An Ageless Song From Collective Memory

With China’s booming economy and overall national strength significantlyincreased, promoting the status and corresponding development of Chinese culture inthe whole world becomes a must. It is of vital importance to enhance China’s softpower by introducing its multi-ethnic, multi-sourced culture, a civilization ofthousands of years, to the outside world. In this regards, translation of Chineseclassics, currently mainly into English, plays an important part, among whichtranslation of Chinese ethnic minority classics should never be overlooked, for itplays an irreplaceable and indispensable role in the reconstruction of China’smulti-ethnic literature as a whole.As a typical epic from Chinese minority traditions, Gesar is a lengthy heroic epiccreated first by Tibetans and then by Mongolians. While in Tibetan it is known asGesar, in Mongolian, as Geser. Gesar is gradually formed on the basis of ancientTibetan myths, legends and historical events and influenced by local Tibetan customs,folk songs and proverbs. It is also shaped by the religious beliefs such as primitiveShamanism, Tibetan Buddhism, Lamaism and other ideological influences, thus,demonstrating a process of multi-channel folk creation encompassing text translationand oral transmission, as well as that of multicultural co-molding at large. Theoriginal route of formation and dissemination of Gesar is from Tibetan to Mongolianregions, after long years’ folk creation and circulation, forming a variety of complexmultilingual versions. The epic has been in circulation by folk singers for thousandsof years, and is still performed and appreciated nowadays, in this sense it can bejustifiably credited with “A Model for Oral Literature” and “A Typical Live Epic”.The discovery of Gesar together with other epics from Chinese minorities effectivelyoverturned Hegel’s assertion:“there are no epics in China”. What’s more, this factconveys to the world that China has not only epics; it has the world’s longest one. Thevery existence of such a grand epic itself is of great academic and research value. Since the19th century, Gesar has increasingly spread in Europe, arousinggrowing interests and attention of western sinologists. Successive translations inRussian, French, German, English and other languages were available in the west.Owing to its own unique value and charm, as well as the key position in Chinesemulti-ethnic literature, Gesar has been under study by scholars home and abroad fromvarious perspectives of epic studies, ethnology, anthropology, literature, etc. Thus anew subject “Gesar Studies” has come into being, constituting an important branch ofinternational Tibetology. However, few investigations into transmission anddissemination of this Live Epic have ever been conducted from the perspective oftranslation studies. A preliminary study finds that the epic abounds in various formsof translations and transmissions, such as translation among ethnic minorities,translation into Chinese and foreign tongues, cross translation and back translation.What a variety of complex phenomena of translations! The channel and process ofthese translations is more than literary translation, intermediate translation orretranslation in traditional sense, it further manifests itself a more complex,multi-directional, overlapping cross translation, which produces new and classicaltranslation problems. A description and investigation into these problems is of greatsignificance as far as translation of ethnic epics and oral literature is concerned. Alsoit will greatly benefit the on-going program of rewriting the history of Chinesemulti-ethnic literature and restructuring the history of Chinese translation inparticular.The collection, collation and translation of Gesar constitute a comprehensiveresearch project, a preliminary work for it to go abroad. Translations betweenminorities and into Chinese belong to “inter-translation”, which takes placefrequently in translating Chinese minoriyty classics. By undertaking investigationsfrom a partial introduction to an overall research, from a microscopic research into amacroscopic one, the present dissertiation deals with epic transltion both amongminorities and into foreign languages, aiming at proper approaches and strategies forGesar to be well received and appreciated in the world literature. To this end, startingfrom the occurrence, development and dissemination of Gesar and taking translationsamong ethnic minorities and into Chinese, translations into English and other languages and a variety of translations and other means into consideration, thedissertation intends to draw a cognitive map of Gesar translation and transmission aswell as a hierarchical graph reflecting the interrelationship between different versions.A careful classification of the complex phenomena of translations and translationtypes is also made for further studies. More emphasis is laid on multi-dimensionalcomparative studies on the three major English translations of Gesar in regarding oftranslations of Homer’s epics and Indian epics, with a view to initiating sometheoretical explanations and elaborations on translations of oral live epics. In view ofthe complicated mutual opposition and transformation of textuality and orality of theepic, the dissertation also attempts to analyze epic translation in two dimensions: thatis, oral transmission and text translation, and how they are connected in an attempt toput forward the ontology of oral literature with some theoretical issues of itstranslation.Based on the objectives and research priorities above, the present paper firstlytakes the epic itself as the stepping stone and proceeds to make an investigation intothe following tasks, such as formation, origin, content and structure, artisticachievements, spreading, circulation mode, folk singers, text formation, variationsand versions. By adopting the latest achievements in international epic studies andintroducing oral poetics theory, the dissertation makes an exploration into theformulaic structures and memory features of the singers. From the perspectives ofTransference of the Original Story and Intertextuality, the dissertation also analyzesthe formation mechanism of multiple epic versions and variations and makes aneffective classification of circulation of epic versions, thus paving a way for laterstudies on epic translation and transmission.Secondly, after a survey on the history of epic circulation in more than200years,a research including overseas translation and domestic translation, the present studycomes up with three routes of Gesar translation, i.e. from translations amongminorities, translations into Chinese, translations into foreign languages, especiallyEnglish. Then a further classification and elaboration of these translations is carriedout, which underlies the core part of Gesar Translation Studies. In a cross-culturalcontext, the present dissertation makes an all-round comparison on three typical English versions of Gesar, namely, European Sinologist David Neil’s version, NorthAmerican Douglas Penick’s version and Chinese translator Wang Guozheng’s version,in order to expound different historical contexts of each version and theoreticalthinking and interpretation triggered by the new types of translations.Translation of Gesar should not go alone without reference to translations ofother major epics in the world. Therefore, by relocating Gesar in the context oftranslations of the three famous epics in the world and comparing text translationswith oral transmissions, the dissertation finally explores translating strategies andmethods of epics and oral literature from the perspective of enthopoetics. Alsothrough theoretical interpretation on epic translation, this dissertation proposes twoconcepts: ontology of oral literature and ontology of translation of oral literature. Atthe same time, approaches to translating ethnic epics and rewriting a Chinese historyof multi-ethnic literary translation are also discussed along this line.In conclusion, translation studies on ethinic literature and oral literature form animportant part of a history of Chinese literature translation as well as an importantchapter in rewriting Chinese translation history. Translation of Gesar, an oral balladmasterpiece, poses a new field of translation, which enjoys a dual nature of empiricalresearch on translation and literary criticism of translation. Concepts such as“translations among minorities”,“translation into Chinese” and “translations intoforeign languages” will facilitate proper approaches to translate other ethnic classicsas a whole. By exploring the feasible translation principles, strategies and methods ofepic translation to provide certain referentianl perspectives for translations of otherepics, this dissertation makes some theoretical discussions and looks into theoreticalsublimation and discipline construction of epic translation, which will be helpful instrengthening and developing a fuller concept of translation of the ethnic classics andthus benefit the rewriting of a history of China’s multi-ethnic literary translation.