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#5 Oct 26 - Gender ＆ Translation

張貼者： NTNU GITI BLOG on 2009年10月27日 星期二
標籤：
#5 Oct 26 Hu, Ying. Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899-1918. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, c2000.

4 意見:

明哲 提到...

Driven by a historical sense of mission, the late Qing’s intellectuals tried to transplant the Western culture and values into the Chinese context via translation, which, according to statistics, had even outnumbered original works at the turn of the century. The drastic change also implies the Chinese intellectuals’ great anxiety to make their nation part of the evolving world. However, the conventional Chinese thinking and representation were not fundamentally displaced by the “secondary” rendering, but appeared in the more sinicized image of woman figures as what we read in the “new novels” like 《孽海花》,《東歐女豪傑》, and《黃繡球》. The radical female pioneers such as Madame Roland and Sophia Perovskaia were intentionally transformed for the service of reforming the old China, as a means to create a “new woman” that might be identified with the modernized elevation of the nation.

I am especially intrigued by the transitional norms from 才女 to 俠女. In order to correlate woman’s education with a modern China, the monolithic image of traditional Chinese learned women was buried along with the “useless” prescriptions of 才女 and the old high culture. Liang argued they are “far from practical learning for the building of the modern China.” Therefore, the “new woman” must be inspired. I am so curious about how these so-called new women had functioned as impetus to urge the reformation of the old China. Did 秋瑾’s purposeful cross-dressing and 張竹君 or 康愛德’s claim for celibacy (female sexual autonomy) ever successfully call for the public awakening? Professor Hu believes “the emerging of new woman cannot be seen as simply a Western import.” She regards the transformation as a dialogue (or, say, a hybridity?) straddling the foreign and the self, eventually re-creating a new context that might apply to the needs of the new Chinese society. For example, the universalism generally developed and achieved in late Qing’s translation of new novels seems to have offered a justified legitimacy of such hybridity, as 嚴復 said in the preface of 《天演論》:

以其所得於彼者，反以證諸吾古人之所傳，乃澄湛精瑩，如寐初覺，……此真治異國語言文字者之樂也。

I really admire the efforts they made to bridge the gap between the suspicious Chinese literati class and the new learning. Just like translation is compared, by Walter Benjamin in his essay The Task of the Translator, to the “afterlife” of the original, these Western woman figures and their Chinese sisters had somehow collaborated to continue the spirit of liberalism through translation.

2009年10月29日 晚上7:11
素勳 提到...

I. About boundary-crossing, the foreign/the home, self/other…

I guess it’s only appropriate that the book would begin with the tale of Fu CaiYun’s very materialistic boundary-crossing—through her transgression, transformation, transportation and translation—and ends with Huang Xiuqiun’s not so materialist boundary-crossing, with her staying at her hometown village and her universal-feminist sister Madame Roland coming to her in her dream, enlightening her through a miraculously transparent translation act. It seems that the boundary may not be as distinct as we have thought. The exotic could be the familiar; the foreign could be domesticated through translation and transformation in the act of intersubjectivity as forced mirroring (Qtd. Spivak). And despite all the effort of the New trying to cut off the Past (e.g. Liao’s deprecation of Cai-nu’s education as useless), the tradition/the convention) is always in the lurking---as one would always try to construct Self through the alienation/distinction of the “other,” yet only to find that the other is but the uncanny mirror image of oneself ? (As the author has pointed out, the Chinese “Fan”[翻] would be an most appropriate metaphor for all these tales of translation in this book.)

From Late-Ching to Early Republic, we would see that the foreign are translated, transplanted and transformed to derive a new life of their own (Benjamin’s “afterlife”?) again and again. From Lady of Camellias, we have Lin-Su’s new version of Liu Ting-Ting , 玉梨魂 (by徐枕亞) and 碎簪記(by蘇曼殊). Also, we have three different versions of Madame Roland (in Liao Qi-Chao’s biography, Tan-Ci, the Bodhisattva-like Madame Roland in Huang Xiuqiun’s Dream) and the real Madame Roland. We see that Sophia has become Su Feiya with “Su” as the Chinese family name and Feiya as the given name. Madame Roland can speak Chinese and write in classical Chinese… Where’s the distinction between the foreign and the domestic?

II. On women’s education and women’s self-denial and sacrifices:

It’s a pity to see that while Liang Qi-Chao been preaching the education of women all the time, he would cast women in the role of “the mother of the citizen” instead of the woman citizen. It is even regrettable to find that the need for education and emancipation of the Chinese women has always been in the service of national discourse. Take Sophia (and her doubles 秋謹, 夏雅麗…) for example. It is interesting to note that all these “beautiful” heroines must live in self-denial to serve the “greater” end and then end their violent lives with their sacrifices as if only death can contain their potential threat and redeem their transgressive behaviors in their lifetime. This reminds me that I have read it somewhere that while women in the West have fought for their rights, most of the battle has been fought and won by men in China. As the result, the feminism in China did not have a solid ground. Is it so?

附錄:關於本書的書評(http://www.eyii.com/news/review/20091015/2750.html )

2009年11月1日 凌晨2:54
Craig 提到...

Hu Ying presents a fascinating analysis of how certain women's identities were put to use in reconstructing a public notion of the female gender. Although we may make clearer distinctions between fictionalized accounts and biography today, I feel Liang Qichao was justified in doing whatever was necessary to promote his basic premise that women's skills needed to be realigned to better serve China's modernization. For me this is a key point that I think will be valid as long as people live together in societies: how are individuals socialized so as to serve a common good, and how do we define contribution.

Hu Ying takes exception with Liang's description of the Michigan commencement ceremony (which he didn't attend). Her claim is that his language was too subjective to qualify as reportage, and that he was shameless in calling forth traditional tropes to aggrandize these women and convince folks back home of the importance of their successes. To me, his language was such that people must have known they were reading Liang's perception of the event, and in an era before on-the-scene video reports, to a greater extent than today, all news was filtered through perceptions. It seems to me that if the result promoted greater freedoms for women, then what he did was not as problematic as Hu Ying was suggesting. Although we have a different awareness of media manipulation today, the fact remains that the possibility of “objectivity” is still and always will be called into question. It seems more important to discuss how the politics of the situation serve a goal that worthy of pursuing, and how these goals may benefit people.

While the article was steeped in a certain historicized feeling, there is nothing old fashioned about the manipulation of imagery to promote a cause. If fact, our reality is constructed by such operations on a daily basis, and the myth of Sophia is fundamentally the same as, say, the myth of Bill Gates.

2009年11月1日 上午9:01
加真 提到...

Hu Ying thinks that Liang Qichao’s idea of the new woman is actually the metonymic symbol for the new citizen of modern China. Here, Liang’s woman equals the new citizen, men and women alike. Spiritually and intellectually speaking, all the “old citizens” in the past are actually living and thinking like women, and now they should change, as women have changed now. Does this again show the tradition of feminization in poetic or lyrical tradition? When a country is shattered by foreign forces, it is always like a weak woman, waiting to be cured and saved. This feminization might coincide with the most popular translation of late Qing, 巴黎茶花女遺事. So many male literati mentioned the influence of this translation in their youth. It is also surprising that a sad love story of a courtesan could touch so many people (men in particular), and “precipitated a tremendous boom in late Quing literary translation.” Does it mean that so many men projected themselves as Marguerite, who was wronged and was willing to sacrifice herself for her lover’s bright future?

Other thought:
We mentioned the “women’s writing女書” in China, and on Oct. 31 聯合報副刊, there is an article remembering 鄭至慧 (did she pass away? what a loss.). She is probably the only woman in Taiwan that can read women’s writing, composed in diamond-shaped characters as opposed to the patriarchal square-shaped ones. I am starting to feel very curious about such writing and would like to know whether it is possible for women to shake off patriarchal influence if they write in the characters they invented.

2009年11月1日 晚上10:11

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