Yanyi Chen; Rémy Jarry; William Peyton
Yanyi Chen
Year 2 DPhil Student , Research Centre for Chinese Literature & Literary Culture, The Education University of Hong Kong
The Dynamics of (Dis)connection: T.S. Eliot Across the Border
T. S. Eliot, one of the Modernist poets in the 20th century and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, was introduced to mainland China in the 1930s. Yeh Kung- chao (1904-1981), a diplomat and famous scholar in literary studies, first introduced and interpreted T. S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland (1922) to the Chinese readers in 1934. Just as what Zhao Luorui (1912-1998), the early translator of The Wasteland, said in her lament for Yeh, the profoundness of T.S. Eliot’s influence outreaches his poetic works. Indeed, both T.S. Eliot’s major poetic works and his essays on poetry have become popular among the intellectual in mainland China since the 1930s. Unfortunately, the publication of anything about T.S. Eliot came to a standstill at the end of 1940s, even the name of T.S. Eliot was found missing in an American anthology. After two decades’ absence (i.e. 1950s -1970s), T.S. Eliot studies have flourished again in mainland China after the Chinese Cultural Revolution. But where’s T.S. Eliot during that period?
This article aims to look for the absent T.S. Eliot, and it gives special attention to the vehicle of the cultural transfer as well as its human agent that has helped introducing the poet-critic across the border to Hong Kong. Meanwhile, it intends to discuss the impact of T.S. Eliot’s works in the Hong Kong context to see any dynamics of (dis)connection.
Based on some important literary archives (esp. local newspaper supplements and literary magazines funded by the USIA), it is found that T.S. Eliot has been introduced to Hong Kong since the late 1940s via the Literary Supplements of the Overseas Chinese Daily News and the Literary Current Monthly Magazine etc. - which were then in the charge of some Soundbound Writers from the mainland China – with some local contributors playing a significant role in translation, illustration as well as local adaptation. Among them, S. Quanan (1935- ), a local writer and major translator of T.S. Eliot in Hong Kong, is a typical case. He not only translates several poems of T.S. Eliot (e.g. The Hollow Men, ‘Virginia’ and ‘Usk’ in Landscapes) in the 1950s, but also borrows some literary devices as well as the western cultures and values behind the texts to his early works, wherein he characterizes the disillusioned intellectual in the mercantile Hong Kong society.
Rémy Jarry
China Academy of Art, Year 3 DPhil Candidate in Chinese Art
The Transcultural Nature of Huang Yong Ping’s Oeuvre
Having left China for France in 1989, Huang Yong Ping (1954-) has developed an original relation with his homeland. While disapproving the ideology prevailing in Mainland China, he remains also very critical about this Western-centrism prevailing on the international scene, including the art world. In parallel, he treasures his Chinese cultural heritage and uses it as a prism to approach and decipher the fundamentals of Western culture. By avoiding the binary opposition between East and West, his work explores an alternative path: instead of choosing a camp, he looks at the main touchpoints between the two civilisations and cultures in order to anchor his work.
Far from becoming diversionary, Huang's work regularly tackles the main historical challenges and social issues of our time: the rise of radical Islam, the globalisation, the quest for world power, the climate change, the migrants, among other topics. Moreover, Huang Yong Ping continues to update the French trope of "artiste engagé” ("engaged artist" in English) that has been popularised over 20th century. His main ambition is to deconstruct the so-called cultural identities, while unveiling the processes and forces at stake in their development. Thus, he brings politics into his art rather than diluting his art into politics. Interestingly, his work has been censored in both China and Western countries.
Huang Yong Ping’s transcultural path enables him to raise compelling theoretical questions, such as the relevance of the notion of “Chinese contemporary art”, which he considers as a Western construct. Furthermore, it provides an appropriate framework to reflect the ongoing process of Westernisation that China has gone through over the last decades.
William Peyton
Australian National University, Year 3 PhD candidate in Chinese Literature/Translation
The Translingual Style of Liu Cixin’s Writing
I shall discuss the contemporary Chinese science-fiction author, Liu Cixin, and his trilogy The Three Body Problem (Santi / Diqiu Wangshi). The English translation of this work, published in 2013, has received an enormous amount of attention in the Anglophone world. While critics have been suggesting ways in which this science fiction work is essentially Chinese in character, this paper instead examines it as a phenomenon of translation and English literary influence. Liu Cixin, rather than being an example of Chinese influences, draws upon a collection of translated western fiction (both sf and non-sf), inspired principally by Arthur C. Clarke. I argue that it is less useful to situate Liu within a narrative of native Chinese literary influence or within debates around comparative literary theory, proposing rather that translation and stylistic approaches can better access and explore the influences and ideas developed in The Three Body trilogy. Using the methodology of ‘translingual practice,’ proposed by Lydia Liu (1995), in conjunction with Edward Gunn’s work on the stylistic history of modern Chinese (1991), my research follows an aesthetic analysis of Liu Cixin’s text using parallel examples of western works such as Clarke’s 2001, Orwell’s 1984, Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles and others. This paper is aimed at encouraging further studies of western translation vis-a-vis contemporary Chinese fiction and science-fiction. It continues the wider investigation of new literary forms and themes in contemporary Chinese literature and how they have emerged through the translation and reception of foreign-language texts since the early 1980s.