The Promethean translator and cannibalistic pains: Lu Xun's “hard translation” as a political allegory

Abstract

This essay revisits a crucial moment in the modern Chinese history of translation: Lu Xun's “hard translation” of Marxist theories in the late 1920s and the ensuing debate on translation in the early 1930s. It questions the simplistic application of the paradigm of literalism to the case of “hard translation”, and focuses instead on the translator's self-allegorization as a vital rhetorical surplus of Lu Xun's translation practice. In particular, this essay scrutinizes Lu Xun's rewriting of the Prometheus myth in his response to his critic, Liang Shiqiu. Lu Xun's Prometheus is a translator embodying cannibalistic self-torment. I trace the theme of cannibalism in his other works, and compare the allegory of the cannibalistic translator to the Brazilian theory of translation as cannibalism. I argue that it is within this self-referential rhetoric that “hard translation” becomes a figure of the translator's subjectivity and “labor of the negative”.