History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 32

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Chapter 32: Translation, Cultural Exchange, and the Shaping of Chinese Literature

1. Introduction: Translation as a Transformative Force

The history of Chinese literature cannot be fully understood without an account of the role that translation has played in shaping it. Translation — the rendering of texts from one language into another — has been, at several critical junctures in Chinese literary history, one of the most powerful forces of literary transformation, introducing new ideas, new forms, new narrative techniques, and new ways of understanding the relationship between language and reality into the Chinese literary system. At the same time, the translation of Chinese literature into other languages has been one of the principal means by which Chinese literary achievements have become known to the wider world, contributing to the emergence of a genuinely global literary culture in which the works of Chinese writers are read, studied, and admired alongside the masterpieces of other literary traditions.

The history of literary translation in China is marked by several great waves of translative activity, each of which was associated with a particular historical moment, a particular set of cultural needs, and a particular encounter between Chinese civilization and a foreign cultural system. The translation of Buddhist sutras from Sanskrit and other languages into Chinese, which began in the second century CE and which continued for nearly a millennium, was the first and in many respects the most consequential of these waves. The encounter between Chinese and European literary cultures, which was initiated by Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and which intensified dramatically in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, constituted the second great wave. The massive importation of Western literature into China after the May Fourth Movement of 1919, and the continuing expansion of translation activity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, represent the third and ongoing wave — a wave that has transformed the Chinese literary landscape beyond recognition and that has made Chinese literature an integral part of the world literary system.

2. Buddhist Sutra Translation: The First Great Wave

The translation of Buddhist sutras from Sanskrit, Pali, and Central Asian languages into Chinese, which began with the arrival of the Parthian monk An Shigao (安世高) in Luoyang in 148 CE and which reached its apex with the work of the great translators Kumarajiva (鸠摩罗什, 344–413) and Xuanzang (玄奘, c. 602–664), was one of the most ambitious and one of the most consequential translation projects in human history. Over the course of nearly a thousand years, thousands of Buddhist texts — philosophical treatises, doctrinal works, narrative collections, hymns, and ritual manuals — were translated into Chinese, creating a vast body of translated literature that profoundly influenced the development of Chinese language, literature, and thought.

The impact of Buddhist sutra translation on Chinese prose style was particularly significant. The Chinese language into which the earliest sutras were translated was the classical literary language — the wenyan (文言) that had been the medium of literary and scholarly expression since the time of Confucius. This language, with its conciseness, its allusiveness, and its reliance on implied rather than explicit connections between ideas, was in many respects poorly suited to the translation of Sanskrit texts, which were characterized by elaborate sentence structures, extended chains of logical argument, and a vocabulary of abstract philosophical concepts for which Chinese had no ready equivalents. The effort to render these texts into Chinese required the creation of new vocabulary, new syntactic patterns, and new modes of expression that expanded the expressive resources of the Chinese language and that contributed to the development of a more flexible and more analytical prose style.

The great translator Kumarajiva, who worked in the northern Chinese capital of Chang'an in the early fifth century with a team of several hundred assistants, developed a translation method that emphasized literary grace and readability over word-for-word fidelity to the original. His translations of key Mahayana Buddhist texts — including the Lotus Sutra (妙法莲华经, Miaofa lianhua jing), the Vimalakirti Sutra (维摩诘所说经, Weimojie suoshuo jing), and the Diamond Sutra (金刚般若波罗蜜经, Jingang bore boluomi jing) — became classics of Chinese literary prose in their own right, admired not only for their doctrinal content but for the beauty and the clarity of their language. Kumarajiva's approach to translation — which prioritized the spirit over the letter of the original, and which sought to produce translations that would read as naturally as if they had been originally composed in Chinese — established a model of literary translation that would influence Chinese translation practice for centuries.

Xuanzang, who traveled to India in 629 and who spent sixteen years studying at the great Buddhist university of Nalanda before returning to China with 657 Buddhist texts, adopted a different approach — one that emphasized fidelity to the original over literary grace. Xuanzang's translations are more precise and more systematic than Kumarajiva's, but they are also more difficult and less accessible to non-specialist readers. The contrast between the approaches of Kumarajiva and Xuanzang anticipated the great debate between "domesticating" and "foreignizing" translation strategies that would recur in translation theory throughout the subsequent history of Chinese — and indeed world — literature.

The Buddhist contribution to Chinese narrative literature was equally significant. The jataka tales — stories of the previous lives of the Buddha that were designed to illustrate Buddhist moral principles — introduced into Chinese literature a tradition of didactic narrative that influenced the development of the Chinese short story and the Chinese novel. The bianwen (变文, "transformation texts") that were used by Buddhist monks to present religious narratives to popular audiences — texts that combined prose narration with verse passages and that were designed to be performed aloud — are regarded by many scholars as precursors of the later Chinese storytelling traditions that gave rise to the vernacular novel.

3. The Jesuit Encounter: The First Sino-European Literary Exchange

The arrival of Jesuit missionaries in China in the late sixteenth century initiated the first sustained literary and intellectual exchange between Chinese and European civilizations. The Jesuits — of whom the most important was Matteo Ricci (利玛窦, 1552–1610), who arrived in China in 1583 and who spent the last twenty-seven years of his life in the Middle Kingdom — were not primarily interested in literature; their purpose was the conversion of the Chinese to Christianity. But the strategy that they adopted for achieving this purpose — a strategy of cultural accommodation that involved learning the Chinese language, mastering the Chinese classics, and presenting Christianity in terms that were compatible with Confucian thought — led them to engage with the Chinese literary tradition in ways that had far-reaching consequences for both Chinese and European literary cultures.

The Jesuits translated a number of Chinese classical texts into European languages, making the thought of Confucius and other Chinese philosophers accessible to European readers for the first time. The translations of the Four Books (四书, Sishu) and other Confucian classics that were produced by Jesuit scholars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries played a significant role in the development of the European Enlightenment, influencing the thought of Voltaire, Leibniz, and other European intellectuals who saw in Chinese civilization an example of a rational and well-ordered society that had achieved a high level of moral and political development without the benefit of Christian revelation.

In the other direction, the Jesuits introduced European literary and scientific works into China, including works of theology, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and geography. While the literary impact of these translations was initially limited — the Jesuits were more interested in transmitting scientific and religious knowledge than in introducing European literature — they established the precedent for the much larger and more consequential wave of translation that would follow in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

4. Lin Shu and the Late Qing Translation Boom

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a dramatic expansion of translation activity in China, driven by the urgent desire of Chinese intellectuals to understand the sources of Western power and to find models for the modernization of Chinese society. This was the period in which Chinese readers first gained access to the masterpieces of Western fiction — the novels of Dickens, Scott, Hugo, Dumas, Tolstoy, and many others — and in which the forms, the techniques, and the assumptions of Western narrative fiction began to penetrate the Chinese literary consciousness.

The most remarkable figure in this translation boom was Lin Shu (林纾, 1852–1924), a classical scholar who did not read any foreign language but who produced, in collaboration with various assistants who provided oral renditions of the original texts, more than 180 translations of Western literary works into classical Chinese. Lin Shu's method was extraordinary: his collaborators would read the foreign text aloud, providing an oral summary of each passage in Chinese, and Lin Shu would then render this oral summary into elegant classical prose. The resulting translations were, in a strict linguistic sense, highly inaccurate — they omitted passages, altered plots, and imposed Chinese stylistic conventions on Western narratives — but they were also, by the standards of Chinese literary prose, works of considerable artistic merit, and they introduced a generation of Chinese readers to the world of Western fiction.

Lin Shu's translations of Dickens (David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities), Scott (Ivanhoe), Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Cervantes (Don Quixote), Shakespeare (the plays, rendered as prose narratives), and many other Western authors were enormously popular and enormously influential. They demonstrated to Chinese readers that the novel — a form that had been regarded in China as a marginal and even a disreputable genre — could be a vehicle for the exploration of serious moral, social, and psychological themes, and they provided Chinese novelists with new models of character development, plot construction, and narrative technique that would transform the Chinese novel in the twentieth century.

The irony of Lin Shu's career is that he was a deeply conservative figure who championed the classical literary language and who opposed the vernacular language movement of the May Fourth period — and yet his translations, by introducing Western literary forms and Western literary values into the Chinese literary system, were one of the most powerful forces driving the literary revolution that he himself opposed.

5. The May Fourth Generation and the Massive Importation of Western Literature

The May Fourth Movement of 1919 and the New Culture Movement that accompanied it inaugurated the most intensive period of literary translation in Chinese history — a period in which virtually the entire corpus of canonical Western literature, from Homer to Hemingway, was translated into Chinese, along with enormous quantities of literary criticism, literary theory, and literary philosophy. This translation project — which was carried out by a generation of intellectuals who believed that the importation of Western literary forms and Western literary values was essential to the modernization of Chinese culture — transformed the Chinese literary landscape beyond recognition and established the terms in which Chinese literary modernity would be defined.

The scale of the translation enterprise was staggering. In the two decades between the May Fourth Movement and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, thousands of Western literary works were translated into Chinese — including the major novels of the nineteenth-century European and Russian traditions (Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov), the plays of Ibsen, Shaw, and O'Neill, the poetry of Shelley, Byron, Keats, Whitman, and Tagore, and the fiction of the emerging modernist tradition (Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Proust). At the same time, the major works of Western literary criticism and literary theory — from Aristotle's Poetics to the writings of the Russian Formalists and the New Critics — were translated and discussed, providing Chinese writers and critics with a new vocabulary and a new set of analytical tools for the understanding of literary art.

The impact of this massive importation of Western literature on Chinese literary production was both immediate and profound. Chinese writers of the May Fourth generation — including Lu Xun, Yu Dafu (郁达夫, 1896–1945), Mao Dun (茅盾, 1896–1981), and Ba Jin (巴金, 1904–2005) — drew extensively on Western literary models in their own work. Lu Xun's "A Madman's Diary" (1918), which is generally regarded as the first modern Chinese short story, was explicitly modeled on Gogol's story of the same title. Yu Dafu's confessional fiction drew on the Japanese "I-novel" tradition, which was itself derived from European models. Ba Jin's Family (家, Jia) owed debts to both Turgenev and Romain Rolland. The forms, the techniques, and the thematic preoccupations of Western fiction became part of the repertoire of Chinese fiction — a development that was, for better or for worse, irreversible.

6. Lu Xun's Translation Theory and Practice

Lu Xun (鲁迅, 1881–1936) was not only the greatest creative writer of modern China; he was also one of the most prolific and one of the most influential translators, and his reflections on the theory and the practice of translation constitute one of the most important contributions to Chinese translation studies. Lu Xun translated works from Japanese, German, and Russian — including stories by Gogol, Chekhov, and other Russian writers, and theoretical works by Plekhanov and other Marxist literary theorists — and his translations, together with his critical commentaries on the theory and the practice of translation, helped to shape the direction of Chinese translation practice in the twentieth century.

Lu Xun's approach to translation was, by the standards of his time, radically "foreignizing" — that is, he believed that translations should preserve the foreignness of the original text rather than domesticating it to conform to Chinese literary conventions. He argued that one of the purposes of translation was precisely to introduce foreign modes of expression into the Chinese language — to expand the expressive resources of Chinese by importing syntactic structures, rhetorical devices, and modes of thought that were not native to the Chinese literary tradition. "Rather than smooth but unfaithful," Lu Xun declared, "I prefer faithful but not smooth" (宁信而不顺, ning xin er bu shun).

This principle — which Lu Xun formulated in the context of a debate with Liang Shiqiu (梁实秋, 1903–1987), who advocated a more domesticating approach to translation — reflected Lu Xun's broader conviction that the modernization of Chinese literature required a fundamental transformation of the Chinese language itself. Lu Xun believed that the Chinese language, as it existed in his time, was inadequate to the expression of modern thought — that its conciseness and its reliance on implication made it unsuitable for the kind of precise, analytical, and logically rigorous expression that modern intellectual life demanded. Translation, in Lu Xun's view, was one of the means by which the Chinese language could be enriched and modernized — a view that placed translation at the center of the project of Chinese literary and cultural modernization.

7. Howard Goldblatt and the Translation of Chinese Literature into English

The translation of modern and contemporary Chinese literature into English has been dominated, for more than four decades, by the figure of Howard Goldblatt (葛浩文, born 1939), an American scholar and translator who has translated more than sixty works of Chinese fiction into English and who has done more than any other individual to bring contemporary Chinese literature to the attention of English-language readers. Goldblatt's translations include works by many of the most important Chinese writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — including Mo Yan (莫言, born 1955), Su Tong (苏童, born 1963), Bi Feiyu (毕飞宇, born 1964), Liu Zhenyun (刘震云, born 1958), and Jiang Rong (姜戎, born 1946) — and his work has played a decisive role in shaping the image of Chinese literature in the English-speaking world.

Goldblatt's approach to translation has been pragmatic and reader-oriented. He has described his goal as producing translations that read as naturally as possible in English — translations that convey the spirit, the tone, and the narrative energy of the original without being burdened by the syntactic awkwardness and the cultural opacity that can make translated fiction difficult for non-specialist readers. This approach has sometimes led him to make significant alterations to the original texts — cutting passages, rearranging chapters, modifying characterizations — in order to produce translations that are more accessible and more compelling to English-language readers. These alterations have been controversial among some scholars and some Chinese writers, who have argued that Goldblatt's translations sometimes sacrifice fidelity to the original for the sake of readability; but they have also been praised by many readers and critics who have found in Goldblatt's translations a vividness and an immediacy that are rare in literary translation.

The significance of Goldblatt's work was dramatically illustrated in 2012, when Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature — an award that many observers attributed, in part, to the quality and the wide availability of Goldblatt's English translations of Mo Yan's novels. The Nobel committee's citation praised Mo Yan's "hallucinatory realism" — a quality that is vividly present in Goldblatt's English renderings of Mo Yan's work and that might not have been accessible to the Nobel committee without those renderings. The case of Mo Yan and Goldblatt illustrates a broader truth about the relationship between literary translation and literary reputation: in the contemporary world literary system, the reputation of a writer in languages other than his or her own is, to a very large extent, a function of the quality and the availability of translations.

8. Chinese Literature in Other World Languages

While the translation of Chinese literature into English has attracted the most scholarly attention, the translation of Chinese literature into other world languages has a longer history and has, in some cases, been equally consequential. The translation of Chinese literature into Japanese, which began in the medieval period and which intensified dramatically in the modern era, has been particularly important, given the deep historical and cultural connections between the two literary traditions. Classical Chinese poetry was widely read and admired in Japan from the Nara period (710–794) onward, and the influence of Chinese literary models on Japanese literature — from the composition of Chinese-style poetry (漢詩, kanshi) to the structure and the themes of Japanese narrative fiction — has been profound and enduring.

The translation of Chinese literature into French and German has a distinguished history that extends back to the eighteenth century. The French Sinologist Stanislas Julien (1797–1873) produced influential translations of Chinese fiction, including the first European translation of a Chinese novel — Les Deux cousines (1826), a rendering of the Ping Shan Leng Yan (平山冷燕). In Germany, Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930) produced translations of Chinese philosophical and literary classics — including the I Ching (易经), the Tao Te Ching (道德经), and the works of Confucius and Mencius — that exercised an enormous influence on European intellectual and literary culture. Wilhelm's translation of the I Ching, in particular, became one of the most widely read books in the Western world in the twentieth century, influencing writers and thinkers as diverse as Carl Jung, Hermann Hesse, and John Cage.

The translation of Chinese literature into Russian was particularly extensive during the Soviet period, when the political alliance between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China created both the institutional support and the ideological motivation for a large-scale translation program. Russian translations of Chinese classical literature — including complete translations of Dream of the Red Chamber, Journey to the West, and Water Margin — were produced by scholars of the Soviet Sinological school and were published in large editions that made Chinese literature accessible to a mass readership.

In the twenty-first century, the Chinese government has actively promoted the translation of Chinese literature into other languages through programs such as the "Chinese Literature Going Out" (中国文学走出去) initiative and the "Chinese Library" (中国书架) project, which provide funding and institutional support for the translation and the publication of Chinese literary works in foreign languages. These programs reflect the Chinese government's recognition that the international dissemination of Chinese literature is an important component of China's "soft power" strategy — a strategy that seeks to enhance China's cultural influence and its international reputation through the promotion of Chinese culture abroad.

9. The Role of Translation in Shaping Literary Modernity

The history of literary translation in China reveals, with particular clarity, the extent to which translation is not merely a passive transfer of content from one language to another but an active and creative process that transforms both the translated text and the receiving literary system. Each of the great waves of translation that have swept through Chinese literary history has left the Chinese literary tradition fundamentally changed — enriched with new forms, new ideas, new techniques, and new ways of understanding the relationship between language, literature, and reality.

The translation of Buddhist sutras introduced into Chinese literature a tradition of philosophical narrative, a vocabulary of abstract concepts, and a set of narrative forms — including the transformation text and the prosimetrical narrative — that had no precedent in the indigenous Chinese tradition and that contributed to the development of Chinese vernacular fiction and Chinese drama. The translation of Western literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries introduced the novel, the short story, the modern play, the essay, and the lyric poem in their modern Western forms — forms that Chinese writers adapted, modified, and naturalized to create the distinctive hybrid forms of modern Chinese literature. At each stage, the process of translation was also a process of transformation — a process in which foreign literary forms were not simply imported wholesale but were absorbed, digested, and recombined with indigenous Chinese literary elements to produce something new.

Translation has also played a crucial role in the formation of modern Chinese literary language. The effort to render foreign texts into Chinese has repeatedly pushed the boundaries of the Chinese language, introducing new words, new syntactic patterns, and new modes of expression that have enriched the expressive resources of the language and that have contributed to its ongoing evolution. The "Europeanized" syntax of modern Chinese prose — with its longer sentences, its more explicit logical connectives, and its greater tolerance for subordinate clauses — is, to a significant extent, a product of the influence of translation on the Chinese language.

At the same time, the history of Chinese literary translation reveals the dangers and the limitations of translation as a vehicle of cultural exchange. The unequal power relations between Chinese and Western literary cultures — the fact that, for much of the modern period, translation has flowed predominantly from Western languages into Chinese rather than in the reverse direction — have created what some scholars have called a "translation deficit" that has distorted the global literary landscape. Chinese literature remains, in comparison with its depth and its richness, woefully underrepresented in the literary cultures of the West — a situation that is only slowly beginning to change as new generations of translators and new institutional structures work to make the treasures of the Chinese literary tradition more widely accessible to readers around the world.

10. Conclusion: Translation as Transformation

The history of translation in Chinese literature demonstrates that translation is never a neutral or a merely technical activity; it is always an act of cultural negotiation, an exercise of interpretive judgment, and a catalyst of literary change. The Chinese literary tradition has been profoundly shaped by its encounters with foreign literary cultures — encounters that have been mediated, in every case, by the work of translators who have served as intermediaries between different linguistic and cultural worlds.

The three great waves of translation that have marked Chinese literary history — the Buddhist wave, the early modern European wave, and the modern wave that began with the May Fourth Movement — have each contributed essential elements to the Chinese literary tradition as it exists today. Without the Buddhist translations, Chinese prose would lack the philosophical depth and the narrative richness that have been among its greatest strengths. Without the translations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modern Chinese literature would lack the formal range and the thematic ambition that have enabled it to take its place among the major literatures of the world. And without the ongoing work of translators who are rendering Chinese literature into other languages, the achievements of Chinese writers would remain inaccessible to the vast majority of the world's readers — a loss that would impoverish not only the understanding of Chinese literature but the understanding of literature itself.

The future of Chinese literary translation will be shaped by the ongoing development of new translation technologies — including machine translation and artificial intelligence — and by the evolving relationships between Chinese and other literary cultures in an increasingly interconnected world. But whatever forms it takes, the work of translation will continue to be, as it has always been, one of the most important and one of the most creative activities in the literary life of China and of the world.

References

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History of Chinese Literature

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