CSI 上海：探討張愛玲短篇小說英法譯本中的文化詞翻譯

全文

(1)A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE OF TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION NATIONAL TAIWAN NORMAL UNIVERSITY. CSI. CSI Shanghai: the English and French Translation of Culture-Specific Items from Two Eileen Chang Short Stories. Advisee: Margaret Katherine Hayslip Advisor: Dr. Daniel Hu. July 2019.

(2) lexical units culture-specific items, CSIs meaning. connotation source language. foreignization. target language. domestication. neutralization. lexicalization semantic regularity. synonymy cultural. transposition. Kingsbury. Patton. Péchenart. i.

(3) Abstract To a certain extent, all language is a reflection of the culture in which it originates; yet, there are some lexical units which are inextricably culture-bound. Known as culturespecific items (CSIs), these words and/or expressions refer to abstract ideas or concrete objects which only exist in a given language-culture or deviate in meaning or connotation when rendered into another. Since each has its own particular degree of opacity and cultural specificity, some may prove transparent and accessible, while others obscure and unrecognizable. Elusive by nature, CSIs do not simply exist in and of themselves—their actualization depends on the source- and target-language pair in question, the textual function of the given item, and the context of publication. This thesis attempts to explore the interesting challenge of non-equivalence such items pose to the translator, who is tasked with conveying their referents across intercultural gaps and linguistic borders. Traditionally, approaches to their treatment have been classed as either foreignizing or domesticating, but scholars have begun to remodel this time-worn dichotomy into a fluid spectrum to highlight intermediate alternatives. Exploring a wide range of possibilities, this thesis investigates how CSIs are treated in translation from Chinese into English and French, seeking to determine if they are preserved, neutralized or replaced by target-culture equivalents. As compared to previous selective studies which limit analysis to specific CSI categories, this study takes a more comprehensive, inclusive approach and examines the translation of all items which meet stipulated selection criteria. This thesis also proposes a new framework to evaluate and classify the translation procedures by which Chinese CSIs are processed. Building upon existing models in the literature, this framework accounts for (un)lexicalization, semantic (ir)regularity, and (non)synonymy, and consists of nine procedures which contribute to three overall translation strategies, i.e. foreignization, domestication, and most importantly neutralization. The data is then subjected to quantitative analysis to determine the distribution of CSI procedures and cultural transposition value of each target text. For the purposes of this investigation, two Eileen Chang stories, entitled (“Deng”) and (“Guihua”), and their English and French translations were selected as primary source material. Data was collected from the eight texts—four of which being produced by Chang as author and translator—and compiled into trilingual CSI corpora. The findings of this analysis indicate that, regardless of translator or target language, CSIs were more often than not neutralized and extreme procedures were typically avoided. However, there were discrepancies between translators’ approaches. Whereas the English translators Kingsbury and Patton adopted more cautious and moderate orientations, the French translator Péchenart and self-translator Chang experimented more with unlexicalized and ungrammatical language. However, translators, particularly Chang, did not treat CSIs uniformly across texts. As part of its important academic contribution, this case study demonstrates the validity of quantitative analysis of CSI translation and its potential for enriching and substantiating qualitative research. The framework proposed herein can also be adapted for use in other translation studies research, thus facilitating contrastive textual analysis across different language pairs, texts, and authors. Keywords: culture-specific items; quantitative translation analysis; Eileen Chang selftranslation; foreignization; domestication; neutralization. ii.

(4) Table of Contents CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................... 1 RESEARCH AIMS .......................................................................................................................................... 1 INTRODUCING THE SOURCE TEXTS ................................................................................................................. 3 BACK TO THE BEGINNING: RESEARCH ORIENTATION ...................................................................................... 4 TRANSLATION OF CHANG’S WORKS INTO ENGLISH AND FRENCH .................................................................... 5 CHOICE OF TEXTS ......................................................................................................................................... 9 OUTLINE .................................................................................................................................................... 10 TABLE 1 : SHORT STORIES IN TRANSLATION ................................................................................................ 11 TABLE 2: MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS IN TRANSLATION .................................................................................. 12 TABLE 3: FULL-LENGTH WORKS IN TRANSLATION ....................................................................................... 12 CHAPTER 2. THE WRITER AND HER WORKS .................................................................................... 13 EILEEN CHANG, A LIFE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST ...................................................................................... 13 THE TWO SHORT STORIES: “DENG” AND “GUIHUA” ...................................... 16 Chang as self-translator: working from Chinese into English................................................................. 18 “Deng”................................................................................................................................................. 19 “Guihua” ............................................................................................................................................. 29 CHAPTER 3. THE NATURE OF CSIS AND APPROACHES TO THEIR TREATMENT ..................... 49 FROM THE “LITERAL VS. FREE” DICHOTOMY TO NEW AVENUES OF CULTURAL INQUIRY .................................. 49 A GLANCE BACK AT THE LITERATURE ON CSIS ............................................................................................ 50 SO WHAT ARE CSIS?................................................................................................................................... 52 APPROACHES TOWARDS THE STUDY OF CSIS ............................................................................................... 55 CATEGORIZATIONS OF CSI TRANSLATION PROCEDURES ............................................................................... 57 A (NOT VERY) NEW DICHOTOMY: VENUTI’S FOREIGNIZATION VS. DOMESTICATION ....................................... 57 BEYOND FOREIGNIZATION AND DOMESTICATION ......................................................................................... 58 FACTORS TO CONSIDER ............................................................................................................................... 62 OMISSION: A DOMESTICATING PROCEDURE? ................................................................................................ 64 CHAPTER 4. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY ......................................................................................... 66 LOCATING THE TEXTS ................................................................................................................................. 66 RESEARCHING AND SELECTING CSIS ........................................................................................................... 66 CONSTRUCTING (AND CATEGORIZING) THE CSI CORPORA ............................................................................ 67 IDENTIFYING CHANG’S CHANGES TO THE TEXTS .......................................................................................... 72 ESTABLISHING A TRANSLATION PROCEDURE FRAMEWORK AND CATEGORIZING PROCEDURES ........................ 72 ANALYZING THE DATA AND INTERPRETING RESEARCH FINDINGS .................................................................. 73 CONVERTING FINDINGS INTO STATISTICS ..................................................................................................... 75 CHAPTER 5. FRAMEWORK FOR THE CATEGORIZATION OF CSI TRANSLATIONS .................. 77 CATEGORIZATION OF CSI TRANSLATION BY PROCEDURE ............................................................................. 77 THE TRANSLATION PROCEDURES ................................................................................................................. 78 Unlexicalized transliteration (UT) ......................................................................................................... 78 Unlexicalized transliteration + explicitation (UT + EXPCT).................................................................. 81 Unlexicalized transliteration + explanation (UT + EXPLN)................................................................... 84 Semantically anomalous translation or paraphrase (SA) ........................................................................ 88 Semantically systematic reference to the source culture (SS) .................................................................. 91 Culture-neutral explanation (CNE)........................................................................................................ 93 Omission (OM) ..................................................................................................................................... 95 Cultural analogy (CA)........................................................................................................................... 98 Cultural substitution (CS)...................................................................................................................... 99 CHAPTER 6. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF RESULTS .......................... 104 1. 2.. HOW ARE CSIS HANDLED IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH TRANSLATION? .................................................. 105 HOW DO INDIVIDUAL TRANSLATORS RENDER CSIS? ......................................................................... 106. iii.

(5) 3.. DO TRANSLATORS HANDLE CSIS IN THE SAME MANNER ACROSS TEXTS? ........................................... 112. CHAPTER 7. CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................... 119 WORKS CITED......................................................................................................................................... 121 APPENDIX A: “DENG” CSI SOLUTIONS BY TRANSLATOR AND PROCEDURE .......................... 125 APPENDIX B: “GUIHUA” CSI SOLUTIONS BY TRANSLATOR AND PROCEDURE...................... 128 APPENDIX C: “DENG” AND “GUIHUA” AGGREGATED DATA ...................................................... 131 APPENDIX D: “DENG” CULTURE-SPECIFIC ITEMS ........................................................................ 132 APPENDIX E: “GUIHUA” CULTURE-SPECIFIC ITEMS .................................................................... 147. iv.

(6) Chapter 1. Introduction “She could with a single phrase take you hostage. Chinese readers can’t forget her; most Western readers have never met her” (Fisher, 2015, para. 2). Eileen Chang has been revered for decades in Taiwan, Hong Kong, overseas Chinese communities, and more recently in post-Mao China, but she has only just recently come onto the scene in the West, where, over the past decade, her stories have been translated into multiple languages and adapted to the silver screen. The recent attention that her work has garnered comes more than fifty years after renowned literary critic C. T. Hsia first hailed her stories as classics (Thomas, 1995). Another long-time supporter, professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University, David Der-wei Wang, writes that Chang is “arguably the most talented woman writer in twentieth century China” (Wang, 2010, p. v). Favorably compared to writers as diverse as Katherine Mansfield, Joan Didion, Flannery O’Connor, and Franz Kafka, Eileen Chang is beloved for her “hauntingly precise, achingly beautiful” prose and meditations on romantic love, domestic discord, betrayal, and desolation (Thomas, 1995; Fisher, 2015; Kingsbury, 2007, p. xii). Her writing style is unique within Chinese literature of the mid-20th century, which more often than not advocates a strong political ideology. Unlike her confrères, Chang was interested in vividly capturing the sights, sounds, and smells of mid-century urban China and “simply wanted to explore the...thoughts and feelings of ordinary, imperfect people struggling through the day-to-day dislocations caused by war and modernization” (Lovell, 2007, p. xiii). Her writing, at once elegant and biting, drew a loyal following among Chinese readers outside the Mainland and even inspired generations of “Chang school” creative writers in Taiwan and Hong Kong (Louie, 2012).. Research Aims The culmination of this project can be traced back, at its most incipient, to a course on the writings of Eileen Chang, taught in the spring of 2014 by Wu Tao-yuan. at. NTNU’s Mandarin Training Center in Taipei, Taiwan. This was my first introduction to the life and writings of cult icon Chang and the semester would prove to be pivotal in my life. It was during this period, with the encouragement of my teacher and mentor Wu Tao-yuan, that I decided to pursue graduate studies in Taiwan yet to break off the relationship which had. 1.

(7) originally brought me to the island and inspired me to study Chinese in the first place. Fully immersed in the poignant realism of Chang’s writings, I was granted access to a stimulating space in which to further explore Chinese language and a new perspective from which to understand traditional Chinese culture. It is rare, however, that a culture be wholly isolated from and untouched by the outside world, and Chang’s œuvre is by no means homogenous in its cultural identity. Typically set in 1940s foreign-occupied Shanghai and Hong Kong, Chang’s stories are products of the cosmopolitan environments in which they were written. They represent custom-made hybrids of East and West, tradition and modernity, and are dappled with references specific to Chinese and Western ways of life. Such references pose a unique problem for the translator and it is this translation “problem,” or phenomenon, which the present study aims to investigate. In particular, this thesis seeks to analyze how culture-specific items, or CSIs, are translated from Chinese into English and French, and to determine if CSIs tend to be preserved, neutralized, or replaced in each. Unlike other studies which limit their scope to a purely qualitative analysis of specific pre-selected categories of CSI, this thesis aims to adopt a more inclusive approach and will analyze all lexical elements (and their counterparts) which meet an established set of CSI selection criteria. This qualitative analysis will then be complemented by quantitative data to provide a more global perspective of CSI treatment by story, translator, and target language. By eschewing category restrictions and providing both quantitative and qualitative data, this study aims to offer new insight into CSIs and their translation. Furthermore, this study seeks to give greater prominence to “Shame, Amah!” ( ) and “Little Finger Up” (. ), two of Chang’s works which have received. significantly less attention from readers and scholars alike, especially abroad. Apart from Chang’s full-length novel Half a Lifelong Romance (. ) and the novellas which inspired. the popular film adaptations “Red Rose White Rose” ( (. ) and “Lust, Caution”. ), the best-known of Chang’s published works remains the collection Romances ( ) and the ten short stories featured within. In the past decade, significant academic attention has been paid to Chang’s three. posthumously published semi-autobiographical novels, The Fall of the Pagoda ( Book of Change (. ), and Little Reunions (. ), The. ). Translation-oriented research,. meanwhile, has continued to center either on Chang’s blurring of the line between (re)writing 2.

(8) and translation, her Chinese translations of Western literature, notably that of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, or her critically acclaimed self-translation “The Golden Cangue” (. ), translated into English from the original Chinese (Lin, 2012). However, only a few. studies, such as Lin (2012) and Hsu (2013) have begun to investigate translatorial contributions from other parties, thus there is still room for more discussion and analysis. If we only consider that which has been written in English or any other language apart from Chinese, there is a glaring paucity of research on Chang (Lee, 2012). “Until recently, only a few scholars in the West had researched her work, and even this was mostly due to C. T. Hsia’s claim in his authoritative 1961 book...that she was ‘the best and most important writer in Chinese today” (Louie, 2012, p. 2). This study accordingly has been carried out in response to the call of Chang scholars from East and West for more research and shall seek to help fill this research gap. This thesis takes two of Chang’s lesser-known works as its focus and develops discussion around a trilingual corpus drawn from Chang’s own self-translations along with their alternate English and French translations. In so doing, this trilingual contrastive analysis endeavors to create a richer understanding of both CSIs and the cultural lens through which Chang is presented to Anglo- and Francophone readers around the world. To summarize, this thesis seeks to address the following research questions: 1. How are CSIs handled in English and French translation? Are CSIs preserved, neutralized, or replaced with analogous target-culture or third-culture references? 2. How do individual translators render CSIs? Do Chang, Kingsbury, Patton, and Péchenart adopt similar CSI strategies? 3. Do translators handle CSIs in the same manner across texts?. Introducing the source texts The starting point of this research is of course the two Chinese short stories (“Guihua”) and. (“Deng”), which were translated into English by Chang herself. as “Shame, Amah!” and “Little Finger Up.”1 In Chinese, these stories can be found in various collections published by Crown in Taiwan dating as far back as 1968, when Chang first granted the publishing house copyright to her work.. 1. For the sake of clarity, and especially since for each source text there also exists an alternate English translation by another name, this thesis will utilize the above-noted pinyin romanizations when referring to the original Chinese texts.. 3.

(9) For the purposes of this thesis, I have used the 18-volume 2010 edition of Chang’s collected writings, which is available at popular commercial and smaller second-hand bookstores across Taiwan and comprises a wide-ranging assortment of short stories, essays, translations, full-length novels, and semi-autobiographical works. More specifically, CSI data for use in this thesis was drawn from the second volume of the collection, in which “Guihua” and “Deng” are presented alongside nine other short stories, all originally published between 1944 and 1945. Within the 314-page volume organized chronologically by initial date of publication, “Guihua” is the eighth story featured and runs 23 pages long, while “Deng,” follows just after and is 15 pages in length. Although certain stories in the volume, e.g. the well-known. (“Red. Rose, White Rose”) from which the volume takes its name and cover art inspiration, are accompanied by illustrations of characters sketched by the author, no such visuals are appended to either of the stories under analysis in the present study. The only supplemental information provided about either is found after the final line of text and concerns initial publication. According to these editorial notes, both stories were published in December of 1944; “Guihua” originally appeared in the Nanjing-based prose magazine “Bitter Bamboo Monthly” (. )—founded by Chang’s then-husband Hu Lan-cheng—and “Deng” in a. Shanghai periodical named. (“Magazine”).. Back to the Beginning: Research orientation It is important to note that these stories were not chosen arbitrarily or on the basis of personal preference. From the outset, I was interested in exploring how Chang’s Chinese writings have been translated abroad, especially into my two other working languages: English, my mother tongue, and French, the language and literature in which I majored at university. Apart from adding meaning to this endeavor for myself, the decision to undertake a tri- rather than bi-lingual contrastive study arguably enables a richer, more nuanced analysis and increases the potential generalizability of research findings. While English and French do not belong to the same language family, they are relatively similar from a linguistic standpoint, and thus discrepancies in translation would be easy to spot and intriguing as to their implications. Moreover, the two languages represent cultures with roughly commensurate ‘intercultural gaps’ between themselves and that of Chinese. In other words, the Chinese language and culture is more or less as ‘foreign’ to English speakers as it is to those who natively speak French. It seems plausible then that 4.

(10) English and French translators could handle cultural references in roughly the same manner, but that was left to be borne out in this study by contrastive textual analysis. With these tentative research objectives in mind, it was necessary to identify which titles had been translated into English, whether by Chang or others, and which had been translated into French.. Translation of Chang’s works into English and French The results of the subsequent bibliographical research (see Tables 1-3 at end of chapter) indicated that there have been four discernible waves of Chang translation from Chinese into English and French. (Some English titles are original works, however, as Chang famously wrote in both her native Chinese and second language English, sometimes translating back and forth between the two languages.) Up to the mid-1990s, all published English versions of Chang’s work—some originals, some translations—were produced by her own hand. Anglophone readers who were interested in her writing could choose from a limited selection of four short stories and three novels: “Stalemates” (1956), “Little Finger Up” (1961), “Shame, Amah!” (1962), “The Golden Cangue” (1981), The Rice-Sprout Song (1955), Naked Earth (1956), and The Rouge of the North (1967). Francophone readers at the time weren’t so fortunate. In French, there were only two books available, both translations of The Rice-Sprout Song, but one translated (in 1958) from the English original and the other translated several decades later (in 1991) from the Chinese. Though Chang lived more than half of her life in the United States and wrote several essays and full-length novels in English, she was never able to achieve the same literary success in the West that she had enjoyed in Shanghai and remained relatively unknown until the end of her life. In fact, it wasn’t until 1995, the year in which she died, that translation of her works into English and French really began to pick up. Her death inspired a reexamination of her life and literary achievements, and a flurry of translations with it, which culminated the following spring in an entire issue of the translation journal Renditions2 specially devoted to her memory. Published by the Research Centre for Translation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, this single collaborative effort more than doubled the number of English translations of Chang’s works, adding five essays and four short stories to the count. These included “Dream of Genius” (. 2. ), “What is Essential is that the Names. Hung, E. (Ed.) (1996) Eileen Chang [Special Issue]. Renditions: A Chinese-English Translation Magazine, 45.. 5.

(11) be Right” ( (. ), “Intimate Words” (. ), “Love in a Fallen City” (. and “Traces of Love” (. ), “From the Ashes” (. ), “Shutdown” (. ), “A Beating”. ), “Great Felicity” (. ),. ). Four years later in 2000, the latter three appeared in a. collection from the same publisher. That collection3 also included “Stalemates,” the only short story of Chang’s to have been written originally in English, and Simon Patton’s retranslation of “Guihua,” entitled “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn.” In the interim, two Chang novels were also republished by the University of California Press: The Rice Sprout Song (1998) and The Rouge of the North (1998). During roughly the same period, there was a similar uptick in French translations, with the publication of three Chang stories, i.e. “Attente”4 (1995; translation of “Deng”), “La cangue d’or” (1999; “Rose rouge et rose blanche” (2001;. ), and. ), all translated by Emmanuelle. Péchenart. In the mid- to late-2000s, there was another surge of Chang translation within the Anglo- and Francophone worlds. This was in large part thanks to the 2007 release of “Lust, Caution,” the controversial film adaptation of Chang’s so-named novella, directed by the Taiwanese-American Academy-Award winner Ang Lee. This was by no means the first film adaptation of her work—it was in fact the fifth—but it was the first to launch a worldwide wave of interest in her writing (Duzan, 2015). In coordination with the film’s release, various collections of Chang’s short stories with covers bearing sexually suggestive shots from the film appeared in both English and French. This was a turning point in terms of Chang’s reception in the West—Lee had thrust her into the limelight—and translations which had formerly been restricted to a relatively unknown publisher in Asia were now reprinted by two well-known in the West: Penguin and Anchor Books (a division of then Random House). Similarly, in France, the film tie-in collection was not published by Bleu de Chine, the independent Sinophile publisher which had been a key early promoter of Chang’s work, but rather by Éditions Robert Laffont, one of the country’s leading publishing houses. In addition to “Lust, Caution,” the English collections presented previously published translations from the Hong Kong consortium, but also “In the Waiting Room,” Karen S. Kingsbury’s re-translation of “Deng.” The French collection, in contrast, offered a completely new set of translations: “Bouclage” (. ), “La. 3. Hung, E. (Ed.) (2000) Traces of love and other stories. Hong Kong: Renditions Paperbacks (The Chinese University of Hong Kong). 4 In the collection: Péchenart, E. (Ed.). (1995). Shanghai 1920-1940: Douze récits. Paris: Bleu de Chine.. 6.

(12) faïencerie” (. ), “Le méridien du cœur” (. ), and of course “Amour, luxure, trahison. (Lust, caution).” That same year, a separate collection of Chang’s short stories—unrelated to the film but riding the wave of its success—was published in the U.S. by New York Review of Books. Promoted as a NYRB Classic, the collection reprinted Chang’s celebrated self-translation “The Golden Cangue” and offered several translations by Chang devotee Kingsbury, who has said the beauty and magnetic pull of Chang’s writing was what initially inspired her to translate (Yi, 2017). Titles in this work included “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier” ( ), “Jasmine Tea” (. ), “Sealed Off” (. ) and “Red Rose, White Rose” (. ). Also published in 2007, but likely not targeted towards such a mainstream audience, was Chang’s English translation of Han Bang-qing’s 19th-century novel The Singsong Girls of Shanghai. Its Mandarin counterpart, also translated by Chang from the original Wu dialect, had been published by Crown in Taiwan over two decades earlier (double-check date). At the time of Chang’s death, the English manuscript had been discovered unfinished among her possessions. Fortunately, Chang’s loyal admirer Eva Hung, the editor of Hong Kong’s Renditions, undertook its revision for publication. Even before “Lust, Caution” was released, new translations of Chang’s works had appeared in French and English. In 2005, Péchenart’s “Un amour dévastateur” ( came into print; and that same year in the U.S., Written on Water (. ). ) was published by. Columbia University Press. The translation of this collection may not have drawn much attention outside of sinological circles, but it made a significant contribution to the body of Chang’s works available in English, opening up a new world of the author’s essays—31 in total—to an Anglophone audience. Just as the popular Romances (1944) had collected ten of Chang’s best-loved short stories and novellas, Written on Water (1945) collected many of her most notable essays, likewise penned at the peak of her career in early 1940s Shanghai. Its publication therefore marked a milestone in Chang translation into English, and it only seems fitting that it was brought forth by CUP, the publishing arm of the institution from which critic C.T. Hsia first famously hailed Chang as one of the Chinese literary greats. In the 2010s, a steady stream of new Chang titles have continued to materialize in English, French, and even Chinese. At the beginning of the decade, two semiautobiographical novels The Fall of the Pagoda and The Book of Change were published, in the original English, by the affiliate of Chang’s alma mater, the Hong Kong University Press. Soon thereafter, the two were translated into Chinese by Zhao Pi-hui (. ) and published 7.

(13) respectively as. and. by Crown in Taiwan. These publications followed. on the heels of a controversial one, of Chang’s other semi-autobiographical work (Little Reunions) in 2009, which some doubted the author had ever meant to see the light of day. Whatever Chang’s intentions, many lifelong Chang aficionados were pleased to have three new works to pore over in Chinese, over a decade after their beloved author’s death. As for new English works, two have appeared over the past few years: Kingsbury’s translation of the heartrending classic Half a Lifelong Romance (. ), published by. Anchor Books in 2016; and Little Reunions, the novel which struck up such a controversy among Chinese readers, translated by the Melbourne duo Jane Weizhen Pan and Martin Merz, published by NYRB in 2018. Within the past five years, two new volumes of French translations have also been published, both translated by Péchenart and published in Paris by Zulma. The first, which bears the English title Love in a Fallen City, comprises the previously published “Un amour dévastateur” (the French translation of the work’s eponymous novella) and the newly translated “Ah Hsiao est triste en automne L’étuve aux fleurs d’osmanthe” (the French version of “Guihua”). The second volume, published the following year in 2015, presents the two “Aloeswood Incense” stories from Romances, “Copeaux de bois d’aloès: Premier brûle-parfum” ( Second brûle-parfum” (. ) and “Copeaux de bois d’aloès:. ).. In the 76 years since Chang’s writing first captivated the readers of Shanghai, many of her short stories, novellas, essays, and full-length novels have been translated into English and/or French. It is my hope that this short history of the translation of Chang’s works, compiled to the best of my knowledge and ability, helps the reader to appreciate the multiple players and complex forces involved. Though there are certain individuals who figure prominently, such as Kingsbury, Hung, and Péchenart, no single translator, editor, academic institution, or publishing house is wholly responsible for all of the translations produced. These texts represent the collective efforts of numerous publishers, editors, and over a dozen translators. Perhaps this alone is suffice to demonstrate the enduring magnetism of Chang’s legacy.. 8.

(14) Choice of texts While the above-discussed process of bibliographical research was interesting and rewarding in itself, it was also necessary in order to establish the set of texts from which could be chosen the primary sources for this thesis. In total, out of Chang’s collected Chinese works, 12 short stories, 33 essays, and eight full-length novels have been translated into English; meanwhile, 11 short stories and one full-length novel have been translated into French. Among these, eight short stories have been translated into both (all highlighted rows): “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier” ( ), “Love In a Fallen City” ( Rose” (. ), “Sealed Off”/“Shutdown” (. ), “The Golden Cangue” (. ), “Guihua,” “Deng,” and “Lust, Caution” (. ), “Red Rose, White ).. Of these eight, there are three which have a French translation as well as not one but two English translations (rows painted in dark gray); yet, there are only two, “Guihua” and “Deng,” for which exist an English self-translation, produced by the author herself in the early 1960s, and an alternate English version, completed decades later by someone else. For this special reason, and after careful consideration of research goals and design, I elected to exclude the story “Sealed Off”/“Shutdown” from analysis and to concentrate instead on the former two. These stories and their translations, perhaps especially the English, are quite interesting and worthy of academic consideration. Their very existence bears direct relevance to key discussions which have dominated the field of translation for centuries. Early on, translation practitioners like 17th-century poet John Dryden debated how an author might speak in a foreign (target) language; and then later, Schleiermacher and others considered whether it was preferable to move the target text reader to the source language writer or vice versa. In the case of “Shame, Amah!” and “Little Finger Up,” it is already evident, indeed communicated in black-and-white, how the author herself would write the same text in a foreign language. And Chang did not merely move herself closer to the Anglophone reader in a linguistic sense but also in a physical one. More than half a decade before these two translations were published, Chang had left Hong Kong and resettled in the United States to chase her American dream. It is noteworthy then that Patton and Kingsbury chose to retranslate stories for which English versions already exist, penned by the original author herself.. 9.

(15) On the basis of the above considerations, I finally established “Guihua” and “Deng”—and their four English and two French translations—as the primary source material for this work.. Outline This thesis is composed of seven chapters, each concentrating on a different topic arising from my interdisciplinary research. Following this introduction, the second chapter presents a short biographical sketch of Eileen Chang, from her early years in Shanghai to her second marriage and later life spent in seclusion in Los Angeles. The chapter also provides synopses for. “Deng” and. “Guihua,” the two source texts under. analysis, as well as overviews to the global revisions which Chang made to these texts in selftranslation. The third chapter, or literature review for this study, introduces the thorny concept of culture-specific items (CSIs). In particular, I examine how they are rendered in translation and evaluated; outline the factors which may affect translation strategy; and take a special look at the controversial procedure of omission. The fourth chapter, entitled “Research Methodology,” identifies my research goals; traces the history of Chang translation into English, French, and Chinese; and discusses the choice of texts, selection of CSIs, organization of data, and method of quantitative analysis. Presenting the main contribution of this thesis, the fifth chapter proposes a new framework for the categorization and evaluation of CSI translations. This framework consists of nine procedures corresponding to three general translation strategies, namely foreignization, neutralization, and domestication. Then, following the practical application of this framework to the study corpora, the sixth chapter analyzes the resulting quantitative data: the distributions of CSI procedures and cultural orientation ‘scores’ by text and translator. Finally, based on these statistics and figures, I attempt to draw conclusions about the approaches of different translators to CSIs and consider how the general orientation of a translation may be correlated to its publisher and peritext. In conclusion, the seventh chapter summarizes the findings of my research, acknowledges its limitations, and suggests potential extensions of academic inquiry.. 10.

(16) Table 1 : Short Stories in Translation Chinese Text (Eileen Chang). English Text (Eileen Chang). (1943, later in Romances5). English Translation (Karen S. Kingsbury unless otherwise noted) “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier” (2007). French Translation (Emmanuelle Péchenart) “Copeaux de bois d’aloès: Premier brûle-parfum” (2015) “Copeaux de bois d’aloès: Second brûle-parfum” (2015). (1943, later in Romances) “Jasmine Tea” (2007) (1943, later in Romances). “Le méridien du cœur” (2008). (1943, later in Romances) “Sealed Off” (1995); “Shutdown” (Janet Ng & Janet Wickeri, 1996) “Love In a Fallen City” (1996). (1943, later in Romances). (1943, later in Romances). “Bouclage” (2008). “Un amour dévastateur” (2005) “La faïencerie” (2008). (1943, later in Romances) “The Golden Cangue” (1981). “La Cangue d’or” (1999). (1943, later in Romances) (1944). (1944) “Shame, Amah!” (1962) “Guihua” (1944). “Deng” (1944). “Little Finger Up” (1961). (1945) * (1957) * (1978). “Great Felicity” (Janet Ng & Janet Wickeri, 1996) “Red Rose, White Rose” (2007) “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn” (Simon Patton, 2000) “In the Waiting Room” (2007) “Traces of Love” (Eva Hung, 1996). “Rose rouge et rose blanche” (2001) “Ah Hsiao est triste en Automne: L’étuve aux fleurs d’osmanthe” (2014) “Attente” (1995). “Stalemates” (1956) “Lust, Caution” (Julia Lovell, 2007). “Amour, luxure, trahison” (2008). 5. As of mid-2019, the only two short stories from Romances (1944) which remain untranslated into English or French are “Time of Youth” ( ) and “Withered Flowers” ( ).. 11.

(17) Table 2: Miscellaneous Essays in Translation (the first five were published in Renditions, No. 45.) “Dream of Genius” (Karen S. Kingsbury, 1996) “What is Essential is That the Names be Right” (Karen S. Kingsbury, 1996) “Intimate Words” (Janet Ng, 1996) “From the Ashes” (Oliver Stunt, 1996) “A Beating” (D.E. Pollard, 1996) “The Religion of the Chinese” (published in The Chinese Essay, an anthology translated and edited by David Pollard, 2002) Written on Water (Andrew F. Jones, 2005) (includes alternate translations of , , , and ) (collection of 31 essays, 1945). Table 3: Full-length Works in Translation Chinese Text. English Text (produced by Eileen Chang unless otherwise noted) The Rice-Sprout Song* (1955). (anti-Communist novel). French Translation Le chant du riz qui lève (translated from the English—Emy Molinié, 1958) Le chant de la jeune pousse de riz (translated from the Chinese—Francis Marche, 1991). Naked Earth (1956) (anti-Communist novel) The Rouge of the North (1967) (novel based on short story “The Golden Cangue”) (Mandarin translation of Han Bangqing’s novel, originally written in Wu dialect) (translated into Chinese by. ). (translated into Chinese by. ). (romantic novel) (semi-autobiographical novel, 2009). The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai (revised and edited by Eva Hung, 2007) The Fall of the Pagoda* (semi-autobiographical novel, 2010) The Book of Change* (semi-autobiographical novel, 2010) Half a Lifelong Romance (Karen S. Kingsbury, 2016) Little Reunions (Jane Weizhen Pan & Martin Merz, 2018). 12.

(18) Chapter 2. The Writer and Her Works Eileen Chang, a life between East and West Chang was born into a once distinguished aristocratic Shanghai family. Her greatgrandfather was Li Hongzhang (. ), an influential statesman who played a leading role. in foreign policy and the modernization of China during the late-Qing dynasty (Louie, 2012). However, by the time of her birth, the country was in a period of political and social upheaval, and the social status of Chang’s family had likewise declined (Kingsbury, 2007). Chang’s home life and upbringing were quite unstable. Her mother, an elegant, Westernized socialite was far from a devoted parent. When Eileen was only two years old, she left her daughter behind in Shanghai to live abroad in Europe where she studied art and famously skied the Swiss Alps with bound feet (Duzan, 2015). She stayed for five years, only coming back to take care of her children after getting word that her delinquent husband had almost fatally overdosed on opioids. After he had recovered from the overdose yet fallen back into his opium-and-concubine habit, they divorced and she once again set off for Europe, this time staying until Eileen was almost an adult (Kingsbury, 2007). Chang’s father was not simply an odium addict and philanderer; he also routinely beat female members of the household when his unpredictable temper flared up (Kingsbury, 2007). Though his relationship with Eileen had never been completely harmonious, it deteriorated after his divorce from her mother. He later married a woman whom Eileen never took a liking to, and once, after she supposedly treated her stepmother with disrespect, he beat Eileen heartlessly and confined her to her room for six months. Even when she contracted dysentery, she was denied medical treatment and almost died (Louie, 2012). It was only with the help of her nurse that she was able to escape this incarceration and take shelter at her mother’s apartment (Fisher, 2015). She would tell and retell the story of this horrific ordeal in different stories, languages, and genres throughout her life. In 1939, Eileen began her studies in English literature at the University of Hong Kong with the intent to continue her studies at Oxford upon graduation. While in Hong Kong, she fine-tuned her English writing skills and met her life-long friend Fatima Mohideen (. ),. but unfortunately, after only two years of study there, her plans for the future had to be abandoned. In December of 1941, World War II had officially broken out in the East and West, and with the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, the university was forced to close.. 13.

(19) Chang was thus unable to complete her studies and returned to Shanghai in 1942 (Louie, 2012). Disappointed but not disheartened, Chang started churning out short stories, including her debut “Love in a Fallen City,” and sensational essays in Chinese and in English for Shanghai newspapers and literary magazines (Wang, 2010). These stories and essays, which were compiled into two collections,. (Romances) and. (Written on Water) in 1944. and 1945 respectively, arguably represent the best of Chang’s repertoire (Kingsbury, 2007). By the tender age of 23, she had become the “literary darling of 1940s Shanghai” (Fisher, 2015, para. 14). Like Hong Kong, Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese, but Chang stayed off the authorities’ radar by writing about painting, music, fashion, and literature rather than politics and war (McCormick, 2010). The Japanese viewed her work as unthreatening because of its non-political tone; her writing was criticized by others for its focus on so-called trivialities like romance. Yet, in 1943, with the publication of (“The Golden Cangue”), any doubts regarding her literary ability were dispelled and she was once and for all regarded by both loyal fans and former naysayers as an accomplished, talented writer (Thomas, 1995). During these first few years back in Shanghai, Chang met her first husband, Hu Lancheng (. ), a distinguished intellectual who worked in the Ministry of Information, a. bureau of the Nanjing puppet government installed by the Japanese (Louie, 2012; Wang, 2010). Hu and Chang married in 1945, but theirs was not to be a marriage of enduring bliss. When the Japanese retreated and the puppet regime collapsed, Hu was branded a traitor. He fled into hiding and became involved with multiple women. When Chang discovered his infidelity, she was deeply aggrieved and the couple divorced just two years after they had first wed. For decades, Chang carried around feelings of betrayal from her relationship with Hu which finally were given voice in the 1978 story. (“Lust, Caution”), published. over 30 years after their split (Louie, 2012). Even though her career had blossomed under Japanese occupation, Chang and her writing were not welcome in China once Mao Zedong had seized power and proclaimed the People’s Republic. As a former wife of a Japanese collaborator, she was already at risk of being labeled a traitor, and her insistence on remaining apolitical in her writings pushed her even further into the spotlight. Her reflections on fashion and art were accused of being bourgeois, and Leftists questioned if her political reticence originated in secret nationalist sympathies (Louie, 2012; Fisher, 2015). Her background did not help matters either as she. 14.

(20) came from an affluent, upper-class family; ironically, though, she was a struggling writer at that time (Kingsbury, 2007). Within just a few years, it became clear that Chang could not continue to live and work as a writer in Communist China, so in 1952, she fled to Hong Kong, where she worked as a translator and writer at the United States Information Service (Kingsbury, 2007). During her three-year stint there, she was commissioned to write two anti-Communist novels, The Rice Sprout Song and Naked Earth, which, upon their publication and despite their nuanced perspective, made it impossible for her to return to her beloved Shanghai (McCormick, 2010). Three years later, in 1955, Chang immigrated to the United States, where she met her second husband, Ferdinand Reyher, a minor American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist 30 years her senior (Louie, 2012). Together, they moved from one residence to another as Reyher’s health declined. Ten years after they married, Reyher suffered a series of strokes and passed away, at which point Chang began to recede into increasing seclusion (Yi, 2017). Although she lived in isolation, she held the post of writer-in-residence at different universities and finally landed a job as researcher at UC-Berkeley (Kingsbury, 2007). In her later years, she translated the famous Qing novel The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai (. ); revised earlier works, including her English version of. which she extended into a full-length novel, The Rouge of the North; and wrote three semiautobiographical novels, two in English and a much more provocative third in Chinese: The Fall of the Pagoda (. ), The Book of Change (. ), and. (Little Reunions). All. three remained unpublished until after her death and only appeared in 2009 and 2010, adding to an expanding library of Chang works for her devoted readers to enjoy. It is clear that Chang led an exceptional if solitary life. Abandoned by her mother, physically assaulted by her father, betrayed by her first husband, widowed by her second, and all the while surrounded by conflict between East and West, Japan and China, tradition and modernity, Communists and Nationalists, Chang remains unique among her contemporaries as she used her voice not to push any political agenda, but to tell personal stories of desire, misfortune, and betrayal experienced by ordinary humans, most especially young women (Louie, 2012). At the juxtaposition of these manifold cultural and political extremes, and having received a Western-style bilingual education in cosmopolitan Shanghai and later in the British colony of Hong Kong, Chang had an extraordinary talent for bridging cultures and. 15.

(21) languages; thus, she and her stories are a suitable and interesting subject for translation research.. The Two Short Stories:. “Deng” and. “Guihua”. Much academic consideration has been given to Eileen Chang as author of ‘original’ writings and to the short stories and novels which she crafted in her native Chinese; yet, it is important to step back and take a more holistic view of her greater creative life and collected works. Born into a family heavily influenced by Chinese tradition but also well-versed in Western literature and art, Chang came of age in multicultural Shanghai, where she received a bilingual education, and later studied English literature in Hong Kong, which was at that time still a British colony. She then spent the better part of her adult life in the United States, seeking to fulfill her ‘American dream’ of establishing herself as an English-language writer in her new home country. It is thus not surprising that her literary output was not limited to a particular mode, genre, or language. She was prolific as both writer and translator, with an œuvre consisting of short stories, full-length novels, essays, and screenplays in Chinese and English. And it was her mastery of both languages, her ability to translate between the two, and her unique bicultural perspective which distinguished her among contemporary Chinese writers (Hoyan, 1996). In fact, “Chang’s literary achievements are in part a result [emphasis added] of her bilingualism—a fact often overlooked in criticism on her works” (Li, 2006, p. 99). Artistically active in Chinese and in English, she wrote alternately between the two and translated from one into the other and vice versa. In Mandarin, she produced several notable translations, including renderings of The Old Man and the Sea and The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai (. ); she also self-translated several of her own works into. Chinese and/or English, depending on the language of origin. Her creative process, however, sometimes collapsed the distinctions between source and target text, author and translator, and even (re)writing and translating. In some cases, both versions of a text—one in Chinese and the other in English—were published as the original, and it remains unclear to this day which materialized first (Huang, 2015). Even in those cases in which it is possible to distinguish source from target, Chang’s “subjective initiative” is manifestly displayed in the marked discrepancies between her texts. 16.

(22) (Meng & Li, 2017, p. 13), which vacillate between “faithfulness toward and betrayal of the source” (Li, 2006, p. 100). As self-translator, she exercised an “aesthetic freedom” not enjoyed by “any other translator, who would be bound by copyright and concerns of loyalty to the source texts” (Li, 2006, p. 99). And as author, she alone could deviate from her source in self-translation without fear of undermining the “authorial intention” (Li, 2006, p. 100). Her target texts, consequently, do not simply recreate their sources; rather, they reinterpret and reconstruct the stories and their contexts, “extending...sometimes even subverting, [the] earlier writings and highlighting and rearticulating key issues” (Li, 2006, p. 100). They serve to complement and supplement—but also challenge—their source texts. “Her self-translation both extricates meaning from, and adds value to, the source text, while the source text not only gives meaning to but also exposes the significance of her selftranslation” (Li, 2006, p. 100-101). Interacting synergistically, these textual pairs assume greater significance together than either would in isolation. However, depending on the direction of translation, Chang reinterpreted her stories in different ways and to a different extent. In general, works that she originally wrote in English (and later rendered into Chinese) were subjected to fewer manipulations in self-translation than those first penned in her native tongue (Hoyan, 1996, p. 280). On the other hand, works that first appeared in Chinese were often vastly reconfigured by Chang in the process of English translation. One clear exception is “The Golden Cangue” (. ) which retains the. imagery and motifs of the Chinese original and enjoyed widespread attention from sinologists and literary minds across Asia and the West (Hoyan, 1996, p. 282). In comparison, neither of the English self-translated texts under analysis in the present thesis has garnered the same academic consideration or acclaim. As Hoyan notes, both “Little Finger Up” and “Shame, Amah!” “retain merely the basic plot outlines of their originals, but fail to communicate their deeper meanings and the narrative sophistication which the works possess in Chinese” (1996, p. 281). With such glaring discrepancies between source and target texts, it is thus imperative, before proceeding with any comparative linguistic analysis, to take into account the key changes which the self-translated works have undergone. For the sake of brevity, and because the idiosyncrasies of self-translation fall outside the scope of the present study, this section will not seek to determine whether Chang translated or, in fact, rewrote the Chinese source texts, as could be argued. Instead, this section will first introduce Chang’s approach to English self-translation and then present synopses of both stories along with discussions of significant revisions evident in their self-. 17.

(23) translated versions in order to contextualize the main focus of this thesis: CSI analysis and translation. Chang as self-translator: working from Chinese into English For her Sinophone audience, Chang was content to write in an incisive yet voluminous style; however, when she translated her Chinese short stories into English, she opted to make numerous omissions, greatly reducing the length of the target texts. Having once remarked that her Chinese ‘short’ stories were in fact rather long, Chang may have feared that translated as such they would prove unappealing and unpalatable to an Anglophone readership (. , 2010). She may also have wanted to minimize distractions. from central themes or plotlines. Or, as Li (2006) suggests, the more elaborate narration of the Chinese texts may simply be explained by the author’s greater mastery of her mother tongue. Whatever the reason, Chang eliminated both subtle and significant details as well as whole passages and entire characters in self-translation, producing streamlined English versions of her original Chinese texts. In correspondence with Stephen Soong, the later coinheritor of her estate, Chang acknowledged that “her simplicity of [English] diction...was to accommodate American readers” (Hoyan, 1996, p. 280-281). Throughout her bilingual writing and (self-)translation process, she appears to have been ever-conscious of the divergent linguistic but also cultural backgrounds of her target audiences. When writing for a Sinophone readership already familiar with Chinese society and traditional culture, she narrates her stories with “more subtlety and irony” (Li, 2006, p. 102). Yet, when translating those same texts into English for an audience less acquainted with her country of birth, she renders certain details explicit which were left implied in the source and modifies, elucidates, or simply omits certain others which may baffle or pose barriers to comprehension for the foreign reader. In particular, Chang appears to have carefully deliberated upon the significance of individual cultural references to the setting, narration, and characterization of their respective source texts. At times, “[w]hen she writes for an English-speaking audience, she consciously elaborates upon Chinese cultural elements in order to enable these readers to understand the cultural context” (Li, 2006, p. 101). On the other hand, she was also afraid that too many explanations of the Chinese cultural background would interfere with the English-language reading experience (. , 1981). Accordingly, she often omits cultural references which. are not essential to her texts, treating these lexical items one-by-one in ad hoc fashion. 18.

(24) In the following chapters, we will discuss the definition and rendering of such references, but we must first examine the primary sources—the Chinese stories “Deng” and “Guihua”—from which they are drawn. In order to appreciate Chang’s nuanced handling of culture-specific items, it is necessary to understand her more global approach to English selftranslation. Therefore, this section will present synopses of both Chinese stories followed by notes on how Chang manipulated each text in self-translation, i.e. by renaming the stories and omitting, adding, and altering source-text material.. “Deng” Synopsis and Critical Interpretation As its original Chinese title suggests, “Deng”. is a story of anticipation and. restlessness—of waiting—in the most immediate sense but also on a personal and, more broadly speaking, societal level. Gathered in the waiting room of the Pang family’s traditional tuina massage clinic, a microcosm of Shanghai’s local Chinese community gives vent to their grief and anguish, discussing at intervals the inextricable hardships of their private lives. Among the females, the conversation revolves around husbands and metaphorical headaches. Mrs. Xi, in her early forties, yearns to be reunited with her estranged husband, but is embarrassed of the rumors spreading through the community that he has taken a new, likely younger, wife in the capital Chongqing. She is also quite self-conscious of her thinning hair, which has begun to fall out in clumps as a result of chronic anxiety. An even more faded beauty, the older and less worldly Mrs. Tong has already lost complete hope in the notion of marriage, and insists, “There’s nothing to be gained from it.”6 She’s merely waiting until her three grown daughters are married off so that she can leave her husband behind and repair to a nunnery in the hills. Even those women who don’t take the ‘stage’ to air their grievances are plunged in uncertainty and unease. The masseur’s wife Mrs. Pang stays in the clinic day after day from morning to night, vigilantly keeping guard over her husband who is increasingly sought after by powerful government officials. The Pangs’ daughter, Ah Fang, also remains in the clinic, albeit reluctantly, planted by the entranceway to collect money from patients. Her ticket out. 6. “In the Waiting Room,” p. 51. 19.

(25) would be to find a suitable match for marriage, but she is “trapped...doomed to spend her blooming years in wistful longing.”7 With respect to marriage, there is an overall sense of pent-up frustration yet external pressure to exercise continued self-restraint. To take Mrs. Tong for example, she is advised by multiple acquaintances to suppress her anger and “aggravation,” which is precisely the source of the physical pain for which she has come to Pang’s clinic to seek treatment.8 Excluded, or perhaps spared, from the disappointments of marriage due to her unattractive appearance, Mrs. Bao counsels Mrs. Tong to remain in her husband’s home. After all, Mrs. Tong’s in-laws have passed away and her children are grown; in Mrs. Bao’s opinion, she should simply ignore her debauched husband and keep to her own quarters. In agreement, Mrs. Xi recommends that Mrs. Tong visit a Christian church, claiming that “the ministers’ talk” will quickly alleviate her anger.9 Even though Mrs. Tong puts her faith instead in fortune-tellers and Buddhist monks, they incidentally offer similar advice. A monk at the Golden Light Temple in Suzhou has told her that, if she cannot hold her tongue and conceal her resentment in this life, she is destined to be even more unhappily married to her same husband in the next. For Shanghainese women, it seems that marriage alone has the power to provide security and happiness. By exploring this subject, Chang returns to one of the most prominent themes of her collected works. According to the Confucian doctrine of the “Three Obediences” (. ), a woman must not assert independence or authority—she must. obey the patriarch of her household, whether that be her father, husband, or son (Li, 2006, p. 104). And even though, based on the “Seven Out Rules” (. ), women could. traditionally be evicted from their homes for adultery, men were entitled by related rules to take several wives (Li, 2006, p. 104). As such, matrimony was not a symbol of romantic love, but rather the product of careful negotiations and arrangements on behalf of two families or clans. Through her writing, Chang condemned this traditional model of marriage and further underscored the inequalities faced by women in patriarchal society. Not only are the female characters in “Deng” evaluated by men and women in terms of their physical appearance, but. 7. “In the Waiting Room,” p. 43 “In the Waiting Room,” p. 50 9 “In the Waiting Room,” p. 52 8. 20.

(26) as wives and mothers, they are obliged to endure infidelity and long hours of toil, bearing and raising children, cooking and cleaning, and attending to the needs of their husbands’ parents. Aside from marriage, there is yet another, much vaguer, source of concern and disquiet in the background, outside the insulating walls of the clinic: the Second World War. Situated on the fringe of its Asian theater, the characters are caught in a paradigmatic struggle between East and West, domestic and foreign powers, as well as traditional values and modern ideas. Life in Shanghai continues on relatively as it always has, but city residents still feel the effects and see the reminders of the war being waged around them. Inflation has risen, the prices of goods have skyrocketed, residential windows are crisscrossed with tape in case of air raids, and documentaries portraying the savagery of modern combat play at local theaters. Without an end in sight, the community is anxiously waiting for peace. According to Hoyan (1996), “Deng” evokes “a sense of resignation” (p. 282). Meng and Li (2017) concur, adding that the women in wartime Shanghai are ‘occupied’ with “endless, timeless and hopeless waiting” (p. 10). Inured to double doses of heartache and frustration, in their interpretation, Pang’s patients have “lost their spiritual strength” and become resigned to the unpleasantness of their existences (Meng & Li, 2017, p. 10). However, Gao (. , 2010) contends that these women have not given up. As they wait. for an end to aches and pains, marital discord, and armed conflict, they are consumed by anger and unrest. They continue to silently wait, but only because that is all they have in their power to do. In Gao’s reading, Chang has woven a story of the human condition, of our communal helplessness against the things in life which are beyond our control. To support this idea, he points out that there is no single female protagonist and each woman has her own troubles to contend with and burden to bear. The result is that, in having the characters share the spotlight, Chang has captured a snapshot, not of one individual or event of particular interest, but rather of the zeitgeist of wartime Shanghai. As a resident of the occupied area herself, Chang likely experienced the same emotions as the characters she portrays with biting sarcasm and at the same time sympathy: irritation, grief, impatience, and anxiety. It was a complicated time, but “Deng” offers readers a small retrospective window into that historical moment and a vivid portrait of Chang’s then state of mind. Chang’s Self-Translation “Little Finger Up”—a Double Renaming. 21.

(27) In 1961, Lucian Wu’s New Chinese Stories presented Chang’s English self-translation of the short story “Deng”. under a new title, “Little Finger Up.” This represented a. significant departure from the source text, of which the title translates to “Waiting” and offers a vague idea of the political, military, and emotional situation on the ground in occupied Shanghai. While the original title is admittedly somewhat indirect or obscure, that of Chang’s self-translation is downright puzzling, its connotative significance likely not grasped by the average Anglophone. Aware of the target reader’s cultural background, Wu or possibly Chang herself foresaw the potential loss in translation posed by this Chinese culture-bound concept and added a footnote to clarify: “Holding up the little finger is a gesture commonly understood to refer to a concubine.”10 In other words, Chang replaced a simple, mundane verb—to wait— with a culturally-loaded notion, a gesture perhaps only recognized within her native Chinese society. This new title is accompanied by an addition to the target text, a short exchange between the masseur’s daughter and an anonymous patient: After [Mr. Kao and his concubine] were gone, a lady asked carefully, “Was that Mrs. Kao?” Ah Mei held up a little finger significantly. “I thought so,” said the lady. “I certainly hope that the real Mrs. Kao wouldn’t act so cheap.”11 Certain ladies in the waiting room clearly look on the practice of concubinage with strong distaste, and bear resentment towards the women involved. Their displeasure at the sight of Gao’s concubine, according to Meng and Li (2017), mirrors Chang’s own aversion to the practice itself. Moreover, these scholars argue that, by eliminating the ambiguity of the story’s original title, Chang is alerting her readers to the main theme of this work: the broken system of traditional Chinese marriage and the resulting misfortune of women, be they spinsters, widows, concubines, or fully-fledged wives. On the story’s title page in Wu’s 1961 text, the new English title “Little Finger Up” appears printed above an ink drawing of a man and woman walking arm in arm, backs turned to the onlooker, and a vertical subtitle in Chinese reading “Fuzheng”. 10 11. , a term which. “Little Finger Up,” p. 65 “Little Finger Up,” p. 70. 22.

(28) refers to a concubine rising to the full formal status of wife. In Gao’s (. , 2010). assessment, this double titular revision confirms his hypothesis that, in revisiting her source text, Chang deliberately narrowed the focus and scope of the story to its central theme of marriage. He argues that, whereas the Chinese original portrays the diverse, wide-ranging experiences of an entire community in the face of national crisis, Chang’s self-translation concentrates primarily on the ills of traditional marriage and the pressure it places on women. In fact, the female members of the cast effectively represent a spectrum of women across a lifetime, each of whom is currently experiencing the marriage-related troubles which correspond to her given age bracket. For example, the young thirty-something concubine works tirelessly to look after her ‘spouse’ Mr. Gao, while Mrs. Xi, in her early forties, frets that her husband far away in the capital has strayed. As the eldest in the waiting room, middle-aged Mrs. Tong has abandoned hope for anything resembling marital bliss or contentment, but Ah Fang, still a young woman, is frustrated and distressed by her failure to attract a suitor and entertains hopes that she will one day enter into a marriage and thus extricate herself from her large family. To further substantiate his hypothesis that the self-translation zooms in on the question of marriage, Gao (. , 2010) notes the multiple characters who are not. preserved in the target text, i.e. the maid (. ), the little boy who accompanies her, and. arguably Pang’s last patient, the young aristocrat (. ). Interestingly, none of these. characters are directly associated with the theme of marriage. Their back stories each introduce other themes and motifs to the original story, such as class divisions and the ongoing war; thus, their absence from the target text can be viewed as contributing to a condensation, or distillation, of the source. In addition to retitling the story, Chang also renamed the majority of its characters. She was well-known for her penchant for Chinese puns and double entendres, often formulating titles and character names with allusions to plot twists or personality traits (Li, 2006). And among the characters in “Little Finger Up,” there are several which have been given such ‘telling’ names. For example, Mr. Gao (. ), who apart from yelps of. massage-induced pain does not speak to a soul, not even to return Mrs. Pang’s greeting, and whose petite concubine scurries around attending to his every need—buttoning up his gown, fetching his hat and cane, and even testing the temperature of his tea—naturally evokes an association to the expression. (“aloof and remote”) (. , 2010). Similarly, Mrs.. 23.

(29) Tong (. ), whose married name signifies “child” is indeed portrayed as child-like in. appearance: Mrs. Tong stood there in her underclothing, a lightly padded black linen jacket with matching pants. Her short, pot-bellied figure and full face, daubed with red and white makeup, made her look like an old-time Chinese boy, like the ones in those paintings on the theme ‘A Hundred Sons’.12 In particular, the masseur’s name is laden with cultural significance. A fitting moniker for a medical professional, Pang Songling (. ) brings to mind health and long life, with. “ling” making reference to one’s age and “song” denoting a pine tree (. , 2010).. According to traditional Chinese culture, these conifers symbolize resilience and longevity because they are able to withstand extreme cold, heat, and drought, remaining persistently green under both favorable and adverse weather conditions (“What are we talking about when we talk about plants in classical Chinese gardens?”). Lastly, Mrs. Xi’s name (. ). can also be considered descriptive in nature. Her husband has taken a position in Chongqing and left her isolated and near penniless in Shanghai. As a result, her social status has suffered and formerly friendly acquaintances have begun to treat her coldly and with ridicule, or as it is expressed in Chinese. “xi-luo” (. , 2010).. Unfortunately, Chang was unable to replicate these feats of word-play in her English self-translation. All the same, she still gave her characters new names for Romanization. Pang Songling (. ) becomes Peng Yu-fung; his daughter Ah Fang (. as Ah Mei; Mrs. Wang (. ) is rechristened. ) now answers to “Mrs. Li”; and Mrs. Tong (. ) has. taken the married-name “Ho” which carries regrettable target-language connotations. As mentioned earlier, several characters did not survive Chang’s editorial cuts in the process of self-translation, but there are also two minor characters, Mrs. Xi (. ) and Mrs. Bao (. ), who are fused into a less minor role portrayed by a “Mrs. Yu.” The justification for such textual alterations is not immediately clear; yet, there is one other change in name for which there exists a plausible explanation. Mr. Pang speaks complimentarily to Mr. Gao of a certain Mr. Zhu (. ), a government official to whom. he pays a daily house-call and whom he commends for his healthy lifestyle and erudition. In 12. “In the Waiting Room,” p. 55. 24.

(30) Chang’s self-translation, this figure is referred to using a slightly different surname, “Chou,” which likely corresponds to the Chinese “Chou” or “Zhou” ( ). The target text also adds, “Mr. Chou was, as everybody knew, an important personage in the puppet government.” 13 With this supporting detail, it seems likely that Chang was alluding, as she also had in “Lust, Caution,” to the contemporary politician Zhou Fohai (. ) who served as second-in-. command of the Executive Yuan within Wang Jingwei’s collaborationist government. Perhaps, in Chinese, directly mentioning a man in power by name would seem inappropriate or inadvisable; however, Chang was not subject to the same constraints in English self-translation, especially more than a decade later. Furthermore, since Anglophone readers are not as familiar with Chinese politics, explicit mention of “Mr. Chou” and his role in the “puppet government” may have helped to clarify the historical context of the story and frame Chang’s personal experience through the lens of her target readership’s perspective.. “Little Finger Up”—Omissions and Additions In terms of raw textual content, there are substantial discrepancies between “Deng” and its self-translation “Little Finger Up,” which when studied macroscopically appear to reveal several tendencies of Chang’s English self-translation practice. Although some source text content has experienced subtle alteration, most discrepancies between source and target text arise from wholesale material omissions and additions. As previously noted, Chang seems to whittle the text down into a target-language story which primarily explores the tragedy, as she considers it, of Chinese marriage. Secondary characters with no relevance to the dominant theme, such as the maid and the little boy who sits “on her lap like a sickly lump of lard” are eliminated, while others are portrayed in much less detail.14 For example, Mrs. Wang debatably survives in the persona of Mrs. Li, but Chang strips her of all characterization—including her smile which radiates “the dim, dark peace of the alleyways” 15— turning her into a faceless, featureless, forgettable shell of the woman she embodies in the source text. Also gutted in self-translation are several memorable descriptive passages. In the Chinese original text, much attention is given to Mrs. Tong (. ), whose pitiful. circumstances and status as a loyal and dutiful yet wholly unappreciated wife are colorfully 13. “Little Finger Up,” p. 67 “In the Waiting Room,” p. 41 15 “In the Waiting Room,” p. 48 14. 25.