Yu Hua, The Past and the Punishments

The Past and the Punishments is one of Yu Hua’s most famous novellas from his early literary output in the 1980s. It revolves around two themes, which would become core components of the author’s writing sensibility: violence and history. This text is metafictional in a similar way to “One Kind of Reality” in that it includes parodic intertextual self-reflexivity through which Yu Hua recalibrates the violence of history as a dialogue between a Beckettian⁴ pseudo-couple of “the punishment expert” and “the stranger.” In the following passage, for example, history itself is being anthropomorphized and given bodies which suffer the trauma of human flesh:

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TT: He had drawn and quartered January' 9, 1958, tearing it into so many pieces that it had drifted thr ough the air like a flurry of snowflakes. He had castrated December 1, 1967, cutting off its ponderous testicles so that there hadn't been a drop of sunshme on December 1. 1967 while moonlight that evening had been as dense as overgrown weeds. Nor had August 7, 1960, been able to escape its fate, for he had used a rust-dappled saw blade to cut tluough its waist. But the most unforgettable had been September 20.1971. He had dug a trench in the ground, in which he had buried September 20,1971, so that only its head was still exposed. Owing to the pressure exerted on the body by the surrounding earth, September 20, 1971’s blood had surged up into the head.

The punishment expert had proceeded to crack open its skull, from which a column of blood had immediately spurted forth. The fountain of September 20, 1971, had been extraordinarily brilliant.

(Yu, 1996, pp. 120-121)

The passage above has been translated very literally, with no apparent interventions, which opens up potential issues in terms of the transfer of self-reflexivity. It is clear that the text is not functioning along realist lines, and indeed the inclusion of the pronoun “it”⁵ when referring to historic dates suggests a type of metaphoric reference creating a direct link between the concept of historical events and the violence contained within them. In translation, however, this becomes problematic for two reasons: first, readers may not be aware of the parodic qualities of this text in terms of how it subverts classical forms of historical writing in Chinese. Second, these dates only function within a Chinese historical context. While readers are expected to have sufficient contextual knowledge of Chinese history to resolve the second issue, the fir st issue requires some form of intervention, which can be found within the translator’s postscript:

The ‘labyrinth” that Yu Hua constructs in The Past and the Punishments is reminiscent of Borges’ metaphysical narratives of tune and space, necessity and coincidence. Through-out the volume, finally, Yu Hua’s attention to the description of surface detail - at the expense of the inner life of the character - may well remind us of Robbe-Grillet's revolt against the tenets of realist fiction . . . While other stories are not as directly predicated on past literary models, they infuse contemporary settings with echoes of traditional beliefs and practices, to unsettling effect. . . Both 1986 and The Past and the Punishments, finally, are predicated on yet another sort of textual tradition - ancient historical records that detail the punishments meted out to those who had mn afoul of the social order.”

(Yu. 1996, p. 265)

Whereas within "One Kind of Reality” the surrealism pushed the reader away from realist readings of the text into a position where the parodic self-reflexive functions of the text were unclear, here the reader is given the information to be able to traverse this gap of intertextuality. Transferring the self-reflexivity of texts such as The Past and the Punishments highlights the ideological and epistemological divergences of the intended reader in comparison to the original and requir es a form of transculmration. But this process is incredibly problematic and requir es a form of hermeneutic translation that may require the translator to commit to a particular interpretation of the original text. The translator’s postscript quoted above also refers to other texts by Yu Hua which are structurally very similar to "One Kind of Reality" and suggests that they should be interpreted as a "pastiche of traditional story types" with then^- “moral imperative” (Yu, 1996, p. 265) removed. Through rendering explicit that which is implicit in the original, the translator has established a framework of reading through which the text’s self-reflexivity can become apparent and successfully transferred paratextually.