From “hairpins” to “flowers”: feminist translation criticism of The Flowers of War

Abstract

ABSTRACT Chinese novels by women writers are underrepresented in English. Even when translated, the original woman-focused experience is often underplayed due to various factors. This paper focuses on the English translation of Yan Geling’s Thirteen Hairpins of Jinling (translated as The Flowers of War) and examines how the portrayal of the female experience in the original story is underplayed in translation within a commercial discourse. This paper identifies a translation network enacted by the film adaptation of the novella operating on its English translation and proposes that other than the phallocentric translator, commercialized translation agents such as the film director and the publisher may also sideline female voices central to the narrative. Even the writer herself, at the request of the publisher, consciously or otherwise, attenuates the female voices in her writing to meet the target readers’ expectations. Based on the interpretative framework of gynocriticism, this paper analyzes the diminished presence of a female perspective in the English translation of The Flowers of War. It argues strongly for developing feminist translation criticism that applies gynocritic models to uncover and recover the loss of women’s experiences when a text is transplanted into another cultural context, especially from non-hegemonic languages into English.