Tibet has long been orientalized in fictional representations. Taking as a case study two texts by Alai, this paper investigates how a traditional Tibetan cultural trait–the fish taboo–is mobilized to complicate the representation of Tibetan culture. By describing the fish taboo Alai points at Tibet's cultural specificity, which in virtue of its exoticism can catch the attention of non-Tibetan readers. At the same time, however, Alai equips his characters with psychological depth, showing their contrasting inner emotions of attraction and repulsion toward fish. In this sense, Alai subtly points at the fallacies of flat representations of Tibet, thus dismantling them from within.
This article consists of an introduction by Patricia Sieber and six short essays on translation approaches together with actual translations of sanqu songs by Mario De Grandis, Ke Wang, Hui Yao, Jingying Gao and Ian McNally, Xu Yichun, and Jenn Marie Nunes. The introduction provides a short history of the translation of sanqu songs into English, followed by a reflection on which distinctive features of the genre beg for attention in the translation process. In particular, it argues that the different sonic features of sanqu merit close consideration, the loss of the notational contours of the original tunes notwithstanding. Rather than bemoaning the absence of the underlying music, it suggests that, in keeping with Walter Benjamin's vision of the “task of the translator,” translation into another language can be an opportunity to reinvent that musicality in different ways. The six short essays that follow consider sanqu songs from the corpus of diasporic writers from the Yuan dynasty, with a view toward enriching the repertoire of translation strategies for sanqu in terms of musicality and other salient features of the genre. The six essays discuss, respectively, pronouns, rhyme, punctuation, language registers, allusion, and citational practice. In contextualizing such strategies theoretically and illustrating them with examples, the short essays seek to contribute more broadly to the theory and practice of the literary translation of Chinese poetic forms.
La noción de “literatura de minorías étnicas” está bien establecida en los estudios literarios en China. Según la definición canónica, esta categoría se cumple si el autor es miembro de una minoría étnica y si el contenido de su obra refleja las formas de vida de esa minoría específica. Por ende, dicha definición depende del análisis de la etnia del autor y de los temas de su obra, e ignora el papel del lector en el proceso de interpretación literaria. Para llenar ese vacío, esta investigación se pregunta qué hace que un texto sea “étnico” desde el punto de vista del lector modelo, la persona hipotética a la que se dirige la obra. Con cinco cuentos de escritores chinos contemporáneos a modo de ejemplo, se sugiere que es el contenido de un texto literario, más que el origen étnico de su autor, el que determina si ese texto se percibe como “étnico”. Por eso, se introduce la noción de “literatura sobre minorías étnicas” como herramienta de análisis literario. Esta reconceptualización destaca el uso del lenguaje y los temas como instrumentos de expresión literaria independientemente de la etnia del autor.
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