This volume examines translation from many different angles: it explores how translations change the languages in which they occur, how works introduced from other languages become part of the consciousness of native speakers, and what strategies translators must use to secure acceptance for foreign works. Haun Saussy argues that translation doesn't amount to the composition, in one language, of statements equivalent to statements previously made in another language. Rather, translation works with elements of the language and culture in which it arrives, often reconfiguring them irreversibly: it creates, with a fine disregard for precedent, loan-words, calques, forced metaphors, forged pasts, imaginary relationships, and dialogues of the dead. Creativity, in this form of writing, usually considered merely reproductive, is the subject of this book. The volume takes the history of translation in China, from around 150 CE to the modern period, as its source of case studies. When the first proponents of Buddhism arrived in China, creativity was forced upon them: a vocabulary adequate to their purpose had yet to be invented. A Chinese Buddhist textual corpus took shape over centuries despite the near-absence of bilingual speakers. One basis of this translating activity was the rewriting of existing Chinese philosophical texts, and especially the most exorbitant of all these, the collection of dialogues, fables, and paradoxes known as the Zhuangzi. The Zhuangzi also furnished a linguistic basis for Chinese Christianity when the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci arrived in the later part of the Ming dynasty and allowed his friends and associates to frame his teachings in the language of early Daoism. It would function as well when Xu Zhimo translated from The Flowers of Evil in the 1920s. The chance but overdetermined encounter of Zhuangzi and Baudelaire yielded a 'strange music' that retroactively echoes through two millennia of Chinese translation, outlining a new understanding of the translator's craft that cuts across the dividing lines of current theories and critiques of translation.

Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out (Global Asias)

Literature & Fiction

Saussy, Haun

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

Introducing Comparative Literature

Introducing Comparative Literature is a comprehensive guide to the field offering clear, concise information alongside useful analysis and examples. It frames the introduction within recent theoretical debates and shifts in the discipline whilst also addressing the history of the field and its practical application. Looking at Comparative Literature within the context of globalization, cosmopolitanism and post or transnationalism, the book also offers engagement and comparison with other visual media such as cinema and e-literature. The first four chapters address the broad theoretical issues within the field such as ‘interliterary theory’, decoloniality, and world literature, while the next four are more applied, looking at themes, translation, literary history and comparison with other arts. This engaging guide also contains a glossary of terms and concepts as well as a detailed guide to further reading.

Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Applications

Domínguez, César

Villanueva, Darío

Routledge

"China" and "the West," "us" and "them," the "subject" and the "non-subject"--these and other dualisms furnish China watchers, both inside and outside China, with a pervasive, ready-made set of definitions immune to empirical disproof. But what does this language of essential difference accomplish? The essays in this book are an attempt to cut short the recitation of differences and to answer this question.  In six interpretive studies of China, the author examines the ways in which the networks of assumption and consensus that make communication possible within a discipline affect collective thinking about the object of study. Among other subjects, these essays offer a historical and historiographical introduction to the problem of comparison and deal with translation, religious proselytization, semiotics, linguistics, cultural bilingualism, writing systems, the career of postmodernism in China, and the role of China as an imaginary model for postmodernity in the West. Against the reigning simplifications, these essays seek to restore the interpretation of China to the complexity and impurity of the historical situations in which it is always caught.  The chief goal of the essays in this book is not to expose errors in interpreting China but to use these misunderstandings as a basis for devising better methodologies for comparative studies.

Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Harvard East Asian Monographs)

Harvard University Asia Center

"China" and "the West," "us" and "them," the "subject" and the "non-subject"--these and other dualisms furnish China watchers, both inside and outside China, with a pervasive, ready-made set of definitions immune to empirical disproof. But what does this language of essential difference accomplish? The essays in this book are an attempt to cut short the recitation of differences and to answer this question. 
 In six interpretive studies of China, the author examines the ways in which the networks of assumption and consensus that make communication possible within a discipline affect collective thinking about the object of study. Among other subjects, these essays offer a historical and historiographical introduction to the problem of comparison and deal with translation, religious proselytization, semiotics, linguistics, cultural bilingualism, writing systems, the career of postmodernism in China, and the role of China as an imaginary model for postmodernity in the West. Against the reigning simplifications, these essays seek to restore the interpretation of China to the complexity and impurity of the historical situations in which it is always caught. 
 The chief goal of the essays in this book is not to expose errors in interpreting China but to use these misunderstandings as a basis for devising better methodologies for comparative studies.

Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 212)

Review “In The Making of Barbarians, Haun Saussy actually makes us more civilized and enlightened about the eternally nagging question ‘What is China?’ through a perceptive and informative exploration of its fringes and margins, using all his accustomed intelligence and elegance, subtlety and fluidity. Vive l’esprit de finesse!”―Anne Cheng, Collège de France, Paris“The first book of its kind, The Making of Barbarians ushers us into the immense period of premodern Chinese history, looking at the world inside and outside of China before nation-states. Through intriguing case studies, from Buddhist scriptures and philosophical fables to poetic compositions and even sonic articulations in translation, Haun Saussy tackles issues such as center and periphery, civilization and barbarism, self and others, Sinophilia and xenophobia, and hospitality and hostility. This is a beautiful book.”―David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University“Haun Saussy is one of the rare scholars who is able to develop problems that emerge organically from a deep and sustained engagement with premodern Chinese literary texts in ways that are immediately compelling to a larger audience in literary studies and critical theory.”―Robert Ashmore, University of California, Berkeley Product Description A groundbreaking account of translation and identity in the Chinese literary tradition before 1850―with important ramifications for todayDebates on the canon, multiculturalism, and world literature often take Eurocentrism as the target of their critique. But literature is a universe with many centers, and one of them is China. The Making of Barbarians offers an account of world literature in which China, as center, produces its own margins. Here Sinologist and comparatist Haun Saussy investigates the meanings of literary translation, adaptation, and appropriation on the boundaries of China long before it came into sustained contact with the West.When scholars talk about comparative literature in Asia, they tend to focus on translation between European languages and Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, as practiced since about 1900. In contrast, Saussy focuses on the period before 1850, when the translation of foreign works into Chinese was rare because Chinese literary tradition overshadowed those around it.The Making of Barbarians looks closely at literary works that were translated into Chinese from foreign languages or resulted from contact with alien peoples. The book explores why translation was such an undervalued practice in premodern China, and how this vast and prestigious culture dealt with those outside it before a new group of foreigners―Europeans―appeared on the horizon. About the Author Haun Saussy is University Professor at the University of Chicago and teaches in the Committee on Social Thought, the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, the department of Comparative Literature, and the College. His books include Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out, The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies, and The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic.

The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature and Multilingual Asia (Translation/Transnation)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Mental Health

Princeton University Press

The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic calls for and applies a new model of comparative literature - one that, instead of taking for granted the commensurability of traditions and texts, gives incompatibility and contradiction their due. Exposing contemporary literary theory to the risks of ancient Chinese literature (and vice versa), this book considers a linked series of case studies. To what degree does the translation between languages and texts that we call comparative literature depend on allegory or translation within a single text or language? The author offers an important, new perspective on the reading of the Shih-ching or Book of Odes and the question of allegory and metaphor in the Chinese poetic tradition.

The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

Stanford University Press

Stanford Univ Pr

The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies (Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics)

Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies
Who speaks? The author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the “device”―core ideas of modern literary theory―were all pioneered in the shadow of oral literature. Authorless, loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to critical interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally significant texts―starting with Homer and the Bible―had emerged from an oral tradition, assumptions on how to read these texts were greatly perturbed. Through readings that range from ancient Greece, Rome, and China to the Cold War imaginary, The Ethnography of Rhythm situates the study of oral traditions in the contentious space of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking about language, mind, and culture. It also demonstrates the role of technologies in framing this category of poetic creation. By making possible a new understanding of Maussian “techniques of the body” as belonging to the domain of Derridean “arche-writing,” Haun Saussy shows how oral tradition is a means of inscription in its own right, rather than an antecedent made obsolete by the written word or other media and data-storage devices.

Fordham University Press

Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies Who speaks? The author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the “device”―core ideas of modern literary theory―were all pioneered in the shadow of oral literature. Authorless, loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to critical interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally significant texts―starting with Homer and the Bible―had emerged from an oral tradition, assumptions on how to read these texts were greatly perturbed. Through readings that range from ancient Greece, Rome, and China to the Cold War imaginary, The Ethnography of Rhythm situates the study of oral traditions in the contentious space of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking about language, mind, and culture. It also demonstrates the role of technologies in framing this category of poetic creation. By making possible a new understanding of Maussian “techniques of the body” as belonging to the domain of Derridean “arche-writing,” Haun Saussy shows how oral tradition is a means of inscription in its own right, rather than an antecedent made obsolete by the written word or other media and data-storage devices.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Saussy, Haun. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Saussy, Haun

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Saussy, Haun. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out (Global Asias)

Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Applications

Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Harvard East Asian Monographs)

Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 212)

The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature and Multilingual Asia (Translation/Transnation)

The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature and Multilingual Asia (Translation/Transnation)

The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies (Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics)

The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies (Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics)