Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity-China, 1900-1937

by Lydia H. Liu

Are languages incommensurate? If so, how do people establish and maintain hypothetical equivalences between words and their meanings? What does it mean to translate one culture into the language of another on the basis of commonly conceived equivalences?

This study—bridging contemporary theory, Chinese history, comparative literature, and culture studies—analyzes the historical interactions among China, Japan, and the West in terms of "translingual practice." By this term, the author refers to the process by which new words, meanings, discourses, and modes of representation arose, circulated, and acquired legitimacy in early modern China as it contacted/collided with European/Japanese languages and literatures. In reexamining the rise of modern Chinese literature in this context, the book asks three central questions: How did "modernity" and "the West" become legitimized in May fourth literary discourse? What happened to native agency in this complex process of legitimation? How did the Chinese national culture imagine and interpret its own moment of unfolding?

Genres: China, Nonfiction

504 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Lydia H. Liu 劉禾 is the W.T. Tam Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She teaches in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Professor Liu also holds a joint professorship at the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Tsinghua University 清華大學 in Beijing.

(from http://www.columbia.edu/~ll2410/)

Reviews

[Jake Rubenstein]

https://substack.com/@jakerub

[Brady Turpin]

This was a pretty dense read at times, and there are still quite a few passages I didn't fully follow the argument. However, her notion of translingual practice shown through clearly. The applicability of her idea beyond China makes this a truly valuable work, especially translation studies.

China is still the main focus here and I appreciated her novel approaches to works of the Republican Era; her readings of Lu Xun and Xiao Hong were highlights.

[lys · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shelving this book to reread later. Liu's introduction is superb and an excellent guide to the failings of non-Western historiography. Her central thesis is that language practices are a site of a "manifested historical relationship," calling for a historicization of the process of translation that places it in relationships of knowledge-power. I had some difficulty understanding the chapters because of my unfamiliarity with modern Chinese literature.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is best book (among those that I've read) on translation and modernity. Her close reading of Camel Xiangzi is beyond this world. Her examination of 'chineseness' is insightful: in paraticular, the co-authorship between E/W is incisive. I will use transligual practice in my work on Ahisbe's Murder in RedChamber.
Her reading of Xiao Hong is fantastic, finally someone can read her without forcing the ridiculous nationalist sentiment on her.
But, I would recommend this to those who has time to slow-read. If you read it in a hurry, it's doubtful how much you can get out of her sophisticated arguments.

[Quynh Anh]

From reading "Print and power" => the re-appropriation of "revolutionary" terms