Janus-faced Hana yori dango : Transnational Adaptations in East Asia and the Globalization Thesis

Theories of regional formation need to be rigorously examined in relation to East Asian popular culture that has been in circulation under the successive “waves” of Japanese and Korean TV dramas from the 1990s onward. Most overviews of the phenomenon have concentrated on the impact on the region of Japanese, then Korean, TV products as they spread southward to the three Chinese communities of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China. In the voluminous studies devoted to the subject, most conspicuously represented by those of Iwabuchi Koichi, two outstanding points of emphasis are noteworthy. First, the majority of evidence is drawn from the so-called “trendy” love dramas, like Tokyo Love Story (1991), Long Vacation (1996), Love Generation (1996) and Beautiful Life (2000) from Japan as well as Autumn Tale (2000) and Winter Sonata (2002) from Korea. Many of them were so successful that they altered TV drama production in the receptor communities. Second, the preponderant concern in these studies is with the reasons for the spectacular successes achieved by these media products, and views are divided between those who champion the “cultural proximity” thesis, stressing the close links between the three East Asian traditions, and those who uphold the “quest for modernity” thesis, viewing the upbeat, fashionable lifestyles depicted in the dramas as the root appeal for a predominantly young, middle-class and Westernized audience living in the cities. Interestingly, in both camps, one sees illuminating echoes of issues and terms repeatedly theorized and problematized in recent adaptation studies, like manipulation, appropriation, rewriting, localization strategies, and the opposition between regionalization and globalization as explanatory modes for translation activity

At the borders of translation : traditional and modern(ist) adaptations, East and West

Adaptation, as both a method and a textual category, has been a perennial favorite with text mediators who call themselves translators, appearing especially prominently in intersemiotic rather than interlingual translation. The present paper examines the concepts and practices of adaptation, drawing particular attention to examples from both the West and the Far East. Just as a preference for adaptive methods in translation can be seen in certain periods of Western literary history (e.g. seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France), there were times when adaptations were hailed in China, Japan and Korea. In the course of the discussion, reference will be made to (1) the modernist adaptations undertaken by Western writers through much of the twentieth century; (2) the sequences of novelistic adaptations spawned in Korea and Japan by Chinese classical novels; and (3) the adaptations of European novels by the prodigious twentieth-century Chinese translator Lin Shu. It will be shown that there is a need for translation scholars to question the theoretical validity of the dichotomy between the two modes of translation and adaptation, as well as an urgency to reconsider the supposed inferior status of adaptations. Adapted from the source documen

Lily Briscoe's «Chinese Eyes» : the Reading of Difference in Translated Fiction

Since the eighties, translation scholars have increasingly turned to «differences» rather than similarities between the original and the translation. More important than the mere existence of these differences is the fact that they are experienced by the reader. Reading a translation can be characterized as a «border-crossing experience» in that the reader moves back and forth between two semiotic realms, one familiar, the other strange. My paper will take as its starting point the repeated references in Virginia Woolf's masterpiece To the Lighthouse to its central character Lily Briscoe's «Chinese eyes». That the Chinese reader of the translation should feel uncomfortable because Lily's «Chinese eyes» are said to be the main obstacle to her finding a husband is symptomatic of a more general problem concerning readers' reception of translated realist fiction. As a literary method, realism can be understood as a self-conscious effort to make literature appear to be describing directly not some other language but reality itself. Unfortunately, by their very nature, translations call attention to the target language in addition to describing a reality. In the case of Woolf's biased reference to «Chinese eyes», we have an interesting instance of how the reader's sympathetic identification with the characters (encouraged by the language used -Chinese in this case) can be suddenly shattered when his attention is drawn to an unpleasant feature he, as a Chinese person, possesses. The crux of the problem lies in the fact that in translations, one language is used to capture the reality normally expressed by another. Is there reality beyond language? Can reality exist outside of language?Des dels anys vuitanta, els especialistes en traducció s'ocupen cada vegada més de les «diferències» i no de les similituds entre l'original i la traducció. Més important que la mera existència d'aquestes diferències és el fet que el lector les experimenta. Podríem dir que llegir una traducció és una «experiència de frontera», en la qual el lector es mou endavant i endarrere entre dos camps semiòtics, un de familiar i un altre d'estrany. L'article pren com a punt de partida les nombroses referències a «els ulls xinesos» en l'obra mestra de Virginia Woolf, Al Far, del seu personatge central, Lily Briscoe. Que el lector xinès de la traducció s'hauria de sentir incòmode perquè es diu que «els ulls xinesos» de Lily són l'obstacle principal perquè no trobi marit, és simptomàtic d'un problema més general pel que fa a la recepció dels lectors de ficció realista traduïda. Com a mètode literari, el realisme es pot entendre com un esforç tímid per fer que la literatura sembli que descriu directament no una altra llengua, sinó la realitat mateixa. Malauradament, per la seva mateixa naturalesa, les traduccions criden l'atenció sobre la llengua de destinació, a més de descriure una realitat. En el cas de la referència esbiaixada de Woolf a «ulls xinesos», tenim un exemple interessant de com es pot, de cop i volta, destruir la identificació del lector amb els personatges (fomentat per la llengua utilitzada -el xinès, en aquest cas) quan es crida la seva atenció sobre un tret desagradable que té, com a xinesa. El cor del problema rau en el fet que en les traduccions es fa servir una llengua per a captar la realitat normalment expressada per una altra. Hi ha realitat més enllà de la llengua? Pot la realitat existir fora de la llengua

First Imitate, then Translate: Histories of the Introduction of Stream-of-Consciousness Fiction to China

In China, stream-of-consciousness (SOC) fiction had for some time been thought of as untranslatable. By contrast, SOC imitations appeared in abundance through the twentieth century, attempted by several Chinese writers who consciously used the technique in their own novels, first in the thirties, then in the sixties, and finally in the eighties. It was not until the nineties, however, that the “difficult” novels by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, among others, were translated. How can we understand the phenomenon of translations following imitations in the history of SOC fiction as introduced to China?En Chine, le stream-of-consciousness (monologue intérieur) a été considéré comme intraduisible pendant une période de temps. Toutefois, au xxe siècle, on assiste à un foisonnement d’imitations de ce genre littéraire. Plusieurs écrivains chinois employaient cette technique dans leurs romans, d’abord dans les années 1930, ensuite dans les années 1960 et finalement dans les années 1980. La traduction de romans « difficiles » tels ceux de James Joyce et Virginia Woolf apparaîtront seulement dans les années 1990. Comment peut-on comprendre le phénomène des traductions suivant les imitations dans l’histoire du stream-of-consciousness en Chine