“Creation Through Translation” in Early Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction: On a Literary Trend in the Initial Stages of Cultural Exchange Between China and the West

Abstract

In the 1910s, the trend of “creating through translation” emerged in fiction by female Chinese writers. This concept, similar to that of “covert translation,” introduced by the contemporary Western translation theorist Juliane House, sprang up from the early stages of new literary forms that developed in the context of changes in early modern Chinese literature. The works of female Chinese authors were influenced by the plot, characters, and narrative techniques in Western literary works from which they consciously or subconsciously took inspiration, passing from the imitation of foreign novels to “creation through translation.” The arrival of this phenomenon is closely connected to the increased dissemination of Western knowledge and to a wider circulation of foreign novels among female writers in China. When reading and translating foreign literature, female authors transposed, filtered, and rewrote it into new texts that featured local elements. Ideologically and artistically, the practice of “creating through translation” provided enlightening guidance for modern women’s fiction in that it broadened the means of learning from Western literature, proving beneficial to China’s literary and cultural development. The same trend appears in early vernacular poetry during the May Fourth era, from which it can be traced further back to scholarly texts of the early modern period, such as Wei Yuan’s Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms (Haiguo tuzhi 海國圖志) or Wang Tao’s Report on the Franco-Prussian War (Pu-fa zhan ji 普法戰紀). Also Liang Qichao’s writings on Western thought and culture, for example, his Notes on Rousseau (Lusuo xue’an 盧梭學案), are written in a similar form. The emergence of “creation through translation” therefore evidently represents both a conscious, active effort by a generation’s intellectual elite to seek knowledge and truth from cultural exchange between China and the West, and a new exploration and practice under Western influence that had a positive impact on China’s literary and academic history, in that it broadened cultural/academic perspectives and stimulated the development of Chinese literature and culture.