Conference Review
1-3 May 2008
Translations and Transformations: China, Modernity and Cultureal Transmission
Summary Abstract
This was the first of three international conferences forming part of the AHRC-funded Network, based at CRASSH, focusing on the oppositions and relations through which Chinese modernity has been shaped and imagined; the second and third conferences will take place at Yale and Tsinghua Universities during 2009; future topics will be ‘Conflict’ and ‘ Alternative Modalities of Modernity’.
The first conference posed the question: what processes of transmission mediate literary and cultural exchanges between China and the West? It gave central place to translation as a way to define the field of Chinese modernism and modernity. Wide-ranging contributions foregrounded issues of translatability in the broadest sense. The conference drew together equal numbers of academics from China and from the West and included translation theorists, critical theorists, and theorists of visual culture and film.
The programme began with a welcome from Sir Christopher Hum, former Ambassador to China, and an opening Plenary Address by Susan Bassnett, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Director of the Centre for Translation Studies at Warwick. Discussion was organized into linked panels around translating modernism, theory, culture, change, the canon, and modernity itself. The conference included an evening programme on China’s new documentary movement as a translingual practice, and culminated in a guided visit to the Fitzwilliam Museum to see the Chinese collections and an exhibition of flower paintings.
Conference Review
The conference aimed to ask: what processes of transmission mediate literary and cultural exchanges between China and the West? It gave central place to translation as a way to define the field of Chinese modernism and modernity, with issues of translatability understood in the broadest sense. The overarching aim was to stimulate exchange between Chinese and Western academics from the UK and US and to develop research capacity: in the UK, contemporary China studies in the fields of literature and literary theory trail behind the US, where Comparative Literature Departments have allowed for the development of E.Asian studies, including film studies. Although strong in traditional and historical fields and in economic and political studies of China, the UK has had to draw on scholars from the US or China to build up this expanding field. On the other hand, Chinese scholars have been quick to take up and translate a wide range of Western cultural and literary theorists, often making more contact with the US than with the UK when it comes to new movements in cultural and literary theory. The triangulation has rich potential for exchange—and for questions involving both translation and modernity.
Translation theory is a central issue for many Chinese scholars as well as providing a focus in the west for complex negotiations concerning both theory and culture. Susan Bassnett’s opening address concerned the ways in which ideas are transformed (or not)--across linguistic and cultural boundaries, and the ways in which translation serves as a metaphor for intercultural exchange at a time of unprecedented global movement. Emphasising both the anxieties and creative potential of translation, along with histories of location and colonization, power and disciplinary formation, she drew attention to the elements of collision involved in any interaction. She argued powerfully that despite the influence of China of Western modernism, the West still knows little about Chinese literature and Chinese writers. Here translation has an obvious part to pl ay in a larger movement of cultural interaction. Her thoughtful keynote opened up questions about translation theory itself as a changing set of assumptions, and pointed to the ‘cultural turn’ that had overtaking translation studies along with the need to regard translation itself as having necessary agency and freedom.
‘Translating Modernism I’ began with Eric Hayot ( Penn State) on ‘The Example-Effect’, discussing the history of the appearance and disappearance of China in a notorious example, that of Adam Smith’s ‘old Mandarin’. Wang Ning (Tsinghua) argued that the concept of ‘modernity’ itself required an ‘alternative’ Chinese modernity which recognizes difference from both Western and classical Chinese literature while including translated literature in China. Christopher Bush (Northwestern) tackled a different problem, the non-recognition of work on China in the landscape of contemporary modernist studies in the West outside the boundaries of E. Asian studies. ‘Translating Modernism II’ turned the focus to particular genres, writers, and critics. Christopher Rosenmeir (Cambridge) explored the relation of popular fiction in the 1940s to Shanghai modernism as avant-garde aspects entered the mainstream of war-time literature. Jing Tsu (Yale) teased out the issues raised by the self-translation of modern Sinophone writers, including the duplicity of bi-linguality as modern writers address non-Chinese audiences. Cao Li (Tsinghua) argued that the theories and practice of the Cambridge critics (Richards, Empson, Leavis, and Williams)—responsible both for practical criticism and cultural criticism—remained relevant today for liberal arts education in China.
‘Translating Theory’ took up the second theme of the conference. Brett de Bary (Cornell) addressed the ways in which translation has itself been a figure of unstable meaning and sought to historicize translation studies by revisiting influential aspects of translation theory from Benjamin to Derrida in the light of post-colonial concerns. Stephanie Tsai (Tamkang, Taiwan) took the case of Blanchot to show the difficulties involved in translating the idea of ‘alterity’ (as what is foreign to itself) and the displacement of the translator and reader. James St. André (Manchester) expl;ored the ways in which theories of translation circulate from one culture to another, specifically from Europe and America to China and what the process tells us about the way theory travels in general.
‘Translation and Change’ addressed issues of transformation. Cosima Bruno (SOAS) addressed the ways in which new media have made possible new visual forms of poetry, including Chinese poetry, posing particular problems for translation of the visual element. Chen Yongguo (Tsinghua) argued that bi-linguality and linguistic deterritorialization created new ‘lines of flight’ for new englishes and an era of minor literatures, Sun Yifeng (Lingnan) pointed to the ways in which the quest for modernity through translating western ideas inaugurated by the late Qing dynasty has produce bth fraught and transformative outcomes in terms of new ideas.
‘Translating Culture’ turned to the ruses of modernist cultural translation. Yizhong Ning (Beijing Language and Culture) explored the problem of transplanting culture in terms of the untranslatable nature of the Peony Pavilion, arguing for the inevitability of betrayal if the translation is to take root in a new context. Steven Yao (Hamilton College) discussed the ways in which Pound’s ‘Cathay’ consecrated modernist literary practice, obviating knowledge of the source-language and replacing authenticity with ‘reality effects’. Timothy Billings (Middlebury) addressed Segalen’s invention of a modern subject in his poetry and fiction and his creation of composite identities, visual and nominal, by means of seals and epigraphs.
‘Translating the Western Canon’ turned to the impact of western idea. Liu Dong (Peking) focused on the translation of Mill’s On Liberty and on the ways in which Mill’s individualism, opposed to Chinese collectivism, became identified with the west and launched a longer argument about the problematic role of individualism in China. Wang Hui (Tsinghua) examined the formation of the scientific worldview and its disintegration in late 19th and early 20th C China, as its pragmatist methods were challenged by other world views, and humanist, moral, and aesthetic values were incorporated. Lu Jiande (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) paid tribute to Leavis with the title ‘For Continuity’, showing how Chinese intellectuals were faced with the dilemma of taking sides for or against New Culture’ (old and new, east and west) during the New Literature Movement of the early 20thC. when Lin Shu stood up for cultural continuity.
‘Translating Modernity’, the final panel, turned to modernity in its technological, artistic, and literary manifestations. Haun Saussy (Yale) argued that translation and transcription are crucial to modernity, instancing the case of the ‘Delufeng’ (telephone), a creolization that points to the ways in which new practices create new idioms and technology is inscriptional rather than translational in its workings. Red Chan (Warwick) showed how the internet was now transforming Chinese minds as newspapers had once done, demonstrating the ways in which blogs and bulletin boards were now a powerful site of cultural translation. C.J. Wang (Nayang, Singapore) focused on the visual arts as a scene of cultural translation and the ‘exhibition’ of Asia as a region where national boundaries were shifting along with the idea of Asia itself. Finally, Julia Lovell (Birkbeck) considered China’s long quest for the Nobel Literature Prize, awarded to Gao Xingjian in 2000, and the ‘Nobel Complex’ which saw the prize as a passport to recognition as a modern, global civilization, as well as the conditions of international translation and publishing as elements in the instituting of a modern global culture.
The conference closed with a round table discussion in which Haun Sassuy, Wang Hui, and Hans van de Ven ably took up the issues of the conference and outlined future directions, before the participants and delegates departed for a closing talk and reception at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Throughout the conference, discussion was lively, as was social interaction among the participants. CRASSH received many appreciative comments on the conference itself, a first of its kind. Special thanks are due to Judith Green, former CRASSH Programme Coordinator, who ably assisted in conceptualizing the project from its inception; to Katrina Gulliver who took on some of the crucial coordination and programme planning; and to Brittany Wellner, who ably assisted in the run up to the conference itself.
The AHRC-funded project (co-PI Hans van de Venn. AMES) represents a sustained attempt to develop an international perspective at CRASSH, in partnership with AMES, with the aim of developing research capacity in the area of contemporary China studies. It is linked to an on-going series of workshops, graduate groups, and summer fellows from China. Plans are afoot to put some of the papers on line on the project web-site. A volume of papers will emerge from successive conferences. The conveners of the Yale conference are Haun Saussy and of the Tsinghua conference, Wang Ning. As a result of the first conference, ideas are being actively exchanged and developed among the conveners.
