| Zhao Wu, “the orphan of Zhao”, was born in the State of Jin 2 613 years ago(597 B.C.). Nobody would ever expect the boy’s later legend could trigger a wave of literary creation, which carries respective historical characteristics; and 2 316 years after the event of “the orphan of Zhao”(1733 A.D.), Ji Jun-xiang’s opera the Orphan of Zhao was translated and introduced to Europe and then achieved phenomenal success in such a brand new cultural background. On the basis of the Orphan of Zhao, a bunch of famous writers of the time were inspired to rewrite and recreate some remarkable literary works and finally the literary phenomenon of The Orphan of China emerged.The phenomenon has gained a high reputation internationally for Chinese classical literature and traditional drama. Previous studies in this field are quite abundant, but it still has a high research value to make a panoramic generalizing and analyzing from the perspective of vagrant culture and Medio-translatology.Literature and history are often related to each other.It is only by analyzing the cause and effect of true history can we clarify what literature adaptations later generations have made and the brand of the times it reflects.The event of Orphan of Zhao originated in rich and powerful family’s rank in the Spring and Autumn Period,which was recounted in many Pre-Qin Period documents.By carding historical materials we can find that the true Orphan of Zhao was nothing but the result of struggles among monarchs,high-ranking ministers and wives and concubines.For example,the orphan’s grandfather Zhao Dun(赵盾)was a powerful minister of the State of Jin,who had contradictions with the monarch and other high-ranking ministers.This kind of struggle was quite common in the Spring and Autumn Period.The special point in this story was that Zhao Dun took the lead of his clan as the son of a concubine,causing some undercurrent surged inside the family,though he exerted all his strength and wisdom to administrate the affairs of this crisis-stricken family.With the death of Zhao Dun and his son Zhao Shuo(赵朔),conflict burst at last—first the descendents of the family Zhao Kuo(赵括)and Zhao Tong(赵同)deprived Zhao Wu(赵武),the orphan,of his real estate,and then the orphan’s mother banded with her family uncle Zhao Ying(赵婴)in order to differentiate and make balance with the branch of Zhao’s first descendant,but unfortunately,things brought to light,she then brought a false charge against Zhao Kuo and Zhao Tong for rebellion with the actively cooperation of the opposing forces against Zhao’s descendents.Then conspiring with some administers,the monarch wiped out Zhao’s family,and Zhao Wu,the orphan,finally became the biggest beneficiary,whose descendents established the later State of Zhao.Towards the Western Han Dynasty,author of The Historical Records Sima Qian(司马迁)added a chivalrous touch to the brutal and bloody facts with his giant pen.In The Historical Records-Zhao Family(《史记·赵世家》),historical facts were transformed into heroic drama.Instead of mentioning power struggles between high-ranking officials,beneficial conflicts between legitimate and illegitimate children,and adultery committed between father-in-law and daughter-in-law,it put rich colors on the description of chivalrous images of Cheng Ying(程婴),Gongsun Chu-jiu(公孙杵臼)and so on under the despotic power of the traitor minister Tu-an Gu(屠岸贾),thus making the loyal righteous occupy the center stage.Sima Qian made great effort to extoll the chivalry of saving the crisis and helping the poor,defying brute forces,and facing death with indifference.They were“true to their word,firm in their actions,sincere to their promises,and neither grudging their life to save those in danger,nor showing of their talents or moral characters”(其言必信,其行必果,已诺必诚,不爱其躯,赴士之厄困……不矜其能,不伐其德).As the Chinese saying goes“A gentleman is ready to die for his bosom friends”,these comments could also be used as the best comprehension of chivalrous persons such as Cheng Ying and Gongsun Chu-jiu,who,at the same time,possessed not only the chivalrous spirit Sima Qian so highly admired,but also the life experiences of enduring the humiliation for the great goal as Sima Qian once experienced.Sima Qian thus gave the bloody facts a great dramatic infectivity,which laid a foundation for later literary creation.When history entered into the end of Song Dynasty and the beginning of Yuan Dynasty,with the imperial examinations abolishing,Confucian learning became almost useless in agriculture and sericulture,so many Confucian scholars had to dive into the operatic circle to make a living by creating drama to entertain the public.Ji Jun-xiang(纪君祥),the author of The Orphan of Zhao(《赵氏孤儿》)was one of them.The hobodom formed in Song Dynasty developed and grew at the beginning of Yuan Dynasty due to the chaos caused by war.Their ideology became more and more prevalent in general public,especially in intellectuals at the bottom of the society,who were then known as the so called vagrant intellectuals.In order to hit drama,Ji Jun-xiang,on the lines of The Historical Records-Zhao Family,greatly penetrated the vagrant thoughts and culture into the creation of The Orphan of Zhao.In his creational works,Cheng Ying,willing to take the odd risk and by the name of saving the orphan,drove the princess,Han Jue(韩厥),Gongsun Chu-jiu and his own wife and children to death.However,by probing its inside reasons one can see that it was impossible for Cheng Ying to change his low position of ordinary doctor in the society through any of the scarified ones including his own wife and children,while on the orphan he could depend his hope to enjoy extreme wealth in his future life.Then Cheng Ying made Tu-an Gu,the enemy of both Zhao and himself raise the orphan,aiming not simply at killing Tu,but at making the fosterage encounter the revenge.This greatly strong revenge mentality was one of the characteristics of the vagrants at that time.The key point in this story lay in that Cheng Ying did not kill himself to repay the dead as The Historical Records recorded,but“took credit and sought rewards”and“enjoyed wealth and honor”,realizing the ultimate dream of“becoming prosperous”which an ordinary vagrant could hardly and rarely dream.It should be pointed out that these plot designs and arrangements were out of Ji Jun-xiang’s creation,aiming at either appealing to the audience or expressing his own emotion,or both,all of which embodied the generalization of vagrant culture and vagrant consciousness on the stage.Actually, Ji Jun-xiang’s The Orphan of Zhao served as the blueprint for Western writers to create series of The Orphan of China. It has been recommended by general acclaim that it was the Confucian thought of loyalty that spread abroad through The Orphan of Zhao, on the basis of which all kinds of studies have been developed. The truth is that neither Confucius nor Lao Zi was born when the story of the Orphan of Zhao happened, while the story of the Orphan of Zhao experienced two Homologous evolutions of Sima Qian’s “chivalry” and Ji Jun-xiang’s “vagrant”, and how much the Confucian thought still left in it is something which should not be ignored by scholars in the related field.To analyze and study “otherness”, we should fully understand the real “ego”, which is undoubtedly the precondition for the study by medio-translatology. This is also where the practical significance lies for the paper to interpret radically the Orphan of Zhao from the angle of literature and history.Yuan Drama The Orphan of Zhao started its world travel with missionary Joseph de Premare(马若瑟)playing the most important role in it.The academic circle traditionally considered his translation as an attribution to chance,but actually it had its inevitability.The West pass of traditional Chinese culture was with religious exchanges as background,which determined Catholic Missionaries as a bridge of communication between the two civilizations.The profound contradiction between Catholic theocracy and Chinese kingship and its social structure made Catholic theocracy frustrated again and again.As a result,the Figurism in China emerged as the times required,with Joseph de Premare being the representative of them.The Figurism in China(在华索隐派)strived to search the combination point between the two cultures in Chinese classical works and then find a shortcut for Chinese to make their conversion.They even took Chinese classical works as a purer divine revelation.This kind of Missionary strategy,in fact,had included the potential of reverse adaptation,which meant that when they tried to domesticate Chinese,they themselves were domesticated by Chinese traditional culture.However,this phenomenon was keenly sensed by the Holy See and high ranking of the Society of Jesus who then vigorously suppressed it,and the result of it was that Joseph de Premare had to ask for outside help,hoping that the traditional Chinese drama could impress the European public who were then just enjoying themselves in the“Chinese Style”and“Drama Fever”.Historical data showed that Joseph de Premare intensively read and annotated hundreds of species of Yuan Drama.Therefore,it was by no means accidental for him to choose the Orphan of Zhao,which possessed a strong taste of the exotic and coincided to the maximum extent European classical drama requirements and aesthetic taste—hero-subjected,love-beyond,rational supremacy with a strong role in moral education,and besides,there was no superstition and idol worship at all.It can be concluded that it was an inevitability for Joseph de Premare to make his choice of the Orphan of Zhao.It should be pointed out that it was Voltaire who played a key role in making China’s Orphan of Zhao evolve to the world’s Orphan of China. In Europe then, the divine right of Roman Catholic which represented discourse violence was confronted with dual challenges from both the interior and exterior. While the grabbing and monopolizing for power and the exclusion and repression of dissent which the Holy See and the conservative forces it represented did were even more serious than the decentralized royal power did. For Voltaire, the flagman of Enlightenment, what he pursued all his life was religious tolerance and freedom of belief, and for him, the biggest obstacle was Catholic monopoly power of discourse.The amulet with which the church used to maintain theocratic monopoly was that if there were no Roman Catholic Church, there would be no noble morality, nor would there be prosperity and civilization. This judgment seemed to be confirmed constantly with the colonists exploring the world. The civilizations and cultures found by colonialists and missionaries, either in America or in Africa, could not be mentioned in the same breath with those in Europe which was saturated with Christian civilization — It was not until China was known to the outside world that this rhetoric had kept being unquestioned. In the description of the missionaries, China, since ancient times, had been governed by rational, tolerant and enlightened monarchs, and there was no “divine revelation”, nor was Catholicism there, but undoubtedly noble moral civilization and prosperity. If morality and civilization could be gained without the governing of Catholic divine revelation, then it showed how ridiculous it was for the European continent to be governed by theocratic monopoly. This kind of enlightened monarchy of rational supremacy and religious tolerance in the missionaries’ description totally accorded with the ideal of Voltaire. Therefore, when the French version of The Orphan of Zhao appeared, he felt that it was the time to create a work of The Orphan of China, to be used to develop and expand Chinese culture and promote the reality of European continent.Objectively,Voltaire’s understanding of China could not be all-round and thorough due to the obstacles of space and time,and the selected translations done by Jesuit missionaries played the same role as the obstacles mentioned above.Subjectively,Voltaire might not be particularly concerned about the differences between real China and China described by those missionaries,because in the final analysis,the purpose for Voltaire’s praising China was not only to point out problems in European continent and seize the power of discourse,but also to publicize and promote his ideal.China was merely an example of his ideal,not the ideal itself.Therefore,Voltaire,in The Orphan of China,intentionally or unintentionally constructed Chinese civilization and culture in his mind’s imagination.Family Love or Chinese Love changed into Universal Love or Western Love,Chinese human entanglement into Western rational conflict,and Chinese good wife and mother into western women with the spirit of struggle.As for the major character,the most loyal character Cheng Ying turned into the enlightened Emperor Genghis Khan(成吉思汗),who had succumbed to civilization,and the theme turned from“vengeance”into“love and death”.With the great success of The Orphan of China,this image of both China and Chinese culture saturated with misunderstanding or even distortion enormously influenced Europeans’perception and judgment for China in the period of Enlightenment,and in the later long period of time,it dominated the public and even the intellectuals’impression of China.The course of civilization progress often means to seek an external perspective to get a better self-examination. This fundamental starting point predetermines how “heterogeneous culture” is translated and how it constitutes “creative treason” to its mother culture. When self-identification is strong and powerful, “seeking common points” is the main stream, and the translation tends to prove the correctness and universality of its system, and the result is that it often neglects intentionally or unintentionally the real feature of “heterogeneous culture”. Otherwise, it places its ideal on “heterogeneous culture”, even at the expense of its intention to construct the ideal of “Utopia”. Voltaire’s The Orphan of China is an illuminating example of the latter case.Scholars and writers represented by Voltaire made a “creative treason” with large quantity of misreading, rewriting, absorbing and reconstructing and deliberate distorting, etc. It is just through this kind of creative treason that Chinese traditional culture and classical image have entered into Western culture and influenced culture exchange between the East and the West. Starting from the perspective of medio-translatology, compared with real China and Chinese culture, this imagined and reconstructed China has really produced a profound impact and influence on the West, which is also worth for scholars to make a further study. |
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