創造性翻譯：將《周成過台灣》搬上世界文學舞台

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(1)國立師範大學翻譯研究所博士論文 A Dissertation Presented to The Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation National Taiwan Normal University. 指導教授：李根芳博士 Thesis advisor: Dr. Ken-fang Lee. Translating “The Ballad of Tsiu Sing” as World Literature: A Creative Approach 創造性翻譯：將《周成過台灣》搬上世界文學舞台. 研究生：Robert Fox 費儒伯 (Huì Jû-pik). 中華民國一百零七年八月 August 2018.

(2) 國立師範大學翻譯研究所 National Taiwan Normal University Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation. Robert Fox 費儒伯. Doctoral candidate in Translation Studies. Translating “The Ballad of Tsiu Sing” as World Literature: A Creative Approach Abstract “The Ballad of Tsiu Sing” (周成過台灣歌) is an iconic Taiwanese folktale, and songbooks (歌仔册) are archetypal Taiwanese literature. In this paper my aim is to devise a strategy for translating the ballad (歌仔) as a work of World Literature, as David Damrosch defines the concept; that is, to translate in a way that produces “gains” in the target language. Translation is central to the World Literature paradigm. In the first chapter, I survey the construct’s origins and history, and translation’s place within it, focusing on the work of two theorists, David Damrosch and Franco Moretti. Moretti’s “evolutionary” theory accounts for world literary development prior to the seventeenth-century advent of capitalism. Damrosch defines World Literature as it is read, taught, studied, and practiced in academia today. Other scholars question the construct’s validity, pointing out problems inherent to it, particularly the so-called “imperium of English.” Songbooks (歌仔冊) are a vital part of Taiwan’s national literary canon. In the second chapter, I examine the songbook genre’s origins, history, and, more importantly, how a literary form with roots in Tang Dynasty shuochang wenxue 說唱文學 evolved as national literature. I then consider Damrosch’s concept of translational gain and its role in effecting a national literary work's transition into World Literature. Damrosch further suggests that translations gain insofar as they “heighten (…) the naturally creative interaction of reader and text” [Damrosch’s italics] (What Is? 292). In.

(3) recent years, translation studies have taken a “creative turn,” a paradigm shift that frames translation as a creative rather than imitative act. While there are no formulae for creativity, there are models to study and emulate. Douglas Robinson’s “somatic theory” provided the theoretical rationale and his rhetorical “turns" the methodological underpinning for a creative approach. Jorge Luis Borges and theorists and practitioners identified with the creative turn supplied both theoretical support and practical inspiration. Moreover, I also drew on video-recorded performances by master balladeer Iunn Siukhing, 楊秀卿 Taiwan’s foremost living representative of the oral folk tradition that gave birth to the songbook genre. Working from multiple sources, I approach the ballad as a series of scenes, blending translated material with extra-textual dialogue and description. In the fourth chapter, I implement certain of the theorists’ ideas, showing how they have shaped and informed my approach to translating the “Tsiu Sing” story. Working from multiple source texts, both oral and written, I treat the ballad as a series of scenes rather than a sequence of stanzas, blending translated material with dialogue and description of my own invention. Discussions focus on strategies and methods, comparing translated passages with their sources. The paper ends with questions and answers. Does the translation gain more than it loses? What about “the author”? What is “bad” translation? Keywords: World Literature, Taiwanese literature, Taiwanese songbooks, creative translation.

(4) 摘要歌德在十九世紀上半葉的宣言至二十一世紀方告實現，我們終於步入世界文學的時代，而這一切都得靠著翻譯來完成。的確，諸如皮瓦克（Spivak）、阿普特（Apter）、韋努蒂（Venuti）、卡薩諾瓦（Casanova）以及莫雷蒂（Moretti）等權威理論家與批評家，都曾立論闡述世界文學翻譯中心論的概念。因此，倘若要研究、比較和鑑賞來自全球的文章，那麼翻譯不僅是重要工具，更是不可或缺的藝術。大衛・丹穆若什（David Damrosch）認為，世界文學作品，是那些「有所得」的譯作。不過他指出「有所失」於翻譯一樣無可避免。因此譯作的最大挑戰，就是將「所得」極大化、將「所失」極小化。此論文，筆者試圖模擬一個翻譯情境，將著名歌仔冊《周成過台灣》搬上世界文學舞台。我的目標是「從原著文化下工夫」（丹穆若什），同時傳達勒菲弗爾（Lefevere）所說的原著的「言外之力」，產出一個「得多於失」的譯本。然而，「得」該如何獲益、「失」又該如何補償？對此，本文擬從實踐和理論的角度，分析選定譯本並探索理論的實際應用。本文最後附上《周成過台灣》摘錄，說明如何將此本歌仔册建構成世界文學的原理與實踐。丹穆若什進一步表明，翻譯可以自自然然地『提高（……）讀者和文本的創意和互動』（丹穆若什的斜體字）近年來，翻譯研究採取了『創意轉向』的方案，將翻譯視為創意而非模仿行為。創意雖無公式可言，但卻有模型共學習和參考。 Douglas Robinson 的『軀體理論』（somatic theory），為創意提供了一個理論基礎；而他的修辭『轉向』就是方法論的基石。Jorge Luis Borges 以及各大理論家和實踐者，都提供了理論和實用的靈感。此外，筆者還借鑒民謠大師楊秀卿的表演視頻。楊氏作為民謠代表人物，以極具生動的民間口頭傳統（oral folk tradition）就催生了歌本體裁（songbook genre）。而筆者便是透過多重渠道，將民謠視為一系列場景，和翻譯文本、超文本對話與描述融為一體。. 關鍵詞: 世界文學、台灣文學、周成過台灣歌、創造性翻.

(5) Table of Contents Acknowledgments. i iv. Abbreviations and terminology Chapter One: Introduction Prologue. v 1. 1. World literature and translational gain Taiwanese songbooks. 3. 4. Written Taiwanese. 6. Taiwanese folk literature in translation The “Tsiu Sing” story: synopsis Research method. 9. 10. 11. Chapter Two: World Literature and Translation The construct Theory. 13. 14. World Literature and translation Criticism. 13. 19. 20. Chapter Three: From National Literature to World Literature Songs, songsters, and songbooks. 29. Songbooks as national literature: Moretti’s “evolutionary” model Songbooks as national literature Nativist thought. “Tsiu Sing” as World Literature . 32. 33. Folklore as national literature. 29. 36 38 i . 30.

(6) Chapter Four: Creative Translation The creative turn. 41. 41. Robinson: somatic response The mentalist model. 45. 46. The physicalist model. 49. Somatic response: criticism. 52. Borges: “The original is unfaithful to the translation.” Creative infidelity: ballad translation Constraints. 62. 66. Chapter Five: Translating “Tsiu Sing” – A New Story The translator as storyteller The “Tsiu Sing” story: evolution The songbooks. Robinson’s “turns”. Metonymy. Conclusion. 76 77. 83 85. 87 88. Liam-kua structure Synecdoche. 75. 78. Postwar liam-kua. Diversion. 57. 91. 96 117. Appendix A: “The Ballad of Tsiu Sing” (English translation). 131. Appendix B: “The Ballad of Tsiu Sing” (Chu-lin/Ng text) 周成過台灣歌 (竹林/黃版本) 173. . ii .

(7) Appendix C: Creative translation: other genres References. . 211. iii . 207.

(8) Acknowledgements First and foremost, I’d like to thank my advisor, Dr. Ken-fang Lee, whose scholarly perspicacity and words of encouragement got me back on track whenever I went off the rails. I’d also like to give special thanks to the Andrew J. Bourke Foundation for its generous grant, without which I’d have lost a lot a weight and ended up sleeping in a park. Special thanks as well to those who, in addition to Dr. Lee, comprised my thesis committee: Daniel Hu 胡宗⽂文, Xavier Lin 林為正, Sharon Lai 賴慈芸, and Darryl Sterk ⽯石岱崙.. 嘛是愛特別感謝阮「車頭」各位台語个老師佮顧問：阿春（鄭芳春先生）、大箍个、鵝頭、錢嫂，仙蟲仔，Lôo 邦（邦兄）、菜頭、酒泉、繳婆、醉龍、籠床貓、老猴、緣投个、鳥喙等。 Last but not least, a big “thank you” to all my friends and family, especially Carol King, Andy Bourke, and Tom Fox – thanks for putting up with me!. . iv .

(9) Abbreviations and terminology The terms song(s), folk song(s), ballad(s), and kua-a ( 歌仔 ) are used interchangeably to avoid repetition, as are songbook(s), chapbook(s), ballad(s), and kua-a-tsheh (歌仔冊).. The terms songster(s), balladeer(s), and kua-a-sian (歌仔仙), i.e., ballad performers, are also used interchangeably. MOE: the R.O.C. Ministry of Education’s online Taiwanese dictionary (教育部台灣閩南語常用詞辭典). NMTL: The National Museum of Taiwan Literature’s Koa-á Booklets Database (國立台灣文學館台灣民間說唱文學歌仔冊資料庫). Twatutia: Taipei’s Dadaocheng (Taiwanese: Tua-tiu-tia) district as the name was traditionally Romanized. The spelling is still in use today (see Google Maps, Wikipedia, etc.). WL: “World Literature” (in citations, etc.) I use the uppercase “World Literature” when referring to the academic construct (unless the term appears in direct quotations) or works that fit Damrosch’s definition of World Literature. qtn./qtns.: quatrain/quatrains (for reference, the Chu-lin/Ng edition’s quatrains are numbered; see Appendix B). . v .

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(11) . Chapter One: Introduction Prologue In my early days in Taiwan, people would often tell me that Taiwanese (台語) was an unwritten language (“有音無字”). It wasn’t until I began to study it that I learned otherwise. On trips to bookstores I found collections of Taiwanese folktales, proverbs, poems, short stories, essays, and even jokes, all transcribed in Han (Chinese) characters, many of which I’d never encountered in standard written Chinese. When I showed these to Taiwanese friends, more than a few were dismissive. They disparaged not only the so-called “homegrown characters” (my translation of “土字”) but the idea of a written form as well, scorning it as “uneducated.” And when I pointed out that the writers and editors were learned persons, often holders of multiple degrees, the attitude was still disdainful, as if “those people should know better.” My favorite comment came from my good friend and informal Taiwanese teacher, A-Tshun 阿春, a professional taxi driver: perusing a book of folktales, he shook his head sadly and uttered a simple verdict: 幹恁娘，教授寫的！(“Damn, a professor wrote this!”). Surprisingly (or not), after I tested into a translation graduate program things weren’t much different. For most of my Taiwanese classmates, many of them graduates of the island’s finest foreign-language departments, the “mother tongue” was the vernacular of grandmothers, gangsters, and gas deliverymen, not the idiom of scholarly discourse. After all, we had entered the age of “globalization,” and Taiwanese was definitely not among the international lingua francae. Students' reactions to my translations both into and out of Taiwanese ranged from merriment to puzzlement, my interest in the language either laughed or shrugged off as a foreigner’s harmless eccentricity. Fortunately, professors were more encouraging of my interest in TaiwaneseEnglish translation. Sharon Lai 賴慈芸 oversaw my master’s project, the translation of a Taiwanese opera script, and Darryl Sterk 石岱崙 invited me to present excerpts from the translation to his undergraduate students at National Taiwan University. Moreover, my. . 1 .

(12) thesis advisor Ken-fang Lee 李根芳 suggested that I take classes at the university’s department of Taiwan languages and literature, where I studied with scholars who were involved with every aspect of the language. And it was there that I was introduced to a form of Taiwanese literature I’d yet to encounter elsewhere: kua-a-tsheh (歌仔冊), or “songbooks,” among them the “The Ballad of Tsiu Sing” (周成過台灣歌). Before I’d ever heard of the songbook form, though, I’d already taken an interest in traditional Taiwanese folk music. In the course of doing research on a Taiwanese opera script I was translating, I happened on a YouTube clip of balladeer Iunn Siu-khing 楊秀卿. I’d never heard of Iunn, nor had I been exposed to the ballad tradition in Taiwan. But straightaway I could see she was a master of the art, a commanding performer at the peak of her powers. That I was able to recognize Iunn’s artistry, I credit to my longtime involvement with traditional American folk music, particularly the blues. As a member of my undergraduate alma mater’s “folk, jazz, and blues” committee, I got to meet and spend time with some of the music's originators, first-generation bluesmen who created a genre, which, in its many manifestations, is now heard around the world. The experience marked the beginning of interest in “roots” music, sounds grown in the soils of traditional cultures. So although I'd never been exposed to traditional Taiwanese folk music, I felt I knew the genuine article when I heard it. For me, the image of an itinerant kua-a-sian 歌仔仙 traveling around the island of Taiwan, performing at weddings and temple festivals, conjured up the image of a country bluesman of the 1920s and 1930s, a solitary figure moving from town to town, playing and singing on street corners and in roadhouses. But kua-a-sian and blues performers existed in radically different social environments. The former lived and worked in the Jim Crow South, where they were second-class citizens in a segregated society. But in the heyday of liam-kua, the 1930s and 1940s, Taiwanese balladeers were “respected figures” (Too 11). Closer to Taiwanese kua-a-sian in social standing and societal function were the bluesmen’s ancestors, the West African griots (or “griottes,” as females were known). Griots are “members of a class of traveling poets, musicians, and storytellers who. . 2 .

(13) maintain a tradition of oral history in parts of West Africa” (Oxford). Throughout the precolonization period, they were part of “[the] fundamental foundation of African societies (Rattrey). In The Land Where the Blues Began, folklorist Alan Lomax wrote: “America’s black bluesmen have, in essence, reconstituted the high art of the African griot (…) the griot tradition has survived full-blown in America with hardly an interruption” (Lomax 357). Like blues singers and balladeers, griots moved from village to village, singing songs, recounting histories, and telling stories, accompanying themselves on stringed instruments (Devi). Because the kua-a-sian played a similar social role, I regard them as the griots and griottes of premodern Taiwan, latter-day representatives of a centuries-old oral folk tradition (see Chapter Two). And like the griots’ descendants, the American blues singers, who both scholars and the public now regard as iconic representatives of a national tradition,1 kua-a-sian are celebrated as gems of Taiwan’s cultural heritage. In my translation, I hope to convey some of the spirit and spontaneity of a kua-a-sian performing before a live audience, thereby producing the translational gain that is essential in enabling a national literary work to cross over into World Literature. World Literature and translational gain In 1827, German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe predicted that “the epoch of world literature is at hand” (qtd. in Damrosch What Is? 1). Two decades later, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels expressed a similar conviction, writing “[n]ational one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature (qtd. in Damrosch What Is? xiii). Both Goethe and Marx were well acquainted with literature beyond their own national traditions. Goethe reportedly read widely in translation, his interests ranging from Chinese novels to Serbian poetry; he even delighted in reading translations of his own work (Damrosch What Is? 10-11). Marx “felt at home in the literature of classical antiquity (…) the works of Dante, Boiardo, Tasso, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, the French and English prose fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (Prawer 1. Blues musicians have been among the winners of the National Endowment for the Art’s National Heritage Fellowship early every year since the award’s establishment in 1982. . . 3 .

(14) 399). Now, in the twenty-first century, and in tandem with “the ongoing vitality of national literatures” (Damrosch What Is? 283), those predictions are at last coming true. We have entered the age of World Literature, and translation is its default mode. Indeed, leading theorists and critics have affirmed translation’s centrality to the World Literature paradigm. If writing from around the world is to be studied, compared and appreciated, translation is more than a vital tool; it is an essential art. According to David Damrosch, to cross over into world literature, a work must gain in translation. Nevertheless, as Damrosch also points out, translation inevitably entails loss. My aim is to devise a strategy for translating a Taiwanese folk classic, “The Ballad of Tsiu Sing,” in a way that gains more than it loses. Of course, it would be presumptuous to suggest that a given work can be translated as World Literature, because factors other than translational gain are at play as well. What I seek to do, then, is to translate the ballad in a way gains, as Damrosch defines that concept (see Chapter Two), thus bettering its chances of joining other works in an ever-expanding world literary canon. And the best way to do that, I believe, is by translating creatively. Taiwanese songbooks Kua-a-tsheh or kua-a-phoo 歌仔簿, are booklets of folk songs written in Southern Min 閩南語2 or Taiwanese 台語. The booklets are printed in red or black ink on white or manila paper and illustrations may accompany the texts. Size varies, but the most common songbook type measures approximately 10 cm x 16 cm. The songs contained in the booklets are most commonly composed in quatrains of seven Chinese characters per line. Lengths vary, running from short romantic ballads to multi-volume historical epics. Content is wide-ranging, including folktales, history stories, love songs, current events, lessons in filial piety, and philosophies of living are the most common topics, but other themes are represented as well. Songbooks (kua-a-tsheh) are windows on premodern Taiwanese society, a compendium of history, legend and lore. Collectively they offer a panoramic portrait of a bygone time and place. Si Bing-hua 施炳華, host of the National Museum of Taiwanese Literature’s Koaa Booklet Database, likens kua-a-tsheh to “a long-abandoned garden awaiting 2 A. . language spoken in the southern coastal region of China’s Fujian province. . 4 .

(15) cultivation.” Within the garden are “written Southern Fukkien and Taiwanese, culture, literature, and seeds of the storytelling arts, all in need of tilling, irrigating and fertilizing by those who are willing” (“Guide” 17). Many of the “willing” have indeed come forth – in recent decades scholars have investigated every aspect of the form, producing a substantial body of literature. Lauded as “precious assets of Taiwanese linguistic culture, treasures of Taiwanese folk literature” (Yao 143), songbooks (歌仔冊 kua-a-tsheh) are now the subject of seminars, theses, and dissertations. Websites, both official and private, are dedicated to the form. Legendary kua-a-sian (歌仔仙) – the songsters who perform kuaa, the ballads set down in the booklets – are hailed as “national treasures” (國寶). Rare early printings are preserved in the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries and other noted collections. Songbook types Long historical narratives and khuan-se-kua (勸世歌), “hortatory songs" that urged listeners to lead morally upright lives, accounted for the bulk of songbook content in the form’s early stages of development (Ong). Later, although traditional themes were still popular, songwriters increasingly turned to Taiwanese history, folklore, customs, and traditions for inspiration and material (Ong). Tseng Tzu-liang 曾子良 classifies ballads into ten categories according to content: •. Stories adapted from Chinese novels and plays (改編中國傳統小說戲曲類). •. Adaptations of Chinese folk tales and history stories (改編中國的歷史與民間故事類). •. Adaptations of Taiwanese folk tales and history stories (改編台灣的歷史與民間故事類). •. Stories drawn from current news and events (改編當時該地社會新聞類 ). •. Hortatory ballads (勸世教化歌), i.e., songs urging moral reform and personal betterment. •. . Antiphonal ballads (褒歌), i.e., duets in which young lovers engage in. 5 .

(16) flirtatious banter (MOC; Ang 3) •. Romantic ballads (情歌). •. Novelties (趣味類). •. General knowledge (事務歌類). •. Miscellaneous (其他) (20-21). Popular from the mid-nineteenth century to the early decades of the postwar era, songbooks were eventually eclipsed by television and other modern forms of entertainment (Si “Guide” 5).\ Written Taiwanese Three methods of writing Taiwanesed (Southern Hokkien) have developed over the course of time: 1) Han (Chinese) characters ( 漢字 ); 2) Romanization; 3) a combination of characters and Romanization [my translation] (Cai 5). Examples of each: 1) Han characters The beginning of a joke: 三儂共五目 Three people, f ive eyes 有一个跛跤个愛娶媠某，益有一个一目个愛嫁媠翁。有一个媒儂婆卜共. 做媒儂。媒儂婆叫. 對看个時. ，跛跤个著騎馬去卡威風；一目个著倚門邊用門將青盲个閘起來，假驚見笑。( Ang, Jokes 141 ) A boy with a bad limp yearned to marry a beautiful girl; and a young woman, blind in one eye, longed to wed a handsome man. Acting as go-between, a matchmaker – a crafty old crone – arranged for the two to meet. Before the meeting, the matchmaker told the young fellow to ride a horse to the home of his prospective bride – that would impress her; and, more importantly, his handicap wouldn’t be apparent. The old woman then told the girl to stand half-hidden in the doorway when the boy came to visit, showing only the side of her face with the good eye; the young man would assume she was shy and wouldn’t notice the flaw in her . 6 .

(17) beauty. [my translation] 2) Romanization (my transliteration of the beginning of the above passage): Ū tsı̍ t-ê pái-kha ê ài tshuā suí bóo, iah ū tsı̍ t-ê tsı̍ t ba̍ k ê ài kè suí ang. Ū tsit-ê muê-lâng-pô beh kā in tsò muê… 3) Han characters and romanization The beginning of a modern poem, “The Whale’s Declaration” 海翁宣言, by Li Khinhuann 李勤岸: 阮無愛koh新婦仔刑痀痀khiā tī遐講家己是一條蕃薯 Hōo 豬食 koh hōo人嫌 [TC Toolkit] “I won’t be daughter-in-law anymore.” There she stands, humpbacked. She calls herself a yam, a humble tuber – Food for pigs, not people. [My translation] Songbooks ballads are written in Han characters. The first stanza of Tenn Sing-kung khai Tai-uan kua 鄭成功開臺灣歌 [Zheng Chenggong opens Taiwan]: 列位貴君請坐靜 Gentlefolk, please have a seat 小弟拜託幾分鐘 I ask for only a few minutes of your time 卜唸台灣舊風景 I am going to tell of Taiwan in times long past 古早三四百年前 Three or four hundred years ago Within the songbook genre, however, there are disparities in character usage among the texts, a subject I touch on again in Chapter Two. Although a great deal of modern Taiwanese literature has been translated into other languages, with few exceptions – Wang Chen-ho's 王禎和 Mei Gui, Mei Gui Wo Ai Ni 玫瑰，玫瑰，我愛你 (Rose, Rose, I Love You) and Darryl Sterk’s translations of Lai Ho’s 賴和 Southern Hokkien works come to mind – the originals were written in standard Chinese. Songbook ballads are typically written in Chinese (Han) characters –. . 7 .

(18) for anyone not well versed in the vernacular, even one proficient in reading standard Chinese, songbook texts are largely indecipherable. To test this hypothesis, I showed the parts of the “Tsiu Sing” text to several of my Western schoolmates at National Taiwan Normal University’s Graduate Institute, all of them able readers of Chinese; none could make sense of it. Below is a sample stanza (“The Ballad of Tsiu Sing,” qtn. 3): 周成不仁佮不義𤆬月裡儂真慈悲替君厝邊共借錢夠台發達無想伊 (Chu-lin/Ng 13) Several of the characters and usages are not found in standard Chinese dictionaries, though some do appear in works such as the Kangxi Dictionary 康熙字典 and Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字 (standard forms are shown in parentheses). In line one, 佮 kah, a nonstandard usage, functions as a conjunction, equivalent to the English “and” (和/與). In the second line, 𤆬 tshuā is the Taiwanese for “to take a wife” (娶); 儂 lâng stands for “human being,” “person” (人). In line three, 厝邊 tshù-pinn, literally “next to the house (next door),” translates as “neighbor” (鄰居). In the last line, 夠, a phonetic loan, is used to represent the Taiwanese kàu, “to arrive” (到); 3 伊 i is the Taiwanese third-person singular pronoun (她/他), “he/she” or “him/her.” I also tested two Chinese exchange students, one from Guangdong province, the other from Hunan province, and neither was able to parse the text. Perhaps even more confusing to readers (and translators), in the heyday of songbook composition, Taiwanese had no standard orthography.4 Thus words or phrases were often written differently in different texts (and sometimes even within the same text), a phenomenon known as “polyorthographia” (Klöter 74).. Lines from two separate “Tsiu Sing” texts are. illustrative: 3. Similarly, 廣 kóng is a sound loan often used to signify “speak” (講/說). Such usages are common in Taiwanese songbooks. 4 The R.O.C. Ministry of Education’s 台灣閩南語常用詞辭典 [A dictionary of commonly used Southern Fukien word and phrases] now lists standard and alternate forms: https://goo.gl/95BCUY. . 8 .

(19) 泰華聽着廣這款 (Hsing-hsin, Part 1) Tài-huâ thiann-tio̍ h kóng tsit khuán Tai-hua heard [him] speak in this way 泰華听着講即款 (Chu-lin/Ng 28) Tài-huâ thiann-tio̍ h kóng tsit khuán Tai-hua heard [him] speak in this way The lines are phonetically, syntactically, and semantically identical but character usage differs. For example, the Taiwanese word kóng, meaning “to speak” or “ to talk,” is written 廣 (kóng) in the Hsing-hsin text and 講 (kóng/káng) in the Chu-lin/Ng text. The former is a phonetic loan, used for its literary reading (讀音) rather than its denotative meaning (“wide”); the latter is a standard form in both Taiwanese and Mandarin. The Taiwanese for “to listen” or “hear” (thiann) appears in its traditional form in the Hsinghsin text but in simplified form in Chu-lin/Ng. Chu-lin/Ng uses the standard form for the determiner tsit (這 “this”) but Hsing-hsin has it as 即. Such orthographic disparities are a common feature of other Taiwanese texts as well.5 Generally speaking, written variants are not an impediment to translation, provided the translator has sufficient knowledge of the spoken language. Unfamiliar usages can often be understood in context, and if all else fails, annotated edition are available in libraries and bookstores. Orthographic inconsistency may be one reason why ballads have not been widely translated, though I find it one of the genre’s most interesting facets. Taiwanese folk literature in translation Very little Taiwanese folk literature has been translated into English. As part of its “Taiwan Literature: Chinese-English Bilingual Series,” the University of California at Santa Barbara’s Center for Taiwan Studies published Folk Stories from Taiwan (2005), the tales translated by Kuo-ch’ing Tu, Robert Backus, Howard Goldblatt, Sylvia Li-chun Lin and others. Harvard’s Wilt L. Idema translated a volume of traditional Hakka ballads, 5 See also: Fox, Robert. Taiwanese Opera in English: Translating Liao Chiung-chih:s Chen San Wu Niang. Monumentica Taiwanica 台灣學誌. 8 (2013): 1-27. Print. . 9 .

(20) many of which were collected in Taiwan.6 Amazon lists Taiwan Folktales: Proverbs, Folk Sayings, and Folktales from Taiwan (2011), a collection translated by Fred H. Lobb. There are also websites such as Folk Stories from Taiwan and Island Folklore: Taiwanese Tales and Traditions, “an online repository of Taiwan’s folktales, legends, myths and traditions,” both of which feature a variety Taiwanese folk literature in English translation. Of the above, only the UCSB ballads were translated from written Taiwanese (台語).7 The UCSB folk stories are written in standard Chinese, as is the source material at the bilingual Island Folklore website. The Lobb book is a monolingual edition, and the author mentions no sources in his preface. There are collections of folk stories written in Taiwanese, such as Ang Ui-jin’s 洪惟仁 Tai-uan gin-a koo-su 台灣囝仔故事 [Taiwan children’s stories] (my copy of which has unfortunately gone missing and the book is out of print), as well as other works I have come across in bookstores over the years. Other than that, there would not seem to be a great deal of Taiwanese folk literature written in Taiwanese – in Han characters, Romanization, or a combination of the two – much less translated out of it. The “Tsiu Sing” story: synopsis One of the so-called “Four Strange Incidents of Late Qing-era Taiwan” (清末臺灣四大奇案), “The Ballad of Tsiu Sing” (Tsiu Sing Crosses Over to Taiwan) (周成過台灣) is the story of a Southern Hokkien immigrant who comes to Taiwan to better provide for his pregnant wife and aging parents. After suffering a number of setbacks, he ultimately earns a fortune in the tea trade but fails to send money home to his family. Instead, he marries Kueh A-mi 郭仔麵, a Taiwanese prostitute with whom he has fallen in love. On learning of his son's perfidy, Tsiu Sing's father dies in a fit of rage (and in some versions of the story his mother hangs herself). Tsiu Sing's wife Guat-li 月裡 and their two-year-old come to Taiwan in search of husband and father, eventually locating him in Taipei’s Dadaocheng (大稻埕) district. At 6. Passion, Poverty, and Travel: Traditional Hakka Songs and Ballads (2015) Hakka ballad (傳仔 con-e) included in the collection is the one exception (Tu ix). . 7 A. . 10 .

(21) A-mi’s behest and with Tsiu Sing’s tacit approval, a servant poisons Guat-li, and she dies an agonizing death. Aided by Giam-lo 閻羅王, King of Hell, her ghost returns to take revenge. She possesses her husband, who then seizes a knife and kills both A-mi and the servant. Repentant at last, Tsiu Sing disembowels himself. Raised by his father’s friend Ong Kin 王根, Tsiu Sing's son eventually takes over the tea business, winning respect for his honesty and integrity. “Tsiu Sing” is a simple tale, representative of an age-old Chinese genre, chinüfuxinhan story (痴女負心漢的故事)8 (Wang, Z.F. 160). But the ballad also stands as a portrait miniature of life in late Qing-era Taiwan, depicting Chinese migration to the island, settlement patterns in the Taipei area, then-thriving commercial districts, and customs and traditions of the day. Formally, the song consists of quatrains of seven characters per line (七字仔 tshit-ji-a) with an AAAA rhyme scheme, standard format in the songbook genre’s late period (晚期) of development (Si “Guide” 10-13).. Research method Methodologically, my approach to the paper and the translation encompassed both theoretical exploration and practical application. First, I studied and analyzed three extant “Tsiu Sing” songbook texts, one of them an annotated edition, and videorecordings of master balladeer Iunn Siu-khing 楊秀卿 in performance. Taiwanese scholars' insights into songbook history, evolution, and content situated the genre not only in a native Taiwanese context but within the Chinese shuochang (說唱文學) tradition as well. Translation theory provided both rationale and inspiration for the project. The writings of Douglas Robinson’s and Jorge Luis Borges pointed the way to possibilities of which I had previously been unaware. By framing literary translation as a form of creative writing, theorists and practitioners of translation studies “creative turn” inspired me to undertake the experiment, effectively “loosening the grip of the source text[s],” as Jean Boase-Beier put it. David Damrosch’s contention that literary works change as they 8. Stories in which wronged women wreak vengeance on unfaithful husbands and lovers, the genre has been traced as far back as the Shijing 詩經, or Classic of Poetry.. . 11 .

(22) travel and that translational gain is a product of creative interaction between readers and texts locates translation at the center of the World Literature paradigm, complementing ideas advanced by Robinson, Borges, and others. In the end, however, theory and practice melded into one. For example, Robinson suggested a variety of creative approaches, and Borges, Iunn Siu-khing, and others pointed to practical ways of implementing creative ideas. Hence, my purpose is not to validate a particular theoretical construct but to explore a variety of possibilities for achieving translational gain, an ongoing trial-and-error process.. . 12 .

(23) . Chapter Two: World Literature and Translation It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained. – Salman Rushdie The construct Emily Apter distinguishes two types of world literature: in the lower-case, “world literature” is the “sum of all forms of literary expression in all the world’s languages”; by contrast, upper-case “World Literature” is now well-established as a “disciplinary construct” (Against WL 2). In academia, institutions such as Harvard’s Institute of World Literature and its worldwide affiliates conduct “far-reaching inquiry into the world’s literary cultures” (Institute for WL, Webpage). Journals such as Forum for World Literature Studies, jointly sponsored by the Wuhan Institute for Humanities, Shanghai Normal University, and Purdue University, strive to promote diversity in the field by focusing on the literatures of “neglected countries and regions” (Forum for WL Studies, Webpage). The online periodicals Asymptote, World Literature Today, and Words Without Borders feature prose, poetry, and criticism from around the world in English translation. Novelists, poets, and playwrights from places once considered literary backwaters now receive prestigious international writing awards. Amazon.com categorizes works by region – Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Latin America – listing hundreds if not thousands of translated titles. World Literature’s time has come. Origins Goethe coined the term “World Literature” (Weltliteratur) in 1827, but the actual practice is much older. Both Hutcheson Macaulay and David Damrosch have traced it to the ancient world. Posnett defined it as “a universalizing of literature,” stating that the “process,” as he called it, was observable in “Alexandrian and Roman, the later Hebrew and Arab, the Indian and Chinese, literatures” (WL in Theory 43). According to Damrosch, books were traveling commodities in antiquity, carried in “saddlebags and. . 13 .

(24) ships’ holds,” part of an international literary market (3). Though modern scholars know it by different names, 9 and the concept’s validity is subject to debate,10 the WL construct “has secured its foothold in both the university institution and mainstream publishing” (Apter Against WL 2). The discipline has also given rise to a great deal of critical discussion. Debates revolve around what it is, how it should be taught, what works are to be included in a world literary canon, translation’s role and function within the paradigm, and other linguistic, cultural and political issues relevant to its study. At one end of the spectrum, some would deny its validity altogether, claiming that WL “would not exist were it not for the efforts of Western critics and publishers promoting semi-foreign texts” (Dooghan, qtd.in Huggan 491). Others define it expansively, including just about everything that has ever been written, providing literary works meets certain criteria. The theorists whose names are most closely associated with the WL construct and whose ideas have been most widely interrogated are Franco Moretti and David Damrosch. Theory Moretti: Two world literatures Moretti defines World Literature as a “problem [his italics] to be solved, requiring a new critical methodology (“Conjectures” 55). His solution is “distant reading,” “[focusing] on units that are much larger or smaller than the text: devices, themes, tropes – genres or systems (“Conjectures” 57). Moretti identifies two distinct types of world literature [Moretti’s italics] (“Evolution” 120). His “planetary system” (“Conjectures” 54) arose in tandem with the eighteenth-century advent and spread of global capitalism (55). Closer in kind to the Weltliteratur envisioned by both Goethe and Marx, the model is based on “world-systems” analysis pioneered by Emmanuel Wallerstein, Fernand Braudel, and others (Apter Against WL 45-46). The system is characterized by sameness [Moretti's italics]: forms move from a cultural “center” to a “semi-periphery” and then to a “periphery,” resulting in “hybridity” (“Evolution” 114-115). For Moretti, then, world literature is “one and 9. E.g., “Cosmopolitanism,” “Global Lit,” “World Lit,” “Literary Transnationalism” (Apter, Translation Zone 42) 10 See, for example, Graham Huggan’s “The Trouble with World Literature.” . . 14 .

(25) unequal”: “the destiny of a [peripheral] culture (…) is intersected and altered” by a “core culture” that ignores the “target” culture yet exerts a strong influence on the latter’s literary production (Conjectures 56). To illustrate, he cites David Der-wei Wang on the impact of European forms on late Qing-era Chinese fiction (“Conjectures” 60), likening the core-periphery phenomenon to a “wave” that sweeps over large areas of the globe (67). Moretti makes scant mention of translation, other than noting that it enables the diffusion of structural elements from the core (e.g., plot) but has very little influence on receiving cultures’ literary stylistics (e.g., narrative voice) and modes of expression (“Evolution 119). Prior to the eighteenth century, world literature comprised “a mosaic of separate ‘local’ [literary] cultures” (“Evolution” 120). This second type “is characterized by strong internal diversity; it produces new forms mostly by divergence [Moretti’s italics] and can be explained by some version of ‘evolutionary theory’” (“Evolution” 120): forms change as they diverge; new forms evolve from older ones, growing outward like branches on a tree (114). The theory “explains the variety and complexity of existing forms on the basis of a historical process” (113). Taiwanese ballads (kua-a) and songbooks (kua-a-tsheh) are the product of an evolutionary process, as we will see the next chapter. Damrosch As director of Harvard’s Institute of World Literature, David Damrosch is WL’s most prominent theorist and leading pedagogical voice. In contrast to Moretti, Damrosch advocates “close reading,” that is, intimate acquaintance with a few selected texts. For him, World Literature is defined by circulation, reception, and, perhaps most importantly, from a translator’s perspective, gain. He emphasizes WL’s multicultural and multitemporal character (What Is WL? 16), calling for an expansion of “the canon” to include a multiplicity of “microcanons” (298). Thus he writes my claim is that world literature is not an infinite ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and reading, a mode that is applicable to individual works, as well as bodies of material, available for reading established classics and new discoveries alike (5).. . 15 .

(26) Damrosch’s model is inclusive: “I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” (What Is? 4). However, “a work only has an effective [his italics] life as world literature, wherever and whenever, it is actively present in a literary system beyond its original culture” (4). For Damrosch, a work enters into world literature by a twofold process: first, it must be read “as” literature [Damrosh’s italics]; second, it has to circulate “beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin” (What Is? 6). Translation is central to this concept. “Works of literature,” Damrosch writes, “take on a new life as they move into the world at large, and to understand this new life, we need to look closely at the ways a work becomes reframed in its translations and in its new cultural contexts” (24). Thus he defines World Literature in three ways: 1. World literature is an elliptical refraction of national literatures. 2. World literature is writing that gains in translation. 3. World literature is not a set canon but a mode of reading: a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time [Damrosch’s italics] (283). A work of World Literature is “a refraction” and not “a reflection” of national literature; when received into a “foreign space,” it is “always as much about the host culture’s values and needs as it is about the source culture” (283). Damrosch visualizes this host-source culture relationship as a “double refraction,” an “elliptical space” where works “live” as world literature. And although works still bear “marks of national origin (…) these traces are increasingly diffused and become ever more sharply refracted the farther a work travels from home” (283). But what does Damrosch mean by “double refraction” and “elliptical space,” concepts I find more easily intuited than explained? One of the dictionary definitions of “refract” is “to alter by viewing through a medium” (Am. Herit.); in the World Literature paradigm, I would argue, translation is the refractive medium that alters a work, thereby enabling its entry into a foreign culture. The refraction doubles when the translated work is received in another culture, where it may be used in a variety of ways: as a positive or negative literary model, or a “neutral” example of otherness:. . 16 .

(27) World literature is thus always as much about the host culture’s values and needs as it is about a work’s source culture; hence it is a double refraction, one that can be described by the figure of the ellipse, with the source and host cultures providing the two foci that generate the elliptical space within which a work lives as world literature, connected to both cultures, circumscribed by neither alone (What Is WL? 284). A Disneyland lightshow illustrates the concept: A better image of the elliptical process might be what takes place around nine o’ clock in the evening, when a crowd gathers along the shoreline of Rivers of America seeking, something more magical than the androidal simulacrum of Main Street, U.S.A. Streetlights dim; music swells; then a sheet of water jets up from a phalanx of nozzles, hidden in the sand out on Tom Sawyer’s Island. From the opposite shore powerful beams of light shoot across the river and converge on a screen of mist, where they project a moving image: Mickey Mouse, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, introducing the evening’s son-et-lumière extravaganza formed in the shimmering conjunction of projected light and refracting water (284). Damrosch does not elaborate further, but as I understand it, the source of the projected light represents the host culture (original work); the audience is the receiving culture; and the “screen of mist” the refracting agent that “translates” light and water into an “extravaganza” of imagery. So what the audience actually sees – i.e., what readers of translations receive – are not reflections but refractions of original works, linked to both host and originary cultures. If works change as they travel, how do they gain in translation? Works of literature differ from media such as film and television in that they create “suggestive gaps” readers are “required” to “productively” fill in, an idea Damrosch credits to German literary scholar Wolfgang Iser [Damrosch’s italics] (292). Iser held that readers may differ in their responses to a given text but the text itself remains unaltered, limiting. . 17 .

(28) the ways in which it can be experienced (292). For Damrosch, however, when a text travels [it] does indeed change, both in its frame of reference and usually in its language as well. In an excellent translation, the result is not the loss of an unmediated original vision but instead a heightening [Damrosch’s emphasis] of the naturally creative interaction of reader and text (292). Thus translational gain is a product of readers’ creative involvement with texts, a twoway street. This runs counter to the notion that a literary work cannot (some would say, should not) gain in translation, or that gains are achieved at the expense of the original. A translation should be judged on its own merits and not solely in comparison to the work on which it is based, an idea put forth by Jorge Luis Borges (see Chapter Three). Similarly, if WL is a “mode of reading” and “a form detached engagement with worlds beyond our own time and place,” reader reception – how and in what context a work is read – is also a determining factor in whether it can successfully cross over into World Literature: At any given time a fluctuating number of foreign works will circulate actively in a culture, and a subset of these will be widely shared and enjoy canonical status, but different groups within a society, and different individuals within any group, will create distinctive congeries of works, blending canonical and noncanonical works into effective microcanons (What Is WL? 297-298). For Damrosch, WL’s “leading characteristic is its variability,” that is, “different readers will be obsessed by different constellations of texts” (What Is? 29). World Literature “comes into play” when a foreign literary work joins with other translated texts, forming a “constellation” in the reader’s mind. Moreover, such works “resonate in ways that have little to do with historical or cultural proximity” (299) For instance, he suggests that The Tale of Genji might be read in conjunction with Proust’s Swann’s Way and Mishima’s Spring Snows, or in a “storytelling context” with Bocaccio’s Decameron or A Thousand a One Nights, manifesting differently in each of those literary “constellations.” Hence, readers “encounter [a] work not at the heart of the source culture but in the field of force generated among works that may come from very different. . 18 .

(29) cultures and eras” (300). “Detachment” is central to this concept: readers who explore literary works from places and periods different from their own are “detached” in that they experience the texts indirectly, or elliptically, the “ellipses multiply[ing] as the angle of refraction increases” (300). By that metric, the farther a work travels from its time and culture of origin, the more it changes. Thus I would argue that a translation gains not only by sparking creative interaction between reader and text but also by the ways it interacts with other translated works in the reader’s mind. Graham Huggan has written that Damrosch’s is “[p]erhaps the most concerted effort so far to define World Literature,” calling it a “coherent (…) if by no means uncontestable program” (492). Scholars have criticized the model on linguistic, cultural, pedagogical, political and translational grounds. As many of these areas overlap, and almost all involve translation, either directly or indirectly, I will look first at translation’s role in the WL construct and then turn to scholars' critiques. World Literature and translation “World literature cannot be conceptualized apart from translation,” Lawrence Venuti writes: In most historical periods as well as most geographical areas, only a small minority of readers can comprehend more than one or two languages, so that considered from the reader’s point of view, world literature consists not so much of original compositions as of translations (…) Translation enables the international reception of literary texts (“WL and Translation Studies” 180) Venuti echoes Damrosch in placing translation at the center of the WL paradigm, as does Pascale Casanova: “Translation, despite the inevitable misunderstandings to which it gives rise, is one of the principle means by which texts circulate in the literary world” (xiii). Translation is a particular type of littérisation in the literary world. Its true nature as a form of literary recognition (…) goes unrecognized on account of its apparent neutrality. Nonetheless it constitutes the principal means of access to the literary world for all writers outside the center” (133).. . 19 .

(30) In Casanova’s model, translation had traditionally served as “a process of establishing literary value” (23). For example, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges achieved wide recognition only after his work had been translated into French and garnered acclaim in Parisian literary circles (135). The same was true for James Joyce, William Faulkner and other twentieth-century writers outside of what were then the world literary centers, Paris and London (128-131). Today, the World Literature construct serves a similar function, as Emily Apter has pointed out, “deprovincializing” the traditionally Eurocentric canon “in a way which, at its best, draws on translation to deliver surprising cognitive landscapes hailing from previously inaccessible linguistic folds” (Against WL 2). Zheng Zhenduo 鄭振鐸, a literary historian and leading figure in China’s May Fourth Movement, early on called for a “thorough and encompassing study” of the world’s literary production, viewing it as a whole or independent subject “unifying time, place, people, and genre” (“A View” 59). In the absence of a global lingua franca, Zheng believed, only translation could make such a study possible (63). Thus, as Venuti correctly pointed out, without translation, World Literature, as we know it today, would not exist. Criticisms The “imperium of English” Nevertheless, scholars have questioned both the model’s legitimacy and translation’s place in it. One of the chief concerns, according to Graham Huggan, is that World Literature “institutionally supports what it claims ideologically to oppose or, to put it still more bluntly, that it represents the cultural realpolitik of globalization masquerading as either a ‘worldly’ cosmopolitanism of reading” [Huggan’s italics] (491). He charges the construct with provid[ing] a stimulating encounter with cultural difference, but one all too readily translated into familiar terms; and it underestimates, almost to the point of forgetting, the materiality of the literary among other forms of cultural production, celebrating cosmopolitan forms of consciousness without necessarily acknowledging the global inequalities that drive them. . 20 .

(31) – and that drive the predominantly liberal-humanist project of World Literature itself (491). For Huggan and other theorists, translation – specifically, English translation – drives this phenomenon, running the risk of “Disney[fying]” (Damrosch, What Is? 15) the world’s literatures for easy consumption by Western students. As Huggan sees it, World Literature is chiefly “a consumerist” North American phenomenon, having acquired an “institutional foothold” on the continent (499). “Two problems obtain in World Literature’s approach to literature in translation,” he writes,” which I will call for short the rule of English and the assumption of translatability” (497). Others have echoed him. Jonathan Arac decried [World Literature’s] “unavowed imperialism” (44): Globalization pluralizes: it opens up every local, national or regional culture to others and thereby produces “many worlds.” Yet these many worlds can only be known through a single medium: just as the dollar is the medium of global commerce, so is English the medium of global culture, producing “one world” (35). While Arac criticisms are aimed chiefly at Moretti’s model, they apply to Damrosch’s as well. Apter criticizes World Literature’s linguistic and geographic bias, which she says views non-Western literatures through a Eurocentric lens. World Literature (and translation studies, by her account) has been “unable to rework literary history through planetary cartographies … [paying] lip-service to alterity while doing little more than to buttress neoliberal ‘big tent’ syllabi taught in English” (Against WL 8-9). She reserves her sharpest criticism for what she views as WL’s failure to account for “Untranslatables,” linguistic, cultural, and philosophical phenomena and ideas that defy translation (8-9).11 And though she praises the construct’s “deprovincialization” of the Eurocentric canon, she is wary of its “reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability, or toward the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded ‘differences’ that have been niche-marketed as commercialized ‘identities’” (Against WL 2). For Apter, WL is in danger of becoming a project of “curatorial salvage” that “gathers up swaths of literary culture deemed vulnerable to extinction and performs preservational intervention’” (326). 11. For example, Apter cites Heidegger in arguing that the term “world” (as in “World Literature”) is not easily defined (Against WL 8-9).. . 21 .

(32) Damrosch answered those charges in a review of Apter’s Against Literature, wryly noting that “[it] is surely a mark of some kind of success when a movement begins to be attacked by its own participants” (Apter was a founding board member of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature) (504). In Damrosch’s estimation, Apter overlooks large parts of the world where translation is widely practiced – e.g., post-Cultural Revolution China and Japan (and, I would add, Taiwan) – (506) while ignoring “seminal figures” in translation’s “cultural turn” – Bassnett, Lefevere, Toury, Venuti – “even though [those] theorists revolutionized a previously formalist field to “address issues such as power, inequality, and the thorniness of language” (507). Gayatri Spivak criticizes the construct for its lack of sensitivity to the rhetoric, cultural politics, and gender differences of non-Western literary cultures: In the act of wholesale translation into English there can be a betrayal of the democratic ideal into the law of the strongest. This happens when all the literature of the Third World gets translated into a sort of with-it translatese, so that the literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan (“Politics” 401) Indeed, Stephen Owen warns of a “mall food-court” (“美食街”) model of World Literature in which non-Western literary traditions are represented by one or two wellknown “dishes,” i.e., a few internationally known authors or works. For example, Chinese food-court stalls in American malls sell neither mantou – steamed bread – nor shredded jellyfish, both popular in China but virtually unknown abroad (252-253). Similarly, the work of modern poets (e.g., Bei Dao 北島) is most frequently chosen (by Western academics) to represent World Literature from China because it conforms to current Western literary and aesthetic norms. In China, however, sales of periodicals featuring contemporary poetry written in the classical tradition far outstrip those of journals publishing modern poetry by “young intellectuals in Beijing and Shanghai,” yet the work of living poets writing classical poetry is ignored in the West (259-261). Damrosch likens this phenomenon to a “literary Miss Universe competition,” where a single author or work is chosen to represent an entire national literary culture (“Frames for WL” 511-512). . 22 .

(33) To counter these shortcomings, Damrosch urges scholars and instructors of World Literature to “keep readers alive to cultural difference and to develop illuminating analyses of creative conjunctions of distant works,” paying greater attention to lesserknown works from previously unrepresented literary traditions (512). Accordingly, his Longman Anthology [of WL] includes Spivak’s “sparkling” translation of Mahasweta Devi’s Breast-Giver, as well as translations from Nahuatl, Sumerian, Middle High German, Polish, and Vietnamese, “the kinds of thing that were rarely in comparatists’ view before” (“Comp Lit/World Lit” 456). While those critical of the fact that English is currently the de facto language of the World Literature construct make valid points, it is worth noting that a great deal of writing is translated from English into other languages as well. Alexander Beecroft writes: English as a second language may be sweeping the world, but as the sheer volume of mass-market literature translated out of English attests, few of those second-language learners choose to read in English for pleasure (…) The world may be shrinking and flattening in many respects, but until we all speak English (or Esperanto), our bedside reading will remain, often, in our own native languages (Ecology 299). Loss and Gain Others have questioned Damrosch’s assertion that works of World Literature gain in translation. British comparatist Nicholas Harrison poses a fair question: “When Damrosch reads or teaches a text written in a language he doesn’t know, how can he tell that it has gained in translation? (“What Gets Lost” 412). Citing Derrida, Harrison argues that language in a work of literature is not subject to “paraphrase” (418), thus translational loss is inevitable. In poetry, language, form and meaning interact in such a way as to preclude translation of “specific” poetic effects into other languages (415). He quotes comparatist Robert von Hallberg: “[M]usic and poetry obstruct the circulation of ideas by means of paraphrase, as though language were entirely semantic, and meaning. . 23 .

(34) entirely linguistic” (418). Harrison allows that a translation of a poem may itself stand as a work of literature but [the] translator will inevitably feel that it has been impossible to capture some of the reverberations and other qualities that made [the poem] worth trying to translate (…) in the first place. [The translator] may add new “facets”; on various levels, things may have been gained; but other things will have been lost (415). In other words, semantic and aesthetic elements are inseparable in a literary work, and translation inevitably results in losses uncompensated for by any supposed gains. For his part, Damrosch never denies translational loss nor does he ever imply that translations are superior to original works. Rather, he states that meaning exists on multiple levels in a literary text, not solely in the “local verbal flavor of its original phrasing” (What Is WL? 291), downplaying what he calls the “modernist” notion of “stylistic novelty” (292). Perhaps the problem lies not in translational “gain” and “loss” but in the way translation has traditionally been viewed, as Lawrence Venuti observed in an interview with World Literature Today: I question pejoratives like “loss,” “infidelity,” and “distortion.” They all assume a particular way of thinking about translation that emerged in antiquity and has prevailed ever since: the idea that translation aims to convey some invariant contained in or caused by the source text – an invariant form, meaning, or effect. The invariant is a hoax (“Full Throttle”). For Venuti, translations are “relatively autonomous” from their source texts but “indissolubly tied” to their contexts of reception, “[as] a result, translation deepens current definitions of world literature” (“WL and Translation Studies” 180). To show how translations gain in receiving cultures, Damrosch compares English translations of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, noting that previous “literalistic” translations “flatten[ed] out Aristophanes’ language and obscure[ed] his outrageous sexual puns” (How to 84). To convey the feel of the Spartan dialect (which Athenians scorned as nonstandard, unrefined Greek), one translator substituted Cockney, the other a dialect of the American South; both created puns of their own to stand in for those of Aristophanes.. . 24 .

(35) The play’s context – the Peloponnesian War – was altered as well. One of the translators reframed the conflict as the American Civil War, another as the twentieth-century Cold War. According to Damrosch, “[the] best modern translators all allow themselves liberties of this kind” (84). If readers seek a better sense of original works, he advises them to “triangulate” by reading more than one translation of the same work, as he does with Voltaire’s Candide, comparing English translations from different eras, weighing relative strengths and weaknesses of each (68-75).12 Pedagogy Questions also revolve around translation’s role in WL pedagogy. Spivak decried what she has called the “multi-culti” approach, declaiming, “I never teach anything whose original I cannot read” (“Teaching”). She also criticizes the widespread use of WL anthologies in English translation, viewing publishers like Longman as arms of American cultural hegemony and capitalist globalization: “the market is international. Students in Taiwan and Nigeria will learn about the literatures of the world through English translations organized by the United States” (Death xii). The result is a watered-down multiculturalism in which students “relate sympathetically but superficially” to a given foreign text, the Anglophone students basking in a benevolent aura of “knowing other cultures” (Spivak “Teaching,” qtd. in “Comp. Lit/World Lit” 465-466). As a counterweight, Damrosch suggests “collaboration” with specialists in the literatures of various languages to supplement the “global generalist’s” knowledge, paying greater attention to non-Western cultures and civilizations (What Is WL? 287). But for now and the foreseeable future, World Literature classes and seminars will likely be conducted in English translation. Below is a list of assigned readings for Damrosch’s “Masterpieces of World Literature,” a Harvard “Online Learning” course: •. Goethe. 12 The . Longman World Literature in Anthology series, which Damrosch coedits, also follows this approach, according to a cover blurb: ‘New Translation’ units will help you to understand the key role of translation in the life of world literature. Passages in the original language are accompanied by two or three translations that show how differently translators can choose to convey the original in expressive new ways (Amazon.com). . . 25 .

(36) •. The Epic of Gilgamesh. •. Homer, The Odyssey. •. The 1001 Nights. •. Voltaire, Candide. •. Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red. •. Wole Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman. •. Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman. •. Eileen Chang [張愛玲]. •. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji. •. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones. •. Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri. •. The Lusiads [a Portuguese epic] (Damrosch, Masterpieces of WL). Were it not for translation, it would not be possible to study the above writers and works in relation to one another in a single course. A well-designed World Literature course generates a synergy otherwise absent when studying foreign works individually or in the context of their respective national literary traditions: by “[r]eading Wordsworth, Du Fu, Sappho, and Murasaki Shikibu together we can explore the distinctive ways in which these writers transmuted social and emotional turmoil into reflective works of art” (Damrosch How to 22). In the World Literature paradigm, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – it is not so much what works we read but how we read them in conjunction with other works. Which is not to invalidate criticisms of the World Literature paradigm and translation’s place in it. But current arguments are not so much about questions of the construct’s legitimacy and translation’s place in it as they are about how to approach its study, which is now well established internationally. The Harvard Institute of World Literature boasts affiliated universities the world over, with high concentrations not only in North America and European universities but in China and other Asian countries as well. A young discipline, World Literature will likely continue to evolve, both in its methodologies and translational practices. Alexander Beecroft envisions a truly universal paradigm that “embraces all verbal art, popular as well as ‘literary,’ and including the cinematic,” one that will “acknowledge the centrality of otherwise peripheral locations. . 26 .

(37) such as Mumbai or Hong Kong” (188). World Literature courses of the future will likely be conducted in languages other than English. But regardless of the linguistic context, translation will undoubtedly continue to play a central role in the dissemination, study, and appreciation of the world’s literary works.. . 27 .

(38) . . 28 .