Representing the true colors of Bai Xian-yong in the English language: “A Touch of Green” recounted

Abstract

ABSTRACT Bai Xian-yong is one of the most important writers in contemporary Chinese and world literature. His masterpiece Taipei People, a collection of fourteen short stories, presents a gallery of Chinese mainland émigrés to Taiwan in 1949 in the wake of Chinese civil war. As a classic of Taiwanese modernism, Taipei People features an emotional sensitivity and a lingual novelty comparable to those of James Joyce’s Dubliners. Its English version was translated by the author and Patia Yasin, and edited by George Kao, the co-founder of Renditions. The paper attempts to compare and contrast the renowned short story, “A Touch of Green,” with its original Chinese, focusing on some sentences, phrases, proper nouns and the title itself, whose English renditions might not be considered tantamount to their original Chinese – a Chinese so crisply and creatively converging both classical beauty and colloquial flavor that only Bai Xian-yong the Chinese novelist knows how to craft. The research argues that if equivalent English rendition abiding by the principle of optimal fidelity exists as the promise land for the promotion of Taiwan literature across the world, future literary translators may need to adopt a multi-etymological strategy to represent the whole picture of Bai’s well-wrought works.