The Chinese liter ature translation archive case studies

There is something intuitive about the need for archival research in literary translation studies because the complexity of translation, as we mentioned earlier, is hidden in plain sight in the sprawling complexity of archives altogether. The example we describe here is the Chinese Literature Translation Archive (CLTA) at the University of Oklahoma Bizzell Library. The genesis of the archive was the formal gift of the Howard Goldblatt papers and personal library in 2014, followed soon by the acquisition of the papers of Wolfgang Kubin and of Wai-lirn Yip, and then the acquisition of the Arthur Waley personal research library. Today the Chinese Literature Translation Archive houses a collection of well over ten thousand books from these personal libraries, so that upon entering the reading room of the CLTA, scholars walk into the sprawling, complex intellectual environments of arguably the two most influential English translators of Chinese literature in the twentieth and now the early 21st centuries.

The source and reference materials used by these translators now siUTOimd translation stirdents and scholars and provide deep insights into the history of Chinese literature in translation. In addition to these source and reference materials (often including marginalia written by the translators), the archive also houses other important translation papers. In the case of the Howard Goldblatt Archive, the collection includes the letters written not only between him and dozens of authors from Mo Yan. Bi Feiyu, and Alai, to Chu T’ien-wen and many more, but also between the translator and his agents, editors, peers, and others.

Taken as a whole, these historical documents begin to reveal something beyond the “black box” of an achieved translation. "Black box” is a term Bruno Latour (1987) uses to describe an input-output model that does not analyze the processes that transform input to output (pp. 2-3). However, archived historical documents pry open the black box and allow a meditation on the social and linguistic complexity of translation that supplants the reductive limitations suggested by the simple self-evidence of a free-standing published tr anslation, which stands before us as literally authoritative - with the author’s name on the cover and the translator’s name modestly set forth, usually in smaller font, on the title page. By unpacking the archive - by situating the social action of translation in the context of its own linguistic and social history - we can grasp the whole networkingconstellation that in aggregate reveals translation as a thoroughly historical field of production. We are no longer bound to the black box of published translations but can access a more fully-complex life-world replete with its intellectual environments and documentation. We hope that the CLTA can stand as a call to anus for other universities to begin the process of collecting, curating, preserving. and rendering translation materials discoverable to other scholars so that we can together initiate a new epoch of materialist sociology in Chinese literature translation studies.

Also worth noting is that the heart of the CLTA lies not only material, but also a new generation of Chinese Translation Studies scholars who are working hard to change the field for years to come.

Two CLTA case studies

Two visiting scholars have contributed to the cataloguing of the Howard Goldblatt papers at the CLTA from 2016-2019, and the contrasts between then work indicates the breadth of possible archival achievements. They are publishing research out of the collection and pointing to new ways of thinking thr ough authorial and translative agency in the context of Chinese to English literature in translation.

Xu Shiyan’s work has focused on translation networks in Hong Kong dining the earliest part of Howard Goldblatt’s career, and her work is illuminating the network pressures that undergirds agency/authority for a young translator within the Smophone translation world. Yan Jia, on the other hand, has brought much needed attention to the editorial process in Goldblatt’s career-long relationship with Mo Yan. Her work challenges us to think of the author as one actor-node (among many) in the translation network rather than simply assuming that the author - and the original (and originary) text - comprise the self-evident base upon which the superstructure of translation is built. In doing so, her work suggests that scholars adopt the idea of multivariate authorship to think through the questions of translative agency/authority.

These two projects nicely exemplify the complex interrelationships between the social and the linguistic in their very different starting points: that of the literary culture of Hong Kong and that of the hanslation-product culture of the United States, both of which can be examined in relation to the translation-product culture of China.

After reviewing these two CLTA case studies, we conclude this paper by arguing that translation studies can and should move beyond research centered upon authors as sovereign agents, with translators serving prior (antecedent) authors and prior texts. Rather, we want to analyze translation as the emergent properties of translative networks, which include but are not limited to final published translations and theft reception. As we have already suggested, the translation networks that emerge from unpacking the archive are more than the social context of text production. More importantly, they necessarily include and designate all the organizational actors - agents/actors/actauts, even the authority of authors - that determine the degrees of node and the complex “actions” of all agents, volitional and notable non-volitional, within a given network.