This article presents a sociological study of the various agents involved in the production, circulation and reception of a 1955 Japanese ballet adapted from the Chinese Communist opera The White-Haired Girl (1945). The ballet served as an effective means of unofficial diplomacy between China and Japan, even prior to normalisation of bilateral relations between the two countries. Apart from the expected agents, such as translators and theatre practitioners, this case study also reveals the role of some extraordinary agents, including Chinese Communist leaders, such as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, and senior Japanese political figures and institutions. Saturation with political agency renders the Japanese adaptation into a text consumed mostly by audiences from the source culture. The artistic life of the ballet, which was sustained by political needs, demonstrates how fundamental political factors are to research on translation in authoritarian contexts and amid geopolitical tensions.
This article presents a descriptive study of the English translations of the classic Chinese novel Jin
Ping Mei in the context of the Anglo-American literary censorship of obscenity in the twentieth century. By
scrutinizing the strategies employed in the English translations of Jin Ping Mei, this article uncovers the
dynamic interactions between literary translation activities and the evolving socio-historical contexts in the target culture. The
resurrection of the archaic source text, particularly its erotic component, in the Anglophone world in the twentieth century was
based on the (re)discovery of its value in the contemporary target context. In the case of Jin Ping Mei,
equivalence at the linguistic and textual levels was simply not a concern of the translators and publishers, who had to decide how
they would deal with the social reality of literary censorship, by submissively conforming to its demands, or by creatively
confronting them.
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