Translating Chinese Women: Écriture féminine and the Male Translator of Female Chinese Poets

Abstract

In 1972, Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung published the translation anthology The Orchid Boat, the first collection of Chinese poetry by women to be published in the twentieth century in any language. Two years later, Julia Kristeva published Des Chinoises (Eng. trans., About Chinese Women, 1977), her study of women in Chinese culture and history following her trip to China as part of a delegation of the French magazine Tel Quel. What accounts for these nearly simultaneous turns of attention to questions of womanhood and gender in China from both sides of the Atlantic, after decades—even centuries—of scant notice (a trend that in many ways has not stopped)? Do Kristeva and Rexroth share certain assumptions, insights, blind spots? For all that both have been critiqued and even criticized, do their writings represent similar political attempts to redress social wrongs? Can the considerations of one be used for analysis of the other, in answer to this vein of questioning? More pertinently, can one be offered as a solution to some of the problems hindering the other? In this presentation, I will look at Rexroth’s translations of Chinese women’s poetry in light of what Kristeva and others have said about écriture féminine—whose exemplars are often men writing female characters. Kristeva’s book has been roundly criticized as essentializing difference where she thought she was deconstructing binaries. Similarly, that écriture feminine relies so much on men’s writing as women has often been cast as embarassing to its conceptualization. In contrast, I will argue that in his “invention” of the category of Chinese women’s poetry, Rexroth’s translations offer an alternative to Kristeva’s deconstruction of essentialized differences of gender and culture in part because they constitute a man’s translation of Chinese women’s poetry. Not only was Rexroth writing against a translational predicament that had subsumed his earlier translations of male Chinese poets into dominant racialized discourses in the US, Rexroth’s attempt at translational écriture féminine represents an acceptance that the onus on promoting literature by women and destabilizing ossified gender categories cannot be put on women alone.