Power relations and deforming tendencies in the Portuguese edition of the novella Se, Jie by Eileen Chang

Abstract

The novella Lust, Caution (Se, Jie; 色, 戒), by Eileen Chang, was written in the 1950s and underwent decades of revision by the author before being published for the first time in the late 1970s. It only reached a broad audience in 2007, when its film adaptation won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, reigniting interest in the work, which has since been translated into at least ten other languages — including Portuguese, through an indirect translation. The interdisciplinary approaches of Translation Studies are a valuable tool for understanding this context, especially since the cultural turn in this field highlights power relations and the circumstances surrounding textual production. While Berman (2013) describes the deforming tendencies present in ethnocentric translations, Venuti (2008) and Tymoczko and Gentzler (2002) shed light on extratextual aspects and point out that comparing different translations and analyzing the techniques employed allows us to determine the literary — and also political — purposes of their translators. Based on the analysis of different translations of Se, Jie, this study aims to: (1) identify the occurrence of deforming tendencies (Berman, 2013) in the intermediate English translation and determine its influence in the indirect Portuguese translation; (2) compare selected excerpts with their counterparts in direct translations into other languages; and (3) using an intercultural approach (Bassnett & Lefevere, 1998; Tymoczko & Gentzler, 2002; Venuti, 2008; Wang, 2004), provide hypotheses for these translational approaches through the lens of power dynamics and intercultural interactions.