Lin Shu and Dickens's Chinese Form

Abstract

Abstract: In this essay, I examine how the first Chinese translation of David Copperfield, The Story of My Life as A Posthumous Child 塊肉餘生述 (1908), proposes a theory of the novel form in and through translation. Translated collaboratively by Lin Shu, who (in)famously did not know any foreign languages, and his oral interpreter Wei Yi, A Posthumous Child reads the Chinese literary form of "latent thread"—or, foreshadowing—into Dickens's novels in a manner similar to Lin's other translations of the Victorian author's works. I suggest that Lin's theorization and rewriting of foreshadowing call for an understanding of literary formal convention as a product of intertextual, interlingual, and international coauthorship, where the defining authority of what constitutes a form does not reside in any enclosed text, language, or nation.