Circumcised or Cannibalized: Une vie de boy in Chinese Translation

Extract

To understand ferdinand oyono's 1956 cameroonian novel une vie de boy in its two chinese translations, first Understand that modern Chinese literature begins in translation. This is true with translation understood both narrowly and broadly. The first “modern” work of Chinese literature—that is, the first work of literary fiction published in modern vernacular Chinese—is the 1918 “Diary of a Madman” (), by Lu Xun (1881-1936), its title a reference to Nikolay Gogol's 1835 story, its narrative written in the vein of calls by Liang Qichao (1873-1929) for a “revolution in fiction” ( [“Foreword” and “On the Relationship”]), a revolution inspired by translation and the possibilities for fiction Liang was exposed to through translation. In the early twentieth century, fiction written in Chinese began to be foreignizing or, as James Holmes would put it, “mimetic” of foreign prose, “re-emphasizing, by its strangeness, the strangeness which for the target-language reader is inherent in the semantic message of the original,” fitting “a period when genre concepts are weak, literary norms are being called into question, and the target culture as a whole stands open to outside impulses” (27-28).