If Babel Had a Form: Translating Equivalence in the Twentieth-Century Transpacific
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Hearsay; or, The Revenge of the Translator Hearsay; or, The Revenge of the Translator
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On Not Reading the Mandarin Shanghai Flowers On Not Reading the Mandarin Shanghai Flowers
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Unnecessary Distinctions: “A Few Small Observations on Modern Chinese” Unnecessary Distinctions: “A Few Small Observations on Modern Chinese”
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A Philology of Error: Malentendus from the Wu A Philology of Error: Malentendus from the Wu
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2 Sound Translation: Eileen Chang
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Published:05 April 2022
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Abstract
Born in Shanghai and hailed as one of China’s great modern writers, Eileen Chang developed a serious interest in translation after she left mainland China in 1952, writing briefly for the United States Information Service. She would go on to live the final forty years of her life in Los Angeles. This chapter focuses on her lesser-studied essays and translations written after her move abroad. Where critics working on this later period tend to focus on the propagandistic realism or aesthetic complications of her Cold War Anglophone writing and self-translations, the chapter instead recovers a surprising kinship between that late turn to translation and the earlier May Fourth Republican interest in vernacular writing. Through a study of her Mandarin and English translations of the late Qing novel Haishang hua (Biographies of Shanghai Flowers), and short essays also written in the United States, the chapter traces Chang’s partial mediations between her hometown Shanghainese Wu, Mandarin, and English by lighting on disembodied sounds that substitute one word for another. Taken together, these sounds ultimately point to an anti-hermeneutic and pseudo-philological work of translation.
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