Found in translation: Shakespeare's Cleopatra in English and Chinese

Found in Translation examines William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in conjunction with four Chinese translations of the play rendered by Cao Weifeng, Zhu Shenghao , Liang Shiqiu , and Fang Ping. The project explores translation as a method of gaining insight into a given literary work. Borrowing M. M. Bakhtin's notion of the interillumination of different languages, the dissertation investigates the various cultural and linguistic elements that come to light when the complex figure of Cleopatra passes through the prism of the Chinese language, and shows how such a process not only illuminates the translations, but offers a new understanding of Shakespeare's original text itself;The project looks at three aspects of the figure of Cleopatra from a cross-cultural perspective. Chapter I establishes the theoretical framework of the study by surveying the existing work on Shakespeare in a Chinese context and exploring how this body of work may be brought into fruitful dialogue with Anglo Shakespeare studies. Chapter 2 discusses issues of gender, reconsiders Cleopatra's seemingly indisputable fatal beauty, and investigates the ramifications of the translations' subtle adjustments of her femme fatale image. Chapter 3 examines how the translations register Cleopatra's color and her Egyptian identity, and considers how they inflect the complex racial issues presented in Shakespeare's text. Chapter 4 focuses on Cleopatra as an orator and rhetorician, and uses the translations to illuminate the workings of her language and to demonstrate how the queen's eloquence is a powerful tool that places her at the center of Shakespeare's play.