Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture by Michael Gibbs Hill

Abstract

Frank Schätzing Limit Shaun Whiteside et al., tr. Quercus The pressing need for an energy source to replace earth’s finite and dwindling fossil fuels brings international power politics, cyber warfare, and a full cast of fascinating characters together in German sci-fi writer Frank Schätzing’s latest epic volume. Conflict over control of the newly discovered resource along with the potentially catastrophic danger of transport from the moon to the earth keeps the story moving at a rapid pace. Parinoush Saniee The Book of Fate Sara Khalili, tr. House of Anansi Massoumeh Sadeghi, the teenage protagonist of The Book of Fate, always dreamed of getting a university education. Instead, she was forced into an arranged marriage with a man who lived a dangerous life in Tehran as a political dissident. The trajectory of Massoumeh’s life takes an unexpected course during fifty years of Iranian social and political upheaval. Nota Bene he finds that “the Chicago I came back to belonged to me. Returning from home, I returned home.” In several family-focused essays, Hemon’s unique sensibility, earlier expressed frequently in mordant tropes, portrays simple joys with warm humor. From a family adventure -turned-debacle, the Hemons salvage “some makeshift joy.” An essay on “Family Dining” concludes: “The crucial ingredient of the perfect borscht is a large, hungry family.” Reunited in Canada with his family ’s dog, Mek, Hemon retrieves large parts of his vanished Sarajevan self when Mek puts his head in his lap: “some of me came back.” In the last and most powerful essay, “The Aquarium,” Hemon eschews memory and doubleness as he confronts the prolonged illness and horrific death of his infant daughter , to whom he dedicated this collection . He here forsakes mediated irony before the immediacy of death. But his healthy toddler’s creation of an imaginary friend through whom she processes her new experiences finally helps him better understand his own creative process: “I’d needed narrative space to extend myself into; I’d needed more lives. . . . I’d cooked up those avatars in the soup of my everchanging self.” Michele Levy North Carolina A&T University Michael Gibbs Hill. Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture. Oxford, England. Oxford University Press. 2013. isbn 9780199892884 Lin Shu, Inc. offers a multifaceted study of the translation practices of Lin Shu and his collaborators in late Qing and early Republican China. Situating these translation efforts within the social and cultural context of China at the turn of the twentieth century, Michael Gibbs Hill’s book convincingly shows how Lin was not just a commercially successful translator of popular romance but also an active shaper of modern Chinese culture. By examining Lin’s translations of nonromance works together with compilations of classical Chinese anthologies, Hill’s book explores how traditional literati continually reinvented their roles to maximize their cultural capital in the midst of rapid social change and cultural transformation. This eight-chapter book begins with an introduction to the rationale behind Hill’s placing Lin Shu within the “serious” cultural debates and intellectual discourse of modern China. The second chapter discusses Lin’s use of guwen (an ancient style of prose) as a medium for translation . The third chapter then examines how Lin used guwen to mediate Western sociopolitical concepts and how he extended Liang Qichao’s discourse on “new fiction” through his rendering of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Aesop’s Fables. The fourth chapter investigates Lin’s (and Wei Yi’s) January–February 2014 • 77 78 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews translations of two Charles Dickens novels; it demonstrates the limits of cultural adaptation Lin encountered as he strove to re-create the verisimilitude in Dickens’s work in the context of late Qing China. Chapter 5 analyzes how Lin revived traditionalism through his translation of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book and other essays. The final two chapters look at Lin’s contribution as a textbook writer and editor, with a focus on Lin’s emergence as a “reputable master of ancient-style prose” and his role as an impresario of traditional Chinese culture. Hill argues that Lin’s classicist stance, like the May Fourth intellectuals ’ iconoclasm, was a...