Introduction

What constitutes a translation is always subject tonorms within a given language community. As TheoHermans observes, the term translation ‘appeals to arecognizable and circumscribed category, both aknown concept and a socially acknowledged practice’.Ever since Roman Jakobson's seminal division oftranslation into ‘intralingual’ (rewording),‘interlingual’ (translation proper), and‘intersemiotic’ (transmutation) approaches, scholarshave sought to define translation through bothprescriptive and descriptive methods. While thelion's share of such scholarly efforts has beendevoted to interlingual translation inEuropean-language contexts, some scholars havesought to place practices of translation on acontinuum of practices of ‘rewriting’ across allthree of Jakobson's categories. Most famously,perhaps, André Lefevere argued that what he termed‘rewriters’ – a terms designed to capture thebreadth of translational activities – constitutedthe ‘motor force behind literary evolution’, subjectto ideology and poetic aesthetics.

In a recent surge of interest in intralingualtranslation, scholars have paid more attention tohow practices of translational rewriting shaped thetransition to modern written standards withinmodernizing empires and nation-states. Suchinvestigations show that the emergence of modernwritten forms of language was not only mediatedthrough interlingual forms of rewriting but alsodepended heavily on intralingual approaches. Suchrewriting involved the translation of ‘classicaltexts’ into modernized written ‘vernaculars’ whileaccommodating new ways to bridge ‘speech’ in itsgeographically distinct formations within the newlyevolving written standards.

Introduction

In this volume we have brought together essays thatexamine various aspects of interlingual transactionswithin East Asia. Some of the essays stretch themeaning of the notion of ‘translation’ ininteresting and challenging ways and suggest thatRoman Jakobson's tripartite distinction betweenintralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotictranslation may need to be rethought. Part of thechallenge resides in the fact that, contrary to thenationalistically inflected binaries of ‘script’ vs.‘orality’ or ‘domestic’ vs. ‘foreign’ advanced intwentieth-century political and scholarlydiscourses, such categories prove to be remarkablyporous and permeable within the early modernlanguage ecologies of East Asia. Thus, this volumeis part of a broader conversation that seeks todismantle certain ready-made assumptions about thenature of the Chinese language, the Chinese literarycorpus, and the cultural engagement of countrieswithin the Sinographic sphere.

The need for a new mapping of the web of translationalinteractions becomes particularly acute as we takestock of the fact that early modern China's literaryculture operated in a plurality of linguistic forms.Moreover, these varieties of written Chineseexceeded the reformist May Fourth divisions betweenlanguages that were reputedly ‘outmoded’ or ‘new’,‘dead’ or ‘alive’. As Chinese intellectuals soughtto fashion a new written medium that couldaccommodate modern content and be readily learned bya mass public, they divided written Chinese intoso-called ‘literary’ (wenyan文 言) Chinese and ‘vernacular’(baihua 白話) Chinese,while revamping the entire literary canon to alignwith these new linguistic divisions. ‘LiteraryChinese’ was reputedly divorced from any spokenforms, encompassed the bulk of the Confucianclassics and the much-maligned examination essays,and as such was thought to represent a ‘deadlanguage’ that impeded modernization. The‘vernacular’ allegedly hewed closely to a spokenidiom, was newly aligned with the ostensibly‘popular’ forms of traditional fiction, drama,songs, and some poetry, and represented thefoundation upon which a new written standard couldbe established.

However, as more recent scholarship has shown, thisopposition between ‘literary’ and ‘vernacular’Chinese is profoundly misleading becausehistorically, the so-called ‘vernacular’ was neitherthe proximate counterpart to any spoken form ofChinese nor was it an exclusively popular form ofwriting. On the contrary, what distinguished thisform of writing – which has alternatively beencalled ‘vernacular’, ‘plain Chinese’, or‘mixed-register literature’ – was its encyclopediccapacity to blend registers drawn from differentstrata within literary Chinese.