The first Chinese face of Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract

This research paper probes and problematizes the first translation in China of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Gold-Bug,” produced in 1905 by the emerging modern literary critic and translator Zhou Zuoren. To operate in a continuous and coherent fashion, this paper compares and contrasts Zhou’s work with three later translations of the story in 1914, 1918 and 1949. It attempts to reconsider Chinese intellectual social engagement, national literary construction, and Sino-Western cultural exchange. With textual analysis, this research provides historical illustrations of Zhou Zuoren’s creative representation of Poe during the tumultuous cultural and political frame of the twentieth century. Equipped with knowledge of western imperial culture, Zhou performed his translation work when Chinese intellectuals struggled to modernize Chinese literature as a vehicle of realizing national modernization. This thesis applies textual, theoretical and historical analysis to decipher how Zhou Zuoren’s creative energy reflects degrees of Poe’s translatability and untranslatability in the context of early twentieth-century Chinese literary history. Also, it considers how a translator’s cultural authority would frustrate subsequent revision, and to some extent, contribute to establishing misinterpretations that haunt cross-cultural understandings of Poe in China today. In addition, this thesis reflects on the early Chinese translators’ paradoxical identities as both empowered elite intellectuals and powerless cultural authorities in a semi-colonial context. This paradox affects in subtle yet significant ways how cultural exchange proceeded in the twentieth century. The inability of translators such as Zhou to translate foreign literature in culturally informed ways provokes questions that trouble the premise and possibility of World Literature. A detailed examination of the translation of key phrases related to slavery will take account of ways to position Zhou Zuoren as a translator, in regard to both Poe’s story and the broader intellectual and historical context of translation. The thesis probes why he was unable to translate the radical foreignness embedded in terms related to slavery, how he misunderstood the peculiar institution of American slavery, confusing it with Chinese feudal relations between masters and servants, and most importantly, how Zhou understood only superficially what it meant to be commoditized as a slave in the American South.