Introduction

What constitutes a translation is always subject to norms within a given language community. As Theo Hermans observes, the term translation ‘appeals to a recognizable and circumscribed category, both a known concept and a socially acknowledged practice’. Ever since Roman Jakobson's seminal division of translation into ‘intralingual’ (rewording), ‘interlingual’ (translation proper), and ‘intersemiotic’ (transmutation) approaches, scholars have sought to define translation through both prescriptive and descriptive methods. While the lion's share of such scholarly efforts has been devoted to interlingual translation in European-language contexts, some scholars have sought to place practices of translation on a continuum of practices of ‘rewriting’ across all three of Jakobson's categories. Most famously, perhaps, André Lefevere argued that what he termed ‘rewriters’ – a terms designed to capture the breadth of translational activities – constituted the ‘motor force behind literary evolution’, subject to ideology and poetic aesthetics.

In a recent surge of interest in intralingual translation, scholars have paid more attention to how practices of translational rewriting shaped the transition to modern written standards within modernizing empires and nation-states. Such investigations show that the emergence of modern written forms of language was not only mediated through interlingual forms of rewriting but also depended heavily on intralingual approaches. Such rewriting involved the translation of ‘classical texts’ into modernized written ‘vernaculars’ while accommodating new ways to bridge ‘speech’ in its geographically distinct formations within the newly evolving written standards.

Introduction

In this volume we have brought together essays that examine various aspects of interlingual transactions within East Asia. Some of the essays stretch the meaning of the notion of ‘translation’ in interesting and challenging ways and suggest that Roman Jakobson's tripartite distinction between intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translation may need to be rethought. Part of the challenge resides in the fact that, contrary to the nationalistically inflected binaries of ‘script’ vs. ‘orality’ or ‘domestic’ vs. ‘foreign’ advanced in twentieth-century political and scholarly discourses, such categories prove to be remarkably porous and permeable within the early modern language ecologies of East Asia. Thus, this volume is part of a broader conversation that seeks to dismantle certain ready-made assumptions about the nature of the Chinese language, the Chinese literary corpus, and the cultural engagement of countries within the Sinographic sphere.

The need for a new mapping of the web of translational interactions becomes particularly acute as we take stock of the fact that early modern China's literary culture operated in a plurality of linguistic forms. Moreover, these varieties of written Chinese exceeded the reformist May Fourth divisions between languages that were reputedly ‘outmoded’ or ‘new’, ‘dead’ or ‘alive’. As Chinese intellectuals sought to fashion a new written medium that could accommodate modern content and be readily learned by a mass public, they divided written Chinese into so-called ‘literary’ (wenyan文 言) Chinese and ‘vernacular’ (baihua 白話) Chinese, while revamping the entire literary canon to align with these new linguistic divisions. ‘Literary Chinese’ was reputedly divorced from any spoken forms, encompassed the bulk of the Confucian classics and the much-maligned examination essays, and as such was thought to represent a ‘dead language’ that impeded modernization. The ‘vernacular’ allegedly hewed closely to a spoken idiom, was newly aligned with the ostensibly ‘popular’ forms of traditional fiction, drama, songs, and some poetry, and represented the foundation upon which a new written standard could be established.

However, as more recent scholarship has shown, this opposition between ‘literary’ and ‘vernacular’ Chinese is profoundly misleading because historically, the so-called ‘vernacular’ was neither the proximate counterpart to any spoken form of Chinese nor was it an exclusively popular form of writing. On the contrary, what distinguished this form of writing – which has alternatively been called ‘vernacular’, ‘plain Chinese’, or ‘mixed-register literature’ – was its encyclopedic capacity to blend registers drawn from different strata within literary Chinese.