Between the Transnational and the Translational: Language, Identity, and Authorship in Ma Jian’s Novels

Autor/innen

  • Nicoletta Pesaro Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2018v38n1p106

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the power exerted by the translator to form cultural identities and to build literary images that often overlap or blur national borders. The sinophone writer Ma Jian’s identity is challenged both in terms of authorship and readership, as his public is a culturally undistinguished “western reader”, and the translator de facto becomes the author. As a representative of the Chinese diaspora, he not only lives in a “deterritorialized” literary space, his novels also share a similar textual instability. Due to his bitter criticism of Chinese government and his internationally recognised role as a dissident writer, his works do not circulate in the People’s Republic of China, and are mainly distributed thanks to the English renditions by Flora Drew.

Autor/innen-Biografie

Nicoletta Pesaro, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Literature since November 2006, Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Science. PhD in Chinese Language, Literature and History. Venice, Italy. E-mail: nicoletta.pesaro@unive.it

Literaturhinweise

Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone. A New Comparative Literature. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press. 2006.

______. Against World Literature. On the Politics of Untranslatability. London, New York: Verso. 2013.

Damgaard, Peter. Visions in Exile. Inroads to a ’Counter-System’ of Contemporary Chinese Literature. PhD Dissertation, University of Copenhagen. 2012.

Kong, Belinda. “The Biopolitical Square: Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma.” Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square. The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Future. Ed. Belinda Kong. Philadelphia: Temple University Press (2012): 184-236.

Kong, Shuyu. “Ma Jian and Gao Xingjian: Intellectual Nomadism and Exilic Consciousness in Sinophone Literature.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, June (2014): 126-46.

Loh, Lucienne. “The Epic Spirit in Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma and the ‘New China as Twenty-first-century Empire.” Textual Practice 27:3 (2013): 379-97. Print.

Ma, Jian 馬建 [Ma Jiangang 馬建剛]. Lamianzhe 拉麵者. Tianjin: Guji chubanshe, 2002.

______. Rouzhitu 肉之土. Taipei: Taichen wenhua, 2010.

______. Yinzhidao 陰之道. Taibei: Taichen wenhua, 2012.

______. The Dark Road, Trans. Flora Drew. London: Vintage, 2014.

Pesaro, Nicoletta. “Authorship, Ideology, and Translation: the Case of Ma Jian.” The Ways of Translation: Constraints and Liberties in Translating Chinese. Ed. Nicoletta Pesaro. Venezia: Cafoscarina, 2013.

Shih, Shu-mei, Tsai Chien-hsin, and Bernards, Brian, eds., Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader, 2013.

Teng, Emma J. “What’s Chinese in Diasporic Literature?” Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature. Ed. Charles Laughlin. New York: Palgrave Macmilian (2005): 61-80.

Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethic of Difference. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

Wang, Ning. “On Cultural Translation. A Postcolonial Perpsective”. Translation, Globalisation and Localisation: A Chinese Perspective. Eds. Ning Wang, Yifeng Sun, Cleveland, Buffalo, Toronto: Multilingual Matters (2008): 75-87.

Zhai, Wenyang. The Issue of Illegitimacy: Writing in Diaspora. Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations, 2014. http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/ object/fsu:254527/datastream/PDF/view Zhang, Yinde. “La litterature chinoise transnationale et la sinopolyphonie.” Diogène 2:246-247 (2014): 222-34.

Veröffentlicht

2018-01-06

Zitationsvorschlag

Pesaro, N. (2018). Between the Transnational and the Translational: Language, Identity, and Authorship in Ma Jian’s Novels. Cadernos De Tradução, 38(1), 106–126. https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2018v38n1p106

Ausgabe

Rubrik

Poetics of Exile