Translating intersemiotically: photographing West and East in Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing

Abstract

Thanks to the contributions of Russian linguist Roman Jokobson, the intersemiotic translation has increasingly attracted the academic attention. Intersemiotic translation is referred to as “transmutation of signs”, an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs or nonverbal sign systems. This intersemiotic translation is seen widely in such modernist writings as those by Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Ezra Pound, and the use of images, photos and maps in Shanghai Dancing continues the tradition of modernism in its assemblage or dissemblage of text into visual elements. In this regard, one can ask whether the traditional sense of translation, especially the mimetic tradition in the west, is subject to great challenge. By using theories of Benjamin’s, Pound’s and Derrida’s understanding of Chinese ideograms, photographs and sign systems, the paper tries to illustrate that Shanghai Dancing, which employs photos, posters and maps of old Shanghai, is a good illustration where East and West cultures are well embodied in the semiotic modernity of Shanghai, in which the image of Shanghai is visualized and translated, with linguistic units transmuted into meaningful mental images of fragmentation and multiplicity and served as a very good paratext to the very body of the traditional sense of the textual representations.