Translating the Dreamers of China

Abstract

Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel by Eric Hayot Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 220 pages Because Eric Hayot begins Chinese Dreams with a personal anecdote about how he came to study Chinese, I will break from standard book review format and tell some anecdotes of my own. I commuted to my first Chinese classes listening to Bob Dylan on my tape deck, and the line about Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in Desolation Row prompted me to look up Pound's poetry. The coincidence of my interest in Chinese and Pound and Pound's interest in Chinese saw the beginning of my interest in translation and Chinese literature. A couple years earlier, I began my high school acting career with a small roll in Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan, and afterward I would joke that fate had cast me as Chinese onstage to prepare me for learning Chinese later on. But I also remember the director explaining the rudiments of the alienation effect and how Brecht used foreign as a symbol for native Germany. Finally, between college and graduate school, I lived in Paris, a block away from the former residence of Zhou Enlai, but, aside from attending an exhibit at the Centre Pompidou called Alors, la Chine, the Tel Quel milieu seldom touched me in any specifically notable way. I indulge in chronicling my personal history because I imagine that all of us with a personal relationship to literature also have had similar run-ins with the forces that are Pound, Brecht, and Tel Quel. And while only prominence in twentieth-century Euro-American literary fields seems to unite them, Hayot compares their independent interactions with China. Of course, that prompts the question--which turns out to be the real question at stake in this study--What is For Chinese people themselves, I have the impression that what is China? is no more complex than defining any other country from within. The changes exhibited in its history are well known, and periods of greatness or weakness flicker in their mental timelines. But the geopolitical, cultural, and epistemological parameters hanging over people in today trump any definition of the country based on the past (and this despite the impossibility of grammatically distinguishing between what is China and what was China in Chinese). So as Hayot's book attests, what is China? is mostly a question for us in the West, with our historical ignorance enabling fantasies of a diachronically monolithic China, while sheer size and politicoeconomic inaccessibility lead us to call it inscrutable even today. As it turns out, the with which Pound, Brecht, and the members of Tel Quel engaged were three different Chinas, with Pound's ancient and abstract, Brecht's performative and alienating, and Tel Quel's contemporary and revolutionary. How actual is large enough to accommodate all three sorts of dreams is a tension Hayot examines in his conclusion, but a mapping of each dream of, or relationship with, is the subject of the individual chapters. Hayot's table of contents is essentially found in the book's subtitle, with one chapter each for Pound, Brecht, and Tel Quel. And as their Chinas get progressively closer to the social and political present, the contents get progressively more complex (though my own scale of fading intimacy with the three subjects may also condition my response). In the first chapter Hayot reads Pound by reading Cathay, examining how--and whether--anyone could conclude that it constitutes a primarily English or primarily Chinese product. Reading an array of secondary sources along with the primary texts, Hayot's questions are on the epistemological side of debates in translation theory: how is difference constituted when the act of translation relies on the precondition of sameness? The question could also be phrased the opposite way, as Hayot does when he writes: Pound was reminding his readers that the value in Li Po lay not in his Chineseness, but in his universality, in the fact that his poems revealed a shared history of ideas across time and space. …