Homeward bound translingualism: (Re)translating Dai Sijie’s autonarration

Martina Codeluppi

doi:10.5007/2175-7968.2019v39n3p272

Auteurs

Martina Codeluppi University of Naples "L'Orientale", Nápoles, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2478-8344

DOI :

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2019v39n3p272

Résumé

Migrant authors writing in foreign languages are one of the most tangible effects of the ongoing globalization of contemporary Chinese literature. Dai Sijie, Chinese émigré writer and film-maker, chose the French language to voice his narration of China. Soon he became an example of how the presence of multiple cultures within an individual can result in self-hybridization. His first novel Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise (2000) is based on Dai Sijie’s own experience of banishment and tells the story of two youths whose re-education is strongly influenced by Western novels banned in China. But what happens when a literary text born as a translingual and transcultural work is translated “back” into its language (and culture) of origin? Is the mediation performed twice or undone? How does this process affect the author’s representation? This article will answer such questions through a comparative analysis of the novel and its Chinese versions (published in the P.R.C. and Taiwan), by focusing on the linguistic and cultural (re)translations. The “world literature fever” stresses the centrifugal force pushing literature from China to the West, yet globalization is a circular movement that sometimes implies the homecoming of a “Westproof” Chinese literariness.

Biographie de l'auteur

Martina Codeluppi, University of Naples "L'Orientale", Nápoles,

Martina Codeluppi earned her Ph.D. in contemporary Chinese literature from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, in co-supervision with the Sorbonne Nouvelle University – Paris 3. Her research focuses on a compared analysis of the narration of memory shaped by the polyglossia characterizing Chinese fiction at a global level. Using a transnational and translinguistic approach, her thesis compares works by migrant writers to investigate the impact of the global dimension on the individual recollection of historical events. She specialized in Chinese literature through research visits to Peking University (P.R.C.) and took part in several international conferences dealing with globality in contemporary Chinese literature, Translation Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis.

Références

Chevaillier, Flore. “Commercialization and Cultural Misreading in Dai Sijie’s Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise.” Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol. 47, no. 1, 2010, pp. 60-74.

Chow, Rey. “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem.” Boundary 2, vol. 25, no. 3, 1998, pp. 1-24.

Chun, Allen. Forget Chineseness. SUNY Press, 2017.

Dai, Sijie 戴思杰. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Trans. Ina Rilke. Vintage, 2002.

Dai, Sijie 戴思杰. Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress). Gallimard, 2000.

Dai, Sijie 戴思杰. Ba’erzhake yu xiaocaifeng 巴爾扎克與小裁縫 (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress). Trans. Yuchi Xiu 尉遲秀. Huangguan wenhua chuban youxian gongsi, 2002.

Dai, Sijie 戴思杰. Ba’erzhake yu Zhongguo xiaocaifeng 巴爾扎克與中國小裁縫 (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress). Trans. Yu Zhongxian 余中先. Beijing shiyue wenyi chubanshe, 2003.

Fraisse, Emmanuel. Littérature et mondialisation (Literature and Globalization). Honoré Champion, 2012.

Fritz-Ababneh, Dorothée. “L’intertextualité dans Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise de Dai Sijie.” Dalhousie French Studies, vol. 77, 2006, pp. 97–113.

Jia, Jie 贾頡. “Zhongfa duzhe yan zhong de ‘Ba’erzhake yu xiao caifeng’” 中法讀者眼中的《巴爾扎克與小裁縫》(Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress in the Eyes of Chinese and French Readers). Faguo Yanjiu, no. 91, 2013, pp. 77-82.

Klein, Lucas. The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness. Brill, 2018.

Kuehn, Julia, Kam Louie, and David M. Pomfret (eds.). Diasporic Chineseness After the Rise of China.: Communities and Cultural Production. UBC Press, 2013.

McCall, Ian. “French Literature and Film in the USSR and Mao’s China: Intertexts in Makine’s Au temps du fleuve amour and Dai Sijie’s Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise.” Romance Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, 2006, pp. 159-70.

Orsini, Francesca. “The Multilingual Local in World Literature.” Comparative Literature, vol. 67, no. 4, 2015, pp. 345-74.

Pesaro, Nicoletta, and Yinde Zhang (eds.). Littérature chinoise et Globalisation : enjeux linguis-tiques, traductologiques et génériques (Chinese Literature and Globalization: Implications in Lan-guage, Translation and Genre). Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2017.

Rao Pengzi 饒芃子. “Quanqiu yujing xia de haiwai huawen wenxue yanjiu” 全球語境下的海外華文文學研究 (Research on Overseas Chinese Literature in the Context of Globalization). Jinan xuebao (zhexue shehui kexue ban), no. 4, 2008, pp. 1–5.

Shih, Chih-yu. “Post-Chineseness as Epistemology: Identities and Scholarship on China in the Philippines.” Asian Ethnicity, vol. 19, no. 3, 2017, pp. 1–22.

Shih, Shu-mei. “The Concept of the Sinophone.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 3, 2011, pp. 709–18.

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

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Translation as Culture.” Parallax, vol. 6, no. 1, 2000, pp. 13-24.

Thornber, Karen L. “French Discourse in Chinese, in Chinese Discourse in French - Paradoxes of Chinese Francophone Émigré Writing.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 2009, pp. 223-32.

Tsu, Jing, and David Der-wei Wang (eds.). Global Chinese Literature. Brill, 2010.

Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. Routledge, 1995.

Vilain, Philippe. “Autofiction.” In The Novelist’s Lexicon: Writers on the Words That Define Their Work, edited by Gillet Villa and Le Monde, trans. by Jeanine Herman, Columbia University Press, 2011, pp. 5-7.