The Performative and Transformative Site of Homosexuality in Call Me by Your Name. Translating Queer Fuck into Chinese

Abstract

André Aciman’s highly acclaimed English queer novel, Call Me by Your Name (Call 2007), won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction in 2007. The novel has been translated into four Chinese editions; two editions in simplified Chinese published by two publishing houses in the Chinese mainland and two in traditional Chinese issued by a Taiwanese publisher. Applying the descriptive framework of verbal camp (Harvey 2000) and incorporating the three modes of translation proposed by Marc Démont (2017) in queer literary texts, the article conducts a textual comparative study of the term fuck across six instances in the four Chinese editions published in the Chinese mainland and Taiwan in 2009, 2012, and 2018. This article seeks to answer the following questions: How is the term fuck rendered differently in the four translations? In what ways are these translations shaped by social and political contexts? What are the socio-political implications of these renditions? The comparative study will highlight shifts in translations across various cultural and political contexts and discuss their ideological implications