The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture
The first comprehensive study of the lifework of Guo Moruo (1892–1978) in English, this book explores the dynamics of translation, revolution, and historical imagination in twentieth-century Chinese culture. Guo was a romantic writer who eventually became Mao Zedong’s last poetic interlocutor; a Marxist historian who evolved into the inaugural president of China’s Academy of Sciences; and a leftist politician who devoted almost three decades to translating Goethe’s Faust. His career, embedded in China’s revolutionary century, has generated more controversy than admiration. Recent scholarship has scarcely treated his oeuvre as a whole, much less touched upon his role as a translator.

Leaping between different genres of Guo’s works, and engaging many other writers’ texts, The Translatability of Revolution confronts two issues of revolutionary cultural politics: translation and historical interpretation. Part 1 focuses on the translingual making of China’s revolutionary culture, especially Guo’s translation of Faust as a “development of Zeitgeist.” Part 2 deals with Guo’s rewritings of antiquity in lyrical, dramatic, and historiographical-paleographical forms, including his vernacular translation of classical Chinese poetry. Interrogating the relationship between translation and historical imagination—within revolutionary cultural practice—this book finds a transcoding of different historical conjunctures into “now-time,” saturated with possibilities and tensions.

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The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture
The first comprehensive study of the lifework of Guo Moruo (1892–1978) in English, this book explores the dynamics of translation, revolution, and historical imagination in twentieth-century Chinese culture. Guo was a romantic writer who eventually became Mao Zedong’s last poetic interlocutor; a Marxist historian who evolved into the inaugural president of China’s Academy of Sciences; and a leftist politician who devoted almost three decades to translating Goethe’s Faust. His career, embedded in China’s revolutionary century, has generated more controversy than admiration. Recent scholarship has scarcely treated his oeuvre as a whole, much less touched upon his role as a translator.

Leaping between different genres of Guo’s works, and engaging many other writers’ texts, The Translatability of Revolution confronts two issues of revolutionary cultural politics: translation and historical interpretation. Part 1 focuses on the translingual making of China’s revolutionary culture, especially Guo’s translation of Faust as a “development of Zeitgeist.” Part 2 deals with Guo’s rewritings of antiquity in lyrical, dramatic, and historiographical-paleographical forms, including his vernacular translation of classical Chinese poetry. Interrogating the relationship between translation and historical imagination—within revolutionary cultural practice—this book finds a transcoding of different historical conjunctures into “now-time,” saturated with possibilities and tensions.

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The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture

The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture

by Pu Wang
The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture

The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture

by Pu Wang

Hardcover

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Overview

The first comprehensive study of the lifework of Guo Moruo (1892–1978) in English, this book explores the dynamics of translation, revolution, and historical imagination in twentieth-century Chinese culture. Guo was a romantic writer who eventually became Mao Zedong’s last poetic interlocutor; a Marxist historian who evolved into the inaugural president of China’s Academy of Sciences; and a leftist politician who devoted almost three decades to translating Goethe’s Faust. His career, embedded in China’s revolutionary century, has generated more controversy than admiration. Recent scholarship has scarcely treated his oeuvre as a whole, much less touched upon his role as a translator.

Leaping between different genres of Guo’s works, and engaging many other writers’ texts, The Translatability of Revolution confronts two issues of revolutionary cultural politics: translation and historical interpretation. Part 1 focuses on the translingual making of China’s revolutionary culture, especially Guo’s translation of Faust as a “development of Zeitgeist.” Part 2 deals with Guo’s rewritings of antiquity in lyrical, dramatic, and historiographical-paleographical forms, including his vernacular translation of classical Chinese poetry. Interrogating the relationship between translation and historical imagination—within revolutionary cultural practice—this book finds a transcoding of different historical conjunctures into “now-time,” saturated with possibilities and tensions.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674987180
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 08/06/2018
Series: Harvard East Asian Monographs , #415
Pages: 352
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Pu Wang is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature and the Helaine and Alvin Allen Chair in Literature at Brandeis University.

Table of Contents

List of Figures ix

Acknowledgments xi

List of Abbreviations xv

Conventions xvi

Introduction 1

Part I The Translingual Making of a Chinese Zeitgeist

1 Apostrophe, Translatability, and the Origins of Guo's Lyrical Politics 41

2 Translingual Practice and a "Caesura of the Revolution" 82

3 Poetics, Thematics, and Time: Translating Faust in Revolutionary China 118

Part II Translating Antiquity into Revolution

4 Autobiography and Historiography 161

5 People's Democracy in Ancient Costume 196

6 Modernizing Translations of Classical Poetry 233

Conclusion, or, Some Final Variations 271

Bibliography 297

Index 324

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