Haun Saussy's Critical Reads
Haun Saussy is University Professor at the University of Chicago, in Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages & Civilizations, and the Committee on Social Thought. His previous books include The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (1993), Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (2001), The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and its Technologies (2016), and, as editor or co-editor, Chinese Women Poets: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism (2000), Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2006), Sinographies: Writing China (2007), Fenollosa/Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition (2009), Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader (2010), and A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep Hidden: Selected Writings of Li Zhi (2016). He contributes to the collective blog Printculture. His next project is tentatively entitled The Nine Relays: Laying the Ground for a Comparative History of East Asian Literatures. Haun will discuss Translation as Citation on Wednesday, 2/21, 6pm at the Co-op.
Yingelishi, by Jonathan Stalling - Between translation and non-translation, an experiment in hearing the English in Chinese and the Chinese in English.
A New Literary History of Modern China, by David D. W. Wang - A "new history" that follows the non-teleological, discontinuous format of Denis Hollier's history of French literature. It finds many beginnings for the modern tradition in China and offers a seeming infinity of connections among topics and subtopics that, in the hands of many scholars, become monotonous and predictable.
An Archaeology of the Political, by Elias José Palti - An intertwining of cultural history and the history of political ideas that leaves neither as it was.
China and Beyond in the Medieval Period, by Dorothy C. Wong and Gustav Heldt - A book of essays on the five or sixth centuries when interaction among China, India, and Central Asia was most intense. Finely researched case studies opening up large avenues of inquiry.
The Evolution of Beauty, by Richard O. Prum - Animal aesthetics: creatures with feathers, fur and scales do create or become things of beauty, and not for utilitarian aims or in obedience to some determinism. One learns from this brilliant ornithologist that charm and the discovery of new preferences are not human properties alone.
Normality: A Critical Genealogy, by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens - History of disciplines, both thoughtful and archival, excavating a single concept from Buffon to Kinsey.
Agnotology, by Robert N. Proctor and Linda Schiebinger - The history of our present moment. Alas.
The Face of the Buddha, by William Empson - The main written product of Empson's 25 years in Asia, and a lost work unexpectedly rediscovered. Ever alert to possibilities of ambiguity as a promise of more rather than less meaning, Empson comments on hundreds of Buddha-sculptures from across the continent that he thought exhibited a subtle asymmetry.
India, China, and the World: A Connected History, by Tansen Sen - A much-needed book in a surprisingly uncrowded field. Most globalization theory will appear a scam when you read this and Janet Abu-Lughod.
Waka and Things, Waka as Things, by Edward Kamens - The material history of early Japanese poetry, a genre so often read as expressing the evanescent.
About Translation as Citation: 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.
Related Titles
Literature, from the Chinese perspective, makes manifest the cosmic patterns that shape and complete the world--a process of "worlding" that is much more than mere representation. In that spirit, A New Literary History of Modern China looks beyond state-sanctioned works and official...
What don't we know, and why don't we know it? What keeps ignorance alive, or allows it to be used as a political instrument? Agnotology--the study of ignorance--provides a new theoretical perspective to broaden traditional questions about how we know to ask: Why don't we know what we don't know...
