreted by the target readers. To be specific, the tri-causes of"ideology, poetics and patronage"in the target culture will, to a large extent, determine how the Panda Books Series is received.Based on the above-mentioned Introduction, Chapter Two aims to examine the Panda Books Series as a type of domestic cultural production in its 1980s context, in which other discourses praxis joined so as to complicate the book series'motives. Generally speaking, the Panda Books Series was an original-culture-oriented project that was launched by the state to maintain a friendly relationship with foreign countries by reshaping a new image of the state with translating Chinese literature. Besides, the elite intellectuals then actively engaged themselves in such a state-manipulated project with a hope to pursue their dream of literary autonomy free of political interference, thereafter to shape their cultural identities. In such a translation project pregnant with ideologies, both sides more or less appear either cooperative or oppositional. It is true that making use of the reforms carried on by the dominant ideology, the elite intellectuals can modestly express their own aesthetical interests within certain limits, which proves that even a governmental institute initiated translation project can harbor different voices in a partly harmonious way.In Chapter Three, our focus shifts from domestic production to the book series'distribution and reception in the USA and the UK. By introducing Pierre Bourdie's concepts of"field"and"capital", the chapter tries to have a panoramic view of the Panda Books Series'distribution and reception in the cultural and literary fields in the two countries. The relevant data shows that from 1981 to 1989, only a few translations from the book series enjoyed a better reception among readers from the two above-mentioned countries. Book reviews and articles on the book series appear frequently in some important journals and newspapers, such as New York Times Book Review and World Literature Today, to name just two. In the reading of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, including the Panda Book Series, foreign readers prefer interpreting the novels from a politically aesthetic perspective, by which means some of the readers expect to read narrations concerning either politics or cultural revolution, thus to some extent neglecting the aesthetic novelties; whereas other readers tend to appreciate Chinese literature from western poetics based upon western canons, but to find that Chinese literature is by comparison immature aesthetically. Nevertheless, such practice of interpreting Chinese literature, for actual fact, implies that it smells of something ideological in aesthetical judgment. It can be asserted that if some translations from the Panda Books Series can be read in accordance with the politically aesthetic perspective, the translations will be warmly accepted, or they are woefully overlooked by western readers.As in Chapter Three, Chapter Four tries to draw a full picture of the book series'distribution in the next ten years from the"June Forth Event"in 1989 to 2000. The"June Forth Event"had a great impact on the distribution of Chinese literature in the cultural and literary fields in the USA and the UK. First, after the political event, western countries tented to imagine China as a"totalitarian society"with no freedom and human rights, as a result to increase the cultural capitals shared by those dissident writers from China. Second, the event itself drove the general public in the west to view Chinese government a political regime, which in turn encourages the publishers in the west to try every means to cater to western readers'political and literary imagination. Novels with symbolic and allegorical parodies will be comparatively welcomed warmly, whereas the aesthetic readings of Chinese novels are overlooked. Third, right after the"June Fourth"event, western readers including professional readers began to question the selection lists of works and writers advertised by Chinese official institutes, among which China International Publishing Group, responsible for the publication and translation of the Panda Books Series, was affected. Finally, after the"June Fourth"event, Yang Xianyi, who took charge of the book series, was forced to leave the general editor's post, for what he has done during the Students'Movement in 1989. Without his effort, the Panda Books Series published through the whole 1990s appear to be more conservative in its book selection, in order to avoid a tension with the Bureau's party cadres. The above-mentioned factors join together to get the book series to decline in marketing overseas. It can no longer appeal to western readers, who came to realize how to get what they want through other medias, like touring, visiting, watching films and Telecommunications, to name a few. Under such new circumstances, the Panda Books Series was finally ended in a failure, though it attempted every means possible to get out of the dilemma after 2000.The above analysis leads to the following conclusions. First, the state-institute manipulated translation project is generally speaking source-oriented. The sender countries can have fewer choices in controlling the reception of translations, because translated texts need to be read and interpreted by readers from the receiving countries. Second, if translated texts run against its receivers'expectation, they will not be better received. Third, the reasons why a translation is badly received can be ideological, poetical and economic. Taking the three points into consideration, we need to realize that the translating project like the Panda Books Series involves not only linguistic transfer from original language to target language, but also cultural communication. During the whole translation process, our attention must be paid to the ideology, poetics and patronage in the target system. With those points in mind, we can better get Chinese literature"Walk Outside of China", if we persist in cooperating actively with others and finding more different methods of introducing Chinese literature into other countries.