Celestial Empire. Nathaniel IsaacsonЧитать онлайн книгу.
1902, in his translation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, he used kexue (Qiu Ruohong, 65).
Proponents of Western fields of knowledge like Yan Fu11 saw sociology as the “science of sciences,” offering the ability to unveil the inherent interrelation between natural and social order (Schwarz, 187). “Science was the expression and result of the spirit of positivism, as well as the manifestation of the universal principle and primary driving force known as tianyan. As the universal principle, tianyan not only revealed the pictures and vistas of the changing world but also determined the criterion of action and direction of value for people” (Wang Hui, 27–28).
As the understanding of science continued to develop, and as its importance continued to ascend in the intellectual hierarchy, science in the Chinese context gradually unmoored itself from its neo-Confucian framework. While the modern scientific lexicon was eventually disambiguated from its neo-Confucian counterpart, the ethical and moral implications of science continued to be foregrounded in intellectual debates and fictional treatment. Science, especially sociology, was seen as a tool for the understanding and reconfiguring of the social order in the interests of nation building. Yan Fu’s view of the importance of sociology continued to emphasize the consonance between the natural and the human order, a notion that has long been a central feature of Chinese philosophical thinking.
Despite an ongoing ambivalence about the relationship between Eastern and Western epistemologies, a key shift in attitudes toward science and technology did take place in the wake of the first Sino-Japanese War. Benjamin Schwarz has noted the fact that in translating Thomas Huxley’s work on social Darwinism, Yan Fu misapprehended the text’s critical stance and, perhaps not surprisingly given China’s semicolonial plight, reconfigured a critique of social Darwinism into a system of moral and social valuation (Schwarz, 45–48). The perception that the law of survival of the fittest applied to societies and nations hung over late Qing intellectual life like a sword of Damocles. Yan Fu’s translation of Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics brought Darwinian thinking to China in a form that had already undergone profound reinterpretations. The translator’s unique understanding of Huxley’s criticism of the social implications of evolution was informed by the apparent reality of social Darwinism under the conditions of colonial rule. What was originally intended to be a criticism of the tenets of social Darwinism was easily understood in East Asia as a matter of historical and empirical fact. At the same time, this tangential offshoot of the main body of evolutionary thinking was identified as its most salient aspect. This is reflected in the writings of late Qing intellectuals like Yan Fu, Liang Qichao, and Kang Youwei, to whom the concept of evolution is most often framed in terms of social Darwinism and racial extinction. Liang Qichao’s writing in Xinmin congbao reflected a pervasive sense that “naked aggression, once thought barbaric, was now presented as a law of civilization supported by European and American science” (Secord, 48). Many Chinese intellectuals shared H. G. Wells’s anxiety that while evolutionary time implied linear motion, the forward progression of time could be reversed, with human intervention playing a key role in the direction a given society was to travel (Pusey 1983, 57–64; Murthy, 79–80).12
Translating Jules Verne
Tracing the complicated trajectory that brought Jules Verne’s De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the Moon) to China presents the scholar of Chinese literature with an interesting case study in Lydia Liu’s “translingual practice,” as the text was creatively reinterpreted through the process of translation. At the same time, this act of translation demonstrates how a French SF text was incorporated into the Chinese literary field. The novel was translated from the French original into English, made its way to Japan (most likely) via an American translation, where it was then translated into Japanese by Inoue Tsutomu (1850–1928) as Getsukai ryokō, and was then rendered into Chinese by Lu Xun as Yuejie lüxing (1903).13 It is unclear which English version Inoue was working with, but it is likely that his translation came from a less-than-accurate version of the original. One glaring inaccuracy is the fact that Lu Xun mistook Jules Verne to be English, an error replicated from Inoue’s translation. It is difficult to say with certainty whether either translator was aware of the satirical nature of the novel. Verne himself harbored serious doubts about the efficacy of science and the promise of the future (Smyth, 118–119), but Meiji and Chinese authors writing in a similar vein often adopted such militaristic discourse with a sense of enjoyment, and adventure.
Reinterpretation, rather than translation, is a more appropriate term for Lu Xun’s efforts in bringing From the Earth to the Moon to a Chinese audience, and Lu Xun himself admitted as much. The specific choices made in reformatting Verne’s work illustrate the transformations that took place when foreign novels were rendered into Chinese, and what methods translators employed when they sought to make their work palatable to a local audience. In a letter to Yang Jiyun about his 1903 translation of Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre (1864), Di di lüxing, he wrote, “though I referred to it as a translation, it was actually a reinterpretation” (sui shuo yi, qishi nai gaizuo) (LXQJ, 12: 93).14 In rendering into Chinese Inoue Tsutomu’s translation, which was relatively faithful to the format of the original, Lu Xun reduced it from twenty-eight chapters to fourteen. He also edited out a great deal of the content, especially sections devoted to the descriptions of new inventions and the science behind them. Most visible, however, was his adoption of the traditional “chapter fiction” form of the zhanghui xiaoshuo.15
Lu Xun’s own introduction to the text further illustrates the vagaries of translating science and SF during the late Qing and the practical difficulties of introducing SF to the Chinese cultural field. “At first I had intended to use only the vernacular language in order to reduce the burden upon my readers, but exclusive use of the vernacular proved to be both troublesome and superfluous. Because of this, I have also made use of classical language in order to save paper (“Lessons,” 22).
The cultural crisis brought about by China’s ignominious defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War catalyzed calls for language reform on the part of reformers dissatisfied with the examination system, but it would take more than two decades until the adoption of a vernacular register was institutionalized. The literary revolution, inaugurated by Hu Shi in 1917 (Hu Shi, 5–16),16 came only after a long period of grappling with the classical language and its many different registers (Huters 1988; Kaske 2008). Lu Xun and many of his contemporaries remained more comfortable with classical written forms, especially the guwen style,17 contrary to the post–May Fourth narrative that understands this as “perversely obscurantist,” and indeed “the most significant prose produced after 1900 within the [tongcheng] school was guwen translations of Western works” (Huters 1988, 249, 252). While many late Qing authors envisioned the vernacular language in a position of high symbolic, political, and economic capital, the cultural field they were trying to supplant continued to influence their work.
Lu Xun and many of his contemporaries understood a broad range of historical developments to be the product of evolutionary processes, and writing was no exception. For example, while Liu Shipei (1884–1919) argued that the next step in the development of literary expression was the adoption of colloquial language, he still understood the maintenance of a classical register to be a key component to preserving a sense of national spirit (Huters 1988, 260). Theodore Huters describes the author’s style in “On the Power of Mara Poetry” (“Moluo shi li shuo”) as “Mimic[king] the elaborate archaisms of Zhang Binglin even as its cosmopolitan polemic points directly at the May Fourth movement that was still ten years away” (Huters 1988, 271). In both language and content, Lu Xun’s early work is rife with the sort of contradictions that characterized the intellectual atmosphere of the late Qing. Andrew Jones has observed that the poignancy of the iron house metaphor is its polysemy, presenting “ethical, philosophical, and political questions in narrative form, materializing in a confined textual space complex and often mutually contradictory ideas, desires and anxieties” (Jones 2011, 34). Many of these contradictions were present in nascent form in Lu Xun’s earliest writings on science and literature.
Lu Xun’s early essays are representative of a late Qing literary trend that favored the use of an archaic grammar and