Case study 2: Yan Jia
A second exemplary scholar who worked on and published research out of the CLTA, Yan Jia, like Xu Shiyan, participated in the cataloguing of the Goldblatt papers (2017-2018), where she undertook a study of the editorial agency and authority in American literary publishing. Tire network she describes is radically different from the one studied by Xu. Yan’s work; she focused on how editors and literary agents in American literary publishing interact and lead to what she describes as the "multiple-authorship” or "multivariate authorship" of tr anslated Chinese contemporary novels.4 hr her essay she argues that multi-authorship challenges the romantic notion of the author and the translator as solitary actors (Yan, 2020).
Her essay, "Multiple Authorship of Translated Literary Works: A Study of Some Chinese Novels in American Publishing Industry,” argues that it is insufficient to study translation as a process executed wholly by a given translator, and she goes further still by claiming that translative network outcomes can actually extend in two directions: forward toward the target text but also backward in some cases toward the source text (Yan and Du. 2020). She therefore asserts that the term “multivariate authorship” (Stillinger, 1991, p. v) most accurately describe the translative process. As a case study, Mo Yan’s second book in English, The Garlic Ballads, is exhibit A for her argument. In fact, this book, and specifically the translation of its final chapter, is arguably the most important moment in modem Chinese-English tr anslation history'.
To make her case Yan points to the relationship between Mo Yan’s literary agent Sandra Dijkstra and the publisher’s editors. Nan Graham and Courtney Hodell. who had been responsible for the editing and publishing of Goldblatt's translation of both Red Sorghum and The Garlic Ballads. Yan cites several passages from letters among these actors, who were authorized by their positions within the system of publishing to be actors/actants in the network of translation. In her analysis, Yan cites passages from correspondence from Hodell including two pages of revision suggestions, where Hodell noted that in passages exhibiting "repetition and florid writing [which] slows the pace to the point where the narrative drive is lost” she had "cut” the text “judiciously so none of the atmosphere is lost" (Hodell. 1994). While such actions suggested the idea of multitranslatorship, Yan suggested that the next episode revealed the potential for what she called “multi-authorship.” “Tire biggest issue,” Hodell (1994) wrote, came with the end of the manuscript. Nan and I both felt that it didn't have the same power as the rest of the novel; Mo Yan seems to lay down all the threads he's tied together so care frilly, and relies on the trick of the courtroom speech and newspaper article to make a tidy conclusion .... Let the characters show us what to feel, instead of having a speech tell us.
(Hodell. 1994)
As it turned out the literary agent and both editors wanted Mo Yan to rewrite his novel, to literally change the way it ended by adding an entire new chapter. In her analysis, Yan Jia explores the meaning of the fact that Mo Yan did accede to then- wishes and rewrote the novel by adding a new final chapter. Chapter 20. In this way, then, the evidence of the archive suggests that Yan Jia is fully justified in her claim that hanslation can be bidirectional, and therefore multivariate in its authorship, especially given the fact that subsequent Chinese publications of the text reveal that Mo Yan added the additional chapter in Chinese.
The two methodological approaches of these two scholars, focusing both on the social/cultural “hum” that surrounds and, indeed, gives rise to any translation project and also on the action and authority of publication systems that surround and give rise to any translation project, are nicely complementary. Moreover, taken together they challenge previous studies of Goldblatt’s translation career by pointing to the interplay of actors/actants and to the emergence of authority itself in the larger network structure from which his published translations emerged.
Reading the scholarship that is emerging from the archive and, indeed, reading through the archive itself - including a new collection of nearly 100 letters from Mo Yan to Howard Goldblatt spanning their careers - has begun to pave the way to what we believe may be a common set of threads not only of their work, but a methodological approach that emerges from the presence of archival resources themselves.
