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The Translator Transfigured: Lin Shu and the Cultural Logic of Writing in the Late Qing

The Translator Transfigured: Lin Shu and the Cultural Logic of Writing in the Late Qing positions 3: 1 Spring 1995 ogies and produced textbooks that were nearly as popular in the late Qing as his translations. H o w does the foreign Other take shape in language? H o w does this otherness then affect the very medium of its embodiment, in the language’s own particulars of time and space? H o w does a scholar/translator, steeped in one tradition, who saw his own role very much as a cultural sentinel, imagine the possibility of cultural crossing, the very possibility of translation? These are important questions in the enterprise of cross-cultural interpretation. They will be the questions that underlie my present studya study that looks to the turn of the twentieth century as a precedent to our own current experience of negotiating traditions, in all their shiftiness, and of defining positions, in all their relatedness. Rather than a case of a failed translator who labored in an outdated mode of translation, a historical curiosity of some sort, Lin Shu’s translation is interesting because it is closely tied u p with the cultural crisis of his time. Writing at a time when the last Chinese empire was about to crumble, Lin Shu was inevitably http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png positions asia critique Duke University Press

The Translator Transfigured: Lin Shu and the Cultural Logic of Writing in the Late Qing

positions asia critique , Volume 3 (1) – Mar 1, 1995

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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 1995 by Duke University Press
ISSN
1067-9847
eISSN
1527-8271
DOI
10.1215/10679847-3-1-69
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

positions 3: 1 Spring 1995 ogies and produced textbooks that were nearly as popular in the late Qing as his translations. H o w does the foreign Other take shape in language? H o w does this otherness then affect the very medium of its embodiment, in the language’s own particulars of time and space? H o w does a scholar/translator, steeped in one tradition, who saw his own role very much as a cultural sentinel, imagine the possibility of cultural crossing, the very possibility of translation? These are important questions in the enterprise of cross-cultural interpretation. They will be the questions that underlie my present studya study that looks to the turn of the twentieth century as a precedent to our own current experience of negotiating traditions, in all their shiftiness, and of defining positions, in all their relatedness. Rather than a case of a failed translator who labored in an outdated mode of translation, a historical curiosity of some sort, Lin Shu’s translation is interesting because it is closely tied u p with the cultural crisis of his time. Writing at a time when the last Chinese empire was about to crumble, Lin Shu was inevitably

Journal

positions asia critiqueDuke University Press

Published: Mar 1, 1995

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