The visibility and invisibility of Taiwan in English Literary Translation

Abstract

Translation has played an important role in enhancing the visibility of Chinese-language literature in the West. Gao Xingjian’s and Mo Yan’s cases well illustrate the positive correlation between translation and winning international recognition. Compared to Chinese literature from Mainland China, and Japanese literature from postwar Japan, Chinese-language literature from Taiwan in general has received relatively less attention as far as the its English translation is concerned. Moreover, several of the existing anthologies treat “Taiwan literature” as part of the Chinese-language literature, rather than a national literature on a par with that from China proper. This paper will consist of two parts; both are concerned with how Taiwan was made visible, or invisible, in the process of literary translation. To afford this paper a feasible scope, the examples will be drawn from the English translations only, with fiction and short stories as my primary sources. The first part will examine various English translation anthologies of Taiwan literature published from the 1970s to the 1990s, such as Twentieth-Century Chinese Stories (1971) edited by C. T. Hsia, Chinese Stories from Taiwan: 1960-1970 (1976) edited by Timothy Ross, The Unbroken Chain: An Anthology of Taiwan Fiction since 1926 (1983) edited by Joseph Lau, and Running Wild: New Chinese Writers (1994). It will identify some of the major characteristics of those anthologies, such as viewing Taiwan’s literature as a regional literature, and preference for modernist and nativist literature. I will also argue how Taiwan, in those anthologies, can be represented through different frameworks, including the earlier “Chinese” framework to the more recent de-nationalized Sinophone framework. The second part will use Wintry Night, the one-volume English translation of Li Qiao’s magnum opus “Wintry Night Trilogy” (Hanye sanbuqu, 1981), to explore the implications of excluding the heavily historical Huangcun, the second volume of the trilogy, in the abridged English translation. It contends that although Li’s original trilogy is renowned for its Taiwan-centric historical narrative and nation-building discourse (at least from the Hakka people’s perspective), the English version has toned down the Taiwan-specific historical elements abundant in the source text. In other words, in order to make Taiwan more visible to the English readership, Taiwan’s cultural and geopolitical particularities are either left out or domesticated, and thus become invisible.