Chris Song
University of Toronto, Language Studies, Faculty Member
- University of Toronto, East Asian Studies, Department Memberadd
- Chinese Modern Literature, Modern Chinese Literature, Modern Chinese Poetry, Hong Kong Literature, Hong Kong Literature and Culture, Translation Studies, and 23 moreLiterary translation, Translation of Poetry, Poetry Translation, Anthology, Chinese Studies, Censorship, COVID-19 PANDEMIC, Modern and Contemporary Chinese Poetry, Hong Kong Culture, Hong Kong Poetry, Gertrude Stein, Self-translation, Paul Auster, George Bernard Shaw, Heteroglossia, Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, Literature, China, History of Sino-Western Relations, Modern China (especially late Qing and Republican history), Poetic Form, and Cultural Exchangeedit
- Chris Song’s research falls at the intersection of translation studies, modern literature in Chinese, and Hong Kong c... moreChris Song’s research falls at the intersection of translation studies, modern literature in Chinese, and Hong Kong culture, with a focus on Chinese anthologies of American poetry. He is appointed by the International Federation of Translators as the managing editor of Babel: Revue internationale de la traduction / International Journal of Translation (John Benjamins). Song has published many volumes of Chinese-English literary translation and is also experienced in translating for international business projects, museums, galleries, and cultural festivals.edit
This article studies the differing manifestations of “life” through the debate over various forms of realism in modern Chinese and Hong Kong poetics since the 1920s. It examines how the trope of life was configured over time in Hong... more
This article studies the differing manifestations of “life” through the debate over various forms of realism in modern Chinese and Hong Kong poetics since the 1920s. It examines how the trope of life was configured over time in Hong Kong’s realist, romantic, and modernist poetics. This article analyzes the working of the trope of life in different historical moments of modern Chinese and Hong Kong poetry and how it has been embedded in the debate over different forms of realism and under various signifiers. This article also argues that the trope of life was represented as shenghuohua and used to build a stylistic identity of Hong Kong poetry in the 1970s and hence has remained the strongest and most long-lasting influence on the writing of Sinophone poetry in Hong Kong.
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Translating modern Chinese literature into foreign languages has been conceptualized in Chinese as “outbound translation” 外譯, in contrast to “inbound translation” 內譯, or foreign-language literature being translated into Chinese. This... more
Translating modern Chinese literature into foreign languages has been conceptualized in Chinese as “outbound translation” 外譯, in contrast to “inbound translation” 內譯, or foreign-language literature being translated into Chinese. This chapter challenges such dualistic two-way-traffic conceptualization entrenched in the translation studies of modern Chinese literature by investigating the labyrinthine translation phenomena of literature in Hong Kong and Macao, two postcolonial cities that enjoy bilingual literary traditions—that is, English and Chinese in Hong Kong, Portuguese and Chinese in Macao.
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This Handbook explores the many paths taken by Chinese and other literatures as they have been transmitted, reinterpreted, reinvented, and disseminated through translation. Targeting undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholarly... more
This Handbook explores the many paths taken by Chinese and other literatures as they have been transmitted, reinterpreted, reinvented, and disseminated through translation. Targeting undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholarly readers of translation studies and Chinese, world, and comparative literatures, the Handbook measures an array of methodologies and theoretical propositions to present stories of literary encounters. A total of thirty-four critical-descriptive essays detail how translation crosses over time and space and operates within overt or covert aims and purposes, in the form of text selection, intertextual relationships, elective affinities, adaptations, pseudotranslations, and self-translations. Altogether these thirty-four excursions in translation from and into Chinese map the “significant geography” (Laachir, Marzagora, and Orsini 2018, 3) of Chinese literature, testifying to translation as a source of inexhaustible richness of information on geographical, historical, and cultural variations.
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This article provides a fresh reading of British diplomat Thomas Francis Wade's translation and Qing foreign-affairs official Dong Xun's rewrite of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's “A Psalm of Life.” Situating its analyses in... more
This article provides a fresh reading of British diplomat Thomas Francis Wade's translation and Qing foreign-affairs official Dong Xun's rewrite of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's “A Psalm of Life.” Situating its analyses in the context of Sino-Western diplomatic maneuvers in 1860s Qing China, the article clarifies the paratextual chronology of the translations, analyzes the translators’ manipulations of poetic form, and draws on Lawrence Venuti's theorization of foreignizing translation and Lydia H. Liu's concept of the supersign to expose Wade's foreignizing strategy against the Sinocentric yi 夷 (barbarity) discourse. The article's coda investigates the circulation of this intercultural occurrence through Goethe's Weltliteratur and David Damrosch's renewed concept of world literature, highlighting the failures of both the British Empire's and the Qing Empire's diplomatic intents through the translations.
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Heteroglossia, the simultaneous coexistence of a variety of languages in a single language, is a widespread phenomenon in world literature, especially in the literature of the culture that enjoys or suffers from a multilingual environment... more
Heteroglossia, the simultaneous coexistence of a variety of languages in a single language, is a widespread phenomenon in world literature, especially in the literature of the culture that enjoys or suffers from a multilingual environment for social, historical, or cultural reasons. However, the translation of heteroglossic literature has largely remained an under-researched topic. This chapter explores the (un-)translatability of heteroglossic literature with the examples of heteroglossic poems written by ethnically Chinese poets in colonial Hong Kong. Historicizing Hong Kong heteroglossic poetry inevitably engages the chapter with the city’s colonial and cultural contexts. Primarily written in the colonized’s language (a Sinitic language, be it Chinese, Cantonese, or their combination), the verses of these poems are embedded with phrases in the colonizer’s language (English). This chapter takes a historical approach to examine the poetic influences Hong Kong’s heteroglossic poetry received in different times and discusses a variety of forms of the untranslatability of heteroglossia knotted into the colonial context in Hong Kong. The chapter postulates a general hypothesis that the more deeply heteroglossia is tied to its context, the less translatable it becomes. The chapter argues that it is often the cultural untranslatability, rather than the linguistic untranslatability, that makes heteroglossic literature appear untranslatable.
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese poetry has been misread, appropriated, and run down with various cultural purposes and/or ideological agendas just like in any historical period, and its circulation does not always meet with open... more
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese poetry has been misread, appropriated, and run down with various cultural purposes and/or ideological agendas just like in any historical period, and its circulation does not always meet with open arms. On February 12, 2020, Changjiang Daily published Xiao Chang’s controversial critical commentary entitled, “Rather than ‘Mountains and Rivers under the Same Sky,’ I Would Like to Hear ‘Wuhan, Add Oil!,’” (“Xiangbi ‘Fengyue tongtian,’ wo geng xiang tingdao ‘Wuhan jiayou!’”) targeting two lines from Prince Nagaya’s Sinitic poem “Occasion of the Embroidered Robes” (“Xiu jiashayi yuan”). This essay revisits the history of this poem and the circulation of this poem during the epidemic in Wuhan. By contrasting Xiao Chang’s implication that poetry was inopportune, obscure, and barbaric, this essay argues that his article, as a voice from the authority, was intended to impose constraint on poetry writing, which further reveals a crisis for the poetry writing in China today.
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This essay examines the Chinese-language debut of Western surrealist poetry in Hong Kong and its effect on the local poetry scene through the work of Ronald Mar 馬朗, from the early years of the Cold War era onward. It traces the trope of... more
This essay examines the Chinese-language debut of Western surrealist poetry in Hong Kong and its effect on the local poetry scene through the work of Ronald Mar 馬朗, from the early years of the Cold War era onward. It traces the trope of poetry being “true to life” – as resistance to the surrealist influence – through evolving notions and experiences of Hong Kong identity over time, up to the present day in the post-handover era.
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This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book postulates that in a time labelled as “postmodern,” China’s quest for modernity shows no signs of diminishing and is... more
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book postulates that in a time labelled as “postmodern,” China’s quest for modernity shows no signs of diminishing and is still very much in evidence in contemporary life and works of art, translation, and modern Chinese literature. It puts forth an effort to reveal a vibrant and complicated dynamic among publishers, illustrators, authors, and the reading public in a burgeoning world of publishing. The chapter explores this vast research area concerning Lu Xun from a very refreshing angle. It traces the influences of and connections between these artistic and poetic representations from different times and cultural traditions. The chapter provides a general overview of the crucial link between translation and modernity by examining how translation has shaped the trajectory of modernity in China situated in the tension between tradition and modernity.
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This paper offers a critical overview of the reception of American poetry in China from 1917 to 1937. Drawing on Maria Tymoczko’s theory of transculturation, it shows how, in order to meet local poetic and ideological demands, America’s... more
This paper offers a critical overview of the reception of American poetry in China from 1917 to 1937. Drawing on Maria Tymoczko’s theory of transculturation, it shows how, in order to meet local poetic and ideological demands, America’s New Poetry Movement, Left poetry, and Black poetry were “performed” in (relay) translations by Chinese authors. Understudied to date, these texts reveal a fascinating literary and political process in which American poetry and Chinese poetry were mutually shaped through translation.
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This article shows both Shi Zhecun and Ronald Mar resorted to the translation of Western modernist poetry as a nonpolitical gesture toward the long-standing antagonism between left-wing and right-wing writers in different cultural... more
This article shows both Shi Zhecun and Ronald Mar resorted to the translation of Western modernist poetry as a nonpolitical gesture toward the long-standing antagonism between left-wing and right-wing writers in different cultural political contexts. For them, the journal served as a vital venue for their poetics statements and signified their pursuit of modernist poetics and their ambition of ushering modern Chinese poetry toward modernism.
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In her Telling the Story of Translation, Judith Woodsworth presents a triad of modernists, namely George Bernard Shaw, Gertrude Stein, and Paul Auster, who also practiced translation at some point of their writing career. By exhaustive... more
In her Telling the Story of Translation, Judith Woodsworth presents a triad of modernists, namely George Bernard Shaw, Gertrude Stein, and Paul Auster, who also practiced translation at some point of their writing career. By exhaustive biographical investigations on the three writers and in-depth analytical survey on their translations and their comments on the art of translation, the book showcases how each of them appropriated translation as a pretext for something else that, for Shaw, Stein and Auster, ultimately serves the purposes of reflecting upon or fashioning their authorial egos.
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Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu is an interesting title for the general readership of modern Chinese literature and Hong Kong literature. Frederik H. Green’s introduction, translation, and commentary present Xu Xu’s works from the... more
Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu is an interesting title for the general readership of modern Chinese literature and Hong Kong literature. Frederik H. Green’s introduction, translation, and commentary present Xu Xu’s works from the innovative lens of neo-romanticism, one of the least-visited topics in the study of modern Chinese fiction.
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Tze-Yin Teo’s If Babel Had a Form: Translating Equivalence in the Twentieth-Century Transpacific refreshes the epistemology of equivalence by moving away from its previous theorization based on language transference. Teo’s monograph... more
Tze-Yin Teo’s If Babel Had a Form: Translating Equivalence in the Twentieth-Century Transpacific refreshes the epistemology of equivalence by moving away from its previous theorization based on language transference. Teo’s monograph boldly investigates the equivalence of abstraction in twentieth-century transpacific semiotic translations that “collapse the concrete into the abstract, and the abstract into the concrete, especially when trading in the name of poetic writing” (20).
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Offering the first systematic overview of modern and contemporary Chinese literature from a translation studies perspective, this handbook provides students, researchers and teachers with a context in which to read and appreciate the... more
Offering the first systematic overview of modern and contemporary Chinese literature from a translation studies perspective, this handbook provides students, researchers and teachers with a context in which to read and appreciate the effects of linguistic and cultural transfer in Chinese literary works.
Translation matters. It always has, of course, but more so when we want to reap the benefits of intercultural communication. In many universities Chinese literature in English translation is taught as if it had been written in English. As a result, students submit what they read to their own cultural expectations; they do not read in translation and do not attend to the protocols of knowing, engagements and contestations that bind literature and society to each other. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation squarely addresses this pedagogical lack.
Organised in a tripartite structure around considerations of textual, social, and large-scale spatial and historical circumstances, its thirty plus essays each deal with a theme of translation studies, as emerged from the translation of one or more Chinese literary works. In doing so, it offers new tools for reading and appreciating modern and contemporary Chinese literature in the global context of its translation, offering in-depth studies about eminent Chinese authors and their literary masterpieces in translation. The first of its kind, this book is essential reading for anyone studying or researching Chinese literature in translation.
Translation matters. It always has, of course, but more so when we want to reap the benefits of intercultural communication. In many universities Chinese literature in English translation is taught as if it had been written in English. As a result, students submit what they read to their own cultural expectations; they do not read in translation and do not attend to the protocols of knowing, engagements and contestations that bind literature and society to each other. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation squarely addresses this pedagogical lack.
Organised in a tripartite structure around considerations of textual, social, and large-scale spatial and historical circumstances, its thirty plus essays each deal with a theme of translation studies, as emerged from the translation of one or more Chinese literary works. In doing so, it offers new tools for reading and appreciating modern and contemporary Chinese literature in the global context of its translation, offering in-depth studies about eminent Chinese authors and their literary masterpieces in translation. The first of its kind, this book is essential reading for anyone studying or researching Chinese literature in translation.