The Problems of Language in Cross Cultural Studies

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CHAPTER I

ntroductionThe Problem Language in

ross ulturalStudies

Strictly speaking, comparative scholarship that aims to cross culturescan do nothing but translate. As a trope ofepistemological crossing, translation always says one thing in terms of another, although it mllst pretendto speak the truth for the sake of fidelity or sanity, to be more exact).But leaving aside the marital trope of fidelity and the logocentric notionof truth-concepts that readily lend themselves to deconstructionist critic i sm-what else do we know or can we say about translation and it simplications for cross-cultural understanding? And indeed, what does itmean for a contemporary scholar to cross the language barrier betweentwo or morc cultures and linguistic communities?

Admittedly, much more is involved here than what is commonlyknown as an interlingual transaction between a source language and a target language.1 Even before I take up the subject of this book, I fmd myselffacing larger problems, such as certain entrenched ways of thinking aboutcultural difference in the Western academy. For example, disciplinaryboundaries and familiar modes of intellectual inquiry often generate diffICult interpretive problems regarding cultures and languages other thanone s own ? In whose terms, for which linguistic constituency, and in thename of what kinds of knowledge or intellectual authority does one perform acts of translation between cultures? The question becomes doublyacute when one crosses from theWest to the East, or vice versa. Of course,the difficulty is compounded when the object of the inquiry itself, suchas modern Chinese literature, does not constitute a pristine territory ofnative knowledge uncontaminated by earlier historical forces that havecoerced and conditioned similar crossings in the recent past, namely, the


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translation of the West and the invention of the modern Chinese language.Although I do not presume to have an answer to these questions, I willventure these m u l t i l y e r ~ crossings in this book, an undertaking fated todescribe as well as to enact the predicament of its subject.3

Perhaps, I would do betterby reframing my problematic in a slightlydifferent context. Let me evoke briefly a running debate among anthropologists on the notion of cultural translation, a debate 1believe has im portant ramifications for literary studies, history, and other disciplinesi n t he human it ie s. For many years, British social anthropologists haveused the concept of cultural translation at its various stages of theoreticalelaboration to develop a notion of interpretation that, ideally, will account for the difference between their own culture and the non-Europeansocieties they study. Edmund Leach, for example, describes the typicalethnographic moment as follows:

Let me recapitulate.We started by emphasizing how different are theothersnd made them not only different but remote and inferior. Sentimentally,

we then t ook t he opposi te t rack and argued that all human beings are alike;we can understand Trobrianders or the Barotse because their motivations arejust the same as our own; butthat didn t work either, the others remainedobstinately other. Bu t now we have come to see that the essential problemis one of translation. The linguists have shown us that all translation is difficult, and thatperfect translation is usually impossible. And yet we knowthatfor practical purposes a tolerably satisfactory translation is always possible evenwhen the original text is highly abstruse. Languages are different but notso different as all that. Looked at in this way social anthropologists are engaged in establishing a methodology for the translation of cultural language.Italics added) 4

One would like to have as much faith in the power of cultural translationas Leach , bu t the phrase practical purposes lets the cat out of the bag.To me, t he crucial thing here is not whether translation between culturesis possible people do it anyway), or whether the other is knowable, oreven whether an abstruse text is decipherable, but what practical purpose or needs (which sustain one s methodological paraphernalia) bringan ethnographer to pursue cultural translation. This is precisely the pointat which the questionI raised earlier should intervene: In whose terms, forwhich linguistic constituency, and in the name of what kinds of knowledge or intellectual authority does an ethnographer perform acts of translation between cultures?

ItYa pointed criticism of the British ethnographic tradition, TalalAsadsites the concept of cultural translation in power relations and urges us to

-Jorge Lllis Borges

Tropes Equivalence East and West

Janguage and Cross Cultural Studies

The dictionary is based on the hypothesis-obviously anunproven one-that languages arc made up of equivalentsynonyms.

consider the problematic of cross-cultural interpretation with close attent ion t o t he actual historical environment in which both the ethnographerand his native informant live, yet do not speak the same language:

To pu t i t crudely, because the languages of the Third World societies-including, of course, the societies that social anthropologists have traditionallystudied-are weaker in relation to Western languages and today, especially to English), they are more likely to submit to forcible transformationin the translation process than the other way around. The reason for this is,first, that in their political-economic relations with Third World countriesWestern nations have the greater ability to manipulate the latter. And,ond, Western languages produce and deploy desired knowledge more readilythan Third World languages do.s

Asad s critique of the not ion of cultural translation has major implicat ions for comparative scholarship and for cross-cultural studies such asthis one.o It warns us that the business of translating a culture into anotherlanguage has little, if anything, to do wit h individual free choice or l in guistic competence. If we have learned anything useful from Foucault, itshould be clear that we must confront forms of institutional practices andthe knowledge/power relationships that authorize certain ways of knowing while discouraging others. One familiar way of producingknowledgeabout other people and other cultures is to construct the terms of Comparison on the ground of perceived linguistic equivalence. Yet that groundof equivalence itselfoften goes unexamined.

The idea that languages are commensurate and equivalents exist naturally between them is, of course, a common illusion that philosophers,linguists, and theorists of translation have tried in vain to dispel. Nietzsche, for example, attacked the illusion by showing that the equating ofthe unequal is simply a metaphorical function of language that lays claimto t ru th . What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations whichbecame poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned,and after long usage seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding; truths

INTRODUCTION


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are illusions of which one has forgo tt en tha t they are illusions. 7 GayatI i Spivak explicates that Nietzsche's defmition of metapho r point s tothe construction of an identity between dissimilar things, as the originalphrase used in his essay is Gleich machen (make equal), calling to mind theGerman word Gleichnis -image, simile, similitude, comparison, allegory, parable-an unmistakable pointer to figurative practice in general. 8Ironically, the philosopher himself has no t been able to escape the fateof being translated and turned into another kind of illusion through themetaphorical equation of German and other languages. The thriving in dustry of bilingual dictionaries depends on the tenacity of this i l lusionits will to power . is the business of this indus try to make sur e thatone understand that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms. 9The implication for cross-cultural comparison is that on e relies on a conceptual model derived from th e bilingual dictionary-that is, a wo rd i nlanguage A must equal a word or a phrase in language B; otherwise one ofth e languages is lacking-to form opinions about other peoples or to la yphilosophical grounds for discourses about other cultures and, conversely,about one s ow n totalized identity.

Le t me illustrate th e problem by reflecting on a famous passage fromHeidegger s Aus einen Gesprach von der Sprache (Dialogue on language) between a European philosopher (Heidegger) and aJapanese interlocutor (Tezuka). Thc following excerpt is taken from the latter half oftheir dialogue (J refers to theJapanese and F [ in English] to the Fragcndcnor Inquirer): Da Sie mir, oder besser den vermutenden Andeutungen, die ich vor

bringe, zuh6ren, erwacht in mir ein Zutrauen, mein Z6gern zu lassen,das mich bislang davor zuriickhielt, Ihnen auf Ihre Frage zu antworten..F: Sie meinen die Frage, welches Wort Ihre Sprache spricht fUr das, was WIr

Europaer Sprache nennen. . . DiesesWort scheute ich mich bis zu diesem Augenblick zu sagen, weIlIchcine Ubersctzl1ng geben muB, durch die sich unser Wort fUr Sprache wieeine bloBe Bilderschrift ausnimmt, namlich im Vorstellungsbezirk von

g r i f f n ~ dcnn nur durch siesucht die europaischeWissenschaft und ihrePhilosophie das Wesen der Sprache zu fassen.

F Wie heiBt das japanische Wort fUr Sprache ?J (nach weiterem Zogern) Es heiBt Koto ba .F: Und was sagt dies?]: ba nennt die Blatter, auch und zumal die Bliitenblatter. Denken Sie an die

Kirschbliite und an die Pfl.aumenbliite. Und was sagt Koto?) : Diese Frage is am schwersten zu beantworten. Indessen wird ein Ver-

This exchange is i l luminat ing in a number of ways. First, it enactsin a s ingle dramatic performance the impossibi li ty and yet the necessi tyof translation between Eas t a nd West. Th e European Inquirer, who isundoubtedly aware of the pitfalls of translation, nonetheless insists onhaving a Japanese equivalent of the European concept of language. Second, before th e Japanese interlocutor is compelled to answer the Inquirer squestion What is the Japanese word for 'language' th e type of syn-

INTRODUCTIONLanguage af1d Cross-Cultural Studies

such dadurch erleichtert, daB wir das ki zu erlautern wagten: das reineEntziicken der rufenden Stille. Das Wehen der Stille, die dies rufendeEntziicken ereignct, ist das Waltende, dasjenes Entziicken kommen laBt.Koto uenut aber immer zugleich das jeweils Entziickende selbst, das einzigje im unwiederholbaren Al1genblick mit der Hille seines Anmutens zumScheiuen kommt.

F: Koto ware dann das Ereignis der lichtenden Botschaft der Anmut.]: Herrlich gesagt; nur fiihrt das Wort Anmut das heutige Vorstellen zu

leicht in die Irre]: The fact t ha t you give ear t o me, or berter, to the probing intimations propose, awakens in me the confidence to drop my hesitations which

have so far kept me from answering your question. You mean the question which word in your language speaks for what we

Europeans call language.J Up to this moment have shied away from that word, because must give

a translation which makes our word for language look like a mere pictograph, to wit, something that belongs within the precincts of conceptualideas; for European science and its philosophy try to grasp the nature oflanguage only by way of concepts.

I: What is the Japanese word for language ?]: after further hesitation) is Koto ba.I: And what does that say?]: ba means leaves, including and especially the leaves of a blossom-petals.

Think of cherry blossoms or plum blossoms.I: And what does Koto say?]: This is the question most difflcult to answer. But it is easier now to at

tempt an answer because we have ventured to explain Iki: the pure delightof the beckoning stillness. The breath of stillness that makes this beckoning delight come into its own is the reign under which that delight ismade to come. But Koto always also names that which in the event givesdelight, itself, that which uniquely in each unrepeatable moment comesto radiance in the fullness of its grace.

Koto, then, would be the appropriating occurrence of the lightening message of grace.

]: Beautifully said Only the word grace easily misleads the modernmind.. 10

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t ax t ha t makes the nonexistence of an equivalent unthinkable withoutits being interpreted as a l ack -he explains his reasons for hesitation(this hesitation, reintroduced by the parenthesized italics a few lines later,effectively disrupts the flow of the conversation). The fear that his translation would make the Japanese equivalent for language look l ike a merepictograph is not entirely groundless because his subsequent descriptionof koto ba probably succeeds in doing just that in German. Third, theInquirer s summary of the meaning of k l after the lengthy descriptiongiven by his interlocutor points to something other than the translation ofaJapanese word. As an appropriating gesture, it leads to Heidcgger s owntheory of Saying or Sage which the Inquirer describes a moment later:Denn es miiBte sich etwas ereignen, wodurch sich dem Botengang jeneWeite offnete und z14leuchtete, in der das Wesen der Sage zum Scheinenkommt (For something would have t o come about by which that vastdistance in which the nature of Saying assumes its radiance, opened itselfto the messenger s course and shone upon it). The words die Sage, derBotengang, and zuleuchten seem to echo his free translation of theJapanese kOlo ba namely, das Ereignis der licJztenden BotscJzq ft der Anmut(the appropriating occurrence of the lightening message of grace; italicsadded), bu t they speak more pertinently to some of the central tropes thephilosopher uses in his own meditations on Ereignis (appropriation), Eige-nen (owning), Licht14ng (clearing), and so o n r ~ In a remarkable momentof mise en abyme Heidegger s language acts out the appropriation that itspeaks about, by illustrating the predicament of translation in the very actof translation.

A Dialogue on Language was a central component of Heidegger sdiscourse on language in his later career when the philosopher developedhis important notion of language as the house of Being. It is worthspeculating, though, what the conversationwould have become if the philosopher had learnedJapanese and conducted and transcribed this dialoguein that language. Most likely, the questions would not have been raised orwould have had to be formulated differently. This dialogue highlights anumber of problematic areas in the so-called exchange between East andWest in modern history, not the least of which is the language of theorythat expresses or implies a universal concern bu t in fact bears witness toits own limitations as a European language. To me, it seems sheer folly towie ld an analytical concept or category indifferently anywhere as if thatwhich makes sense in one place must necessarily obtain elsewhere.

The implications of such language interaction between East and Westare manifold. At a cer ta in point , the c ross ing of language boundaries

stops being a linguistic issue, for words are easily translated into analytical(often universal) categories in the hands of scholars who need conceptualmodels for cross-cultural studies. This happens almost daily in the scholarly realm of pseudo-universals criticizedby Eugene Eoyang in a recentstudy. The subtle or not so subtle bias that informs certain comparative

q u ~ s t o n s Why is there no epic in Chinese? Is there a civil society inChIna? etc.-often says more about the inquirer than the object of in quiry. As Eoyang puts i t well, The obverse questions are rarely, if ever,asked. Why are there no dynastic histories in the West? Why has the Westproduced no counterpart to Shijing? Are there equivalents t o t he lushi andzaju forms in t he West? If these challenges to lacunae in the West strikeone as slightly absurd, then we must consider the possibility that theoriginal questions might be equally pointless. Eoyang attributes theproblem of pseudo-universals to the fundamental confusion of premiseand methodology in comparative scholarship. Bu t are there even morefirmly e n t r e ~ h e d beliefs in what a language can or cannot do that compelsuch confuslOn? We must face the question of translation that Heideg?er s dialogue raises. Are analytical categories translated less frequentlymto the other language than they are used in one s own? What happensin such instances of translation? What is gained or lost? Perhaps, the cruxof the matter is no t so much that analytical categories cannot be appliedacross the board because they fail to have universal relevance-the impulse to translate is in fact unstoppable-but that the crossing of analyticalcategories over language boundaries, like any other crossing or transgression, is bound to entail confrontations charged with contentious claimsto power. To be sure, universality is neither true nor false, but any intellectual claim to i t should be rigorously examined in the light of its ownlinguistic specificity and sources of authority.

Consider some of the words frequently used and abused in this capacity across the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences: t heself, person, and individual. What is the Chinese, Japanese, or Arabic equivalent(s) of the word self ? This troublesome question rests onthe assumption that equivalence of meaning can readily be established between different languages. Does no t the existence of bilingual dictionariesattest to this fact? I hear people ask-Isn t it true that the category of theself has existed all a long in the Chinese philosophical tradition? Whatabout the Confucian not ion of j e tc .? I fmd the questions themselvesrather dubious because they overlook the fact that the trope of equivalence between the English word self and the Chinese j wo ziwo andother words has been established only recently in the process of trans-

6 INTRODUCTION Language and ross ulturalStudies


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lat ion and fIxed by means of modern bilingual dictionariesY Thus anylinkages that exist derive from historical coincidences whose meaningsare contingent on the politics of translingual practice. Once such linkagesare established, a text becomes translatable in the ordinary sense of theword. The point I want to s tress here, and i t cannot be stressed enough,is that serious methodological problems arise when a cross-cultural comparative theory is built upon the basis of an essential category, such asself or individual, whose linguistic identity transcends the history oftranslation and imposes its own discursive priority on a different culture. 1:The assumed homogeneity between ji wo or ziwo and self inevitablyblots out the history of each word and the history of translation of selfin modern Chinese, inasmuch as difference cannot be conceived at theontological level without fIrst presenting itself at the constitutive levelwhere the question of linguistic transaction mus t be brought in. In arecent commentary on Leibniz s Letter on the Natural Theology of theChinese, Haun Saussy points out that mutual translatability between twolanguages can be assured only after the little word is has been strippedof its meaning. Once the thing has been taken out of being, there is no tmuch left for ontologists to disagree about. 17

In the past decade or so, philosophers, anthropologists, and sociologists have discussed whether the notions of the self, person, and individual, however defmed and however unstable, shouldcontinueto be usedas analytical categories in the face of poststructuralist critiques. CharlesTaylor, for example, has devoted several studies to the problems of self,identity, and language in Western philosophy, and his notions of agency,human signifIcance, and public space of disclosure have attracted muchattention in the West latelyYI His Sources of the elf in particular, attemptsto challenge the deconstructive critique of the Western notions of subjectivity by seeking a multilayered historical understanding of the self in theWest. Taylor s approach to th e genesis of modern identity and his broadvision and integrative thinking have been eagerly embraced by scholarsacross a.wide array of fields and disciplines. But, what seems to be apromising sign of intervention into deconstruction at one level turns outto reaffirmJudaeo-Christian values at another. This comes out strongly inTaylor s ethical thinking, when he allows the ]udaeo-Christian traditiouto layexclusive claim to the ideals of the good. Although the author neverloses sight of the historical meanings of these ideals per se, he t ends tode-emphasize certain levels of historical practice being associated with orperformed in the name of these ideals. 9 One senses a strongly evangelicalmove as the book closes with a moralistic telos: the hope of man s moral

redemption, we are told, res ides in Judaeo-Christian theism (howeverterrible the record of i ts adheren ts in h is to ry ), and in its centr-al promiseof a divine affirmation of the human, more total than humans can everattain unaided (p. 521). If the violence of history can be thus containedand suppressed by parentheses, one wonders if the very ground for criticalthinking does not drop from sight altogether. 2

Why should the self be an analytical category in the fm t place? I t isquite possible t o behuman, t o t hi nk in a human manner without any particular notions of the person. British scholar Steven Collins s critiqueof the philosophical categoty of the sel fopens a new horizon for the possibility of grounding the notion of the person and self in the practice ofmodern academic disciplines. In a re-evaluation of the Annee Sociologieschool, he points out that although Durkheim and Marcel Mauss , whoemphasize an empirical or sociological approach, speak of categories developing and changing, both rely on Kantian philosophical categories tobegin with. Thus, even as empirical science compels Mauss to formulatea non-essentialist notion of the person, he nonetheless allows the sense ofthe self to stand as an overriding, philosophical category. I f the categoryis necessary and universal , and so in a sense a prior i, Collins observes,then injust this sense it cannot have a history. 21

This concern is shared by a number of o ther Bri ti sh and Frenchanthropologists who participate in rethinking the legacy of the AnneeSociologie school, especially the impact of Mauss s famous 1938 essay, ACategory of the Human Mind: The Notion of the Person; the NotionofSelf. n These scholars criticize Mauss s Eurocentrism and problematicuse of philosophical categories for their universalist pretensions and try tograpple with the double bind of what Mart in Holl is calls t he historicaland analytic category of the person in their own scholarship.23 In doingso, they effectively highlight the historical conditions under which theself, person, and individual have come to be established and naturalized asanalytical categories in the Western academy.

For many reasons, this kind of self-reflexive critique has done little tochange the disciplinary practice of mainstream scholarship; people continue to .rely on the categories of the self, person, and individual to accessknowledge about the authentic identity of another culture as opposedto their own totalized self-perception. The knowledge obtained this waycannot bu t be tautological: either non-Western cultures are deficient inconcepts of the self, person, and individual; or their concepts essentiallydiffer from their Western counterparts. My question is whether the precondition for this kind of knowledge exists before the categories them-

8 INTRODUCTION Language and ross ulturalStudies 9


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Steiner s observation runs the risk of oversimplifying the situationof translation theory, bu t it is a risk worth taking because it raises issuesthat more than compensate for its reductive approach. Focusing on theways in which the perennial question of translatability has been asked intranslation theories, Steiner offers a historical critique of the metaphysical foundation of Western philosophical tradition and, in par ti cu la r, i tsuniversalist notion of language. Hi s criticism brings a widely held assumption into quest ion, namely, that

translation theory in the West into four periods. The fIrst period, characterized by an immediate empirical focus, extends from Cicero s Libellus deoptima genere oralontrn of 46 B.C. and Horace s reiteration of this formulai n t he Ars poetica some twenty years later all the way to H61derlin s commentary on his own translations of Sophocles in 1804. The second stageis one of theory and hermeneutic inquiry initiated by Friedrich Schleiermacher s decisive essay UbeY die verschiedenen Methoden des Ubersetzens 1813)and taken np by A. W Schlegel, Hnmboldt, Goethe, Schopenhancr, EzraPound, Walter Benjamin, and others. After this age of philosophic-poetictheory, Russian and Czech scholars, heirs to the Formalist movement,in troduced the third period of translation theory by applying structurallinguistics and informa tion theory to the discussion of interlingual exchange. Andrei Fedorov s Introduction to the Theory of Translation Vvedenie teoriiu perevoda; Moscow, 1953) is representative of this collaborative scientific effort. Somewhat overlapping with the scientific stage-a necessarycontradiction in Steiner s attempt to periodize-the fourth period beginsin the early 1960 S when the rediscovery of Walter Benjamin s paper D ieAufgabe des Obersetzers (The task of the translator), originally pnblished in 1923, together with the influence of Heidegger and Hans-GeorgGadamer, caused a reversion to hermeneutic inquiries into translation andinterpretation. 30 Although Steiner s periodization may well be disputed,his cri tical survey provides remarkable insights into some of the majorconcerns with the theories of translation examined by his book.J \ Forinstance he argues that

all theories of translation-formal, pragmatic, chronological-are only variants ofa single, inescapable question. Inwhat ways can or ought fidelity to beachieved? What is the optimal correlation between the A text in the sourcclanguage and the B textin the receptor-language? The issue has been debatedfor over two thousand years. But is there anything of substance to add toSaint Jerome s statement of the alternatives: verbum e verba word by word inthe case of the mysteries, but meaning by meaning, sed sensum exprirnere deset sus everywhere else? (pp.261-62)

arlguage and Cross-Cultural Studies

In translating into English, the Hopi will say that these entities in process ofcausation will come or that they-the Hopi- will come to them butt ~ e i r own lang:lage, there are no verbs corresponding to OUr come : andgo that n:ean ~ l m p l e and abstract motion, our purely kinematic concept.words I? case.translated come refer to the process of eventuating

wahout callmg It motIon-they are eventuates to here petv i) or eventuate: from i ~ a l J ~ q o ) or arrived pitu, pI ok which refers only to thetermInal mamfestatlOn, the actual arrival at a given point , not to any motionpreceding it.32

the underlying structure of language is universal and common to all menDissimilarities between human tongues are essentially of the surface. r a n s ~la.tion. is realizable precisely because those deep-seated universals, genetic,hlstoncal, socia l fr?m which all grammars derive can be located and recognIzed as operatIve m every human idiom, however singular or bizarre itssuperfiCIal forms. To translate is to descend beneath the exterior disparitiesof two languages in order to bring into vital play their analogous and, at thefinal depths, common principles of being. (p .73)Is ~ t e i n e r o v e r s t a t . i ~ g his case? Readers might object that Sapir and

Whorf s .cultural relativism can hardly fit into this totalizing picture; in[ 1Ct Sapir and Whorf were ben t on undermining a universalist understanding of language and reality. According t o t he ir familiar theses, notwo l a n g ~ a g e s sufficiently similar to be considered as representing thesame.soClal reahty, and different societies live in distinct, linguistically de tl. rmmed worlds, no t the same world that happens to have different labelsattached to it. This metalinguistics of thought worlds or cultural relativism, which aspires to a universal condition in its own way , has comeunder attack on various intel lectual fronts , empirical and philosophical ,from ethnographers and linguists. What interests me here is no t t he validity of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis about the linguistic worldview ofa gi.ven communi ty , but an undisputed area of intellectual thinking in habIted by both universalists and cultural relativists, One that predicates a

n ~ ~ d e of knowledge on translation while ostensibly contesting the possibtlity of translation. This contradiction simply brings in the o ld questionof t ~ a n s l a t a b i l i t y and untranslatability through the back door, as the followmg passage from Wharf illustrates very well:

~ 1 3 y performing. a literal translation between English and Hopi on th e;Ipot, thc author inadvertently undermines his own theory of well-defined

p O l l ~ d a r i e s of ethno-linguistic communities. One might want to ask, fol~ w m g Steiner, i f languages were monads with essentially discordantmappmgs of reality, how then could we communicate interlingually?

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INTRODUCTION janguage and Cross Cultural StudiesNot surprisingly, Bible translation serves as the pro to type or the idealof all translation. J' In his desire to rid translation of its indebtedness tothe original text, Benjamin reveals, wittingly or not, his own profoundindebtedness to the story ofBabel.

But can the Babel story not be questioned on its own ground? Hasthe story itselfnot been translated into and read in numerous tongues and,therefore, always already contradicted the myth of the origin? Derridaraises this question in his essay DesTours de Babel . Through a complementary re-reading of Maurice de Gandillac's French translation ofBenjamin, he offers a deconstructionist approach to the problematic oftranslation theory. He reminds us t hat the i rony surrounding the storyof Babel is that on e pays little attention to this fact: i t is in translationthat we mos t often read this narrative and yet one continues to reiter;\tc the impossibility of translation: t Here we have come full circle fromthe double bind of Jakobson s example of tradl ltore traditore with the vitalexception that the structural linguist's concern with the original and itsuntranslatability is now replaced by a fundamental questioning of themetaphysical status of the original and originary text.

Benjamin s notion of complementarity thus acquires a fresh p o r ~tance in Derrida s reconsideration of the concepts of origin, intention,'and the relations between the languages involved in translation processes.That is to say, translation is no longera matter of transferring meaning between languages within the horizon of an absolutely pure, transparent,and unequivocal translatability. 'H The original and translation complement each other to produce meanings larger than mere copies or reproduction: These languages relate to onc another in translation according

an unheard-of-mode. They complete each other, says Benjamin; bu t no:(othcr completeness in the world can represent thi s one, or that symboliccomplementarity. 42 In this sense, the question of translatability/untrans:Iatability that earlier theorists and structural linguists have raised becomes moot point. The irreducible multiplicityoflanguages cannot be reducedito anything other than i tself, and yet , l ike proper names, these languages: rc bound to call for interpretation, translation, and complementarity.

abel and God are examples of such names that simultaneously command forbid one to translate.

Derrida s reading of Benjamin leads to a radical rethinking of theroblcmatic of translation theory in the manner of what Steiner wouldl the mode of philosophic-poetic inquiry in the contemporary West.ere translation becomes an oxymoron: inasmuch as nothing can be re\lccd to anything else and translation cannot but say one thing in terms

14How could we acquire a second tongue or traverse into another languageworld by means of translation? ]] To push these questions further in thedirection of a politics of interlingual transaction, it seems that the verytheoretical language that helped Whorf arrive at his conclusion that Hopicould no t be understood except on its own terms sOInehow also entitledhim to a free translation of this exotic language to an English-speakingaudience.Perhaps, it would be useful to turn to Walter Benjamin's essay TheTask of theTranslator at this point, for not only is Benjamin self-reflexiveabout his role as a practicing translator but his formulation of crosslinguistic communication fol lows a new mode of inquiry that promisesto t ake us outside the familiar terrain of universalism and cultural relativism. The essay in question, which prefaces Benjamin s translation ofBaudelaire's Tableaux parisiens is an a tt empt to rethink the question oftranslatability beyond the problematic of the original and translated text.T he question of whether a work is translatable has a dual meaning, saidBenjamin, Either: Will an adequate translation ever be found among thetotality of its readers? Or, more pertinently: Does its nature lend itself totranslation and, therefore , in view of the signifIcance of the mode, callfor i t? 34 He dismissed the factor of readers ' reception or the ideal receiver as a useful approach to the theoretical issues under question. Inhis view, the original in the source language and its translation in thc receptor language must yield to a third concept, die reine Sprache o r purelanguage, which no longer means or expresses anything bu t is, aspressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages':' 3JThis conceptualization may be said to anticipate French deconstructIvetheory in its displacement of the notions of fIdelity, originality, presence,and authenticity, which explains Benjamin's popularity among poststructuralists in ourown timeYi But there are tensions in his thought that seemt o point away from deconstructionist concerns toward something else.For instance, Benjamin stated that the tdos of t ranslation is the possibility of God s messianic return. 37 The messianic troping Benjamin usedthroughout his essay must be taken seriously because it suggests important linkages between his thinking and the earlier theoretical theologicalconcerns that Steiner describes. What is pure language? t binds both theoriginal and translation to Holy Writ and belongs to the realm of God sremembrancewhere the original and translation co-exist in acomplementary relat ionship (Derrida later picks up the idea of complementarity).t is in this sense that the translatability of linguistic creations ought

bl I h 3 8to be considered even if men should prove una e to trans ate t rn


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of another, the cpistemic violence is committedout of necessity-a condition that circumscribes cognitive understanding itselfand must, therefore,be grasped in its proper context. Through Benjamin, Derrida is able tocontribute new insights to an old problematic in his powerful critiqueof Western metaphysics. But precisely because his attention is fixed onWestern metaphysics, his critique cannot break away f rom the hold ofthe object of his cri t ique to allow him to ask such mundane questionsas How does hypothetical equivalence get established and maintained between concrete languages? What needs arc served by such acts of equationhistorically? These are not just technical or linguistic issues that one mayhope to resolve in a case-by-case study ; rather, they point t o f orms ofpractice and power that deserve our foremost attention in cross-culturaland translingual inquiries.Perhaps the thing to do is go beyond the deconstructionist stage oftrying to prove that equivalents do not exist and look, instead, into theirmanner becoming For it is the making of hypothetical equivalences thatenables the modus operandi of translation and its politics. For instance,historically when and how do equivalents or tropes of equivalence getestablished between languages? Is it possible that at certain levels of practice sonle equivalents might cease to be mere illusions? What enables suchchanges? Under what conditions does difference, which is the perceivedground for the inscript ion of equivalence, become translatable in otherwords ? When we are confronted with languages that are radically different from Indo-European languages, such as classical and modern vernacular Chinese, in what terms should that difference be conceptualizedfor the purpose of understanding translation and translingual practice?

Steiner, for example, gives an interesting description of the Chineselanguage a l anguage he d id not know) i n o rder to illustrate what hetakes to be the radical difference of a non-European language. Chineseis composed mainly of monosyllabic units with a wide range of diversemeanings. The grammar lacks clear tense distinctions. The characters arelogographic but many contain pictorial rudiments or suggestions. The relations between propositions are paratactic rather than syntactic and punctuat ion marks represent breathing pauses far more than they do logicalor grammatical segmentations. Somewhat curious about the sources ofinformation Steiner uses here, I checked the art ic le he cites , which waswritten by Achilles Fang, a renowned sinologist in the 1950's and 1 9 6 ~ sA quick comparison of the two texts reveals that Fang's discussion, whlChaddresses the difficulty of translating classical Chinese shi and w n is taken

17anguage and Cross Cultural Studiesout of its immediate context and used by Steiner to generalize about theChinese language. To be sure, Fang wonld probably have never used theverb lack to characterize classical Chinese vis-a.-vis European languagesor describe Chinese as composed of monosyllabic units any more than hewould say Indo-European languages were full of redundant grammaticalunits. In the context of his outdated essay, entitled Some Reflections onthe Difficulty of Translation, Fang stressed the need for a translator ofclassical Chinese texts to attend to the elements of rhetoric, quotation andallusion, sentiment, punctuation, parataxis, particles, context , and so on.He brought up the question of grammar in criticizing sinologists w hostill think Chinese (classical Chinese) is a 'language' in the conventionalsense. Interestingly, Steiner overlooks the implied critique of the Western notion of language, which might have proved useful in strengthening his own critique of the Western philosophy of language. Of course,in order to create a genuine confrontation between these languages, onelIot only needs a firsthand knowledge of the languages involved, but mustguard vigilantly against easily assuming an equivalence between any pairof words, idioms, or languages.

But a question lingers: Can we talk about an uncontaminated Chinese notion of language in English? And can we do so even in Chinese in

. the wake of all that has happened in the past one and a halfcenturies? Languages change, and Chinese is no exception. Since the latter half of thenineteenth century, massive (unidirectional) interactions between Chinese, Japanese, and modern European languages have taken place. If Chinese remains one of the most diffIcult languages to translate, the chances

, a fC that the difficulty lies in the growing number of hypothetical equiva:\lents between Chinese and other languages, rather than the lack thereof.:Modern Chinese words and concepts as well as those f rom the c1assi

~ c l l n g u g e which are increasingly mediated through modern Chinese,i:,often present hidden snares, even though on the surface they seem relatively transparent. Edward Gunn s recent writiflg Chinese offers some:'brilliant insights in this respect by documenting the major innovat ions,in modern Chinese prose s ty le s ince the turn of the twentieth century.;,His detai led sty list ic analysis reveals, for example, that as many as 21outof the 44 major types of innovations that he categorizes according to:thc criteria of grammatical construction, rhetorical invention, and sen,cuce cohesion result from exposure to European languages and Japanesehrough translation.4

In the area of loanword studies, mainland Chinese linguists Gao

INTRODUCTION16


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Mingkai and Liu Zhengtan have identified 1,266 onetimeneologisms thatare now part of the mainstream vocabulary of modern Chinese; of these459 compounds were borrowed from J


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Traveling Theory and the Postcolonial Critique

using the one or the other as an absolute category of analysis. My pointcan be stated simply: a cross-cultural study must examine its own condition of possibility. Constituted as a translingual act itself, it enters, ratherthan sits above, the dynamic history of the relationshipbetween words,concepts, categories, and discourse. One way of unraveling that relationship is to engage rigorously with those words, concepts, categories, anddiscourses beyond the realm of common sense, dictionary defmition, andeven historical linguistics.

First, there is t he point of origin, o r wha t seems l ike one , a set of initialcircumstances in which the idea came to birth or entered discourse. Second,there is a distancetransversed, a passage through the pressure of various contexts as the idea moves from an earlier point to another time and place whereit will come into a new prominence. Third, there is a se t of conditionscall them conditions of acceptance or, as an inevitable part of acceptance,resistances-which then confronts the transplanted theory or idea, makingpossible its introduction or toleration, however alien it might appear to be.Fourth, the now full (or partly) accommodated (or incorporated) idea is tosome extent transformed by its new uses, its new posi t ion in a new t ime andplaceY:

21anguage and Cross Cultural StudiesIlaving introduced his general framework, Said then examines the intellectual development of three majorMarxian literary critics, Georg Lukacs,Lucien Goldmann, and Raymond Williams, with Foucault t hrown intoward the end, and measures the career of each critic against his historical environment. For some inexplicable reason, however, his discussiondocs not go beyond the usual argument that theory is always a response tochanging social and historical circumstances, and the traveling aspect ofhis theory is abandoned along the way. As I tried to figure out an explanation for this, i t occurred to me that perhaps the notion itself lacked thekind of intellectual rigor needed for its own fulfillment. Indeed, who doesthe traveling? Does theory travel? If so, how?Granting theory suchsubjectivity leads to a further question: What is the means of transportation? Isit the aircraft, automobile, rickshaw, train, man-of-war, or space shuttle?Commenting on Said s oversight,James Cliffordsuggests that LukacsianMarxism in his essay seems to travel by immigrant boat; theory nowadaystakes the plane, sometimes with round-tr ip tickets. I would take thispoint a step further: not only does the concept of traveling theory tend toaffirm the primacy of theory (or Western theory in the context of Said sbook) by endowing the latter with full-fledged, mobile subjectivity, bu t itfails to account for the vehicle of translation. With the suppression of thatvehicle, travel becomes such an abstract idea that i t makes no differencein which direction theory travels (from West to East or vice versa) andfor what purpose (cultural exchange, imperialism, or colonization?), or inwhich language and for what audience.

is no t as if Said has paid little attention to the question of transla ~ i o n elsewhere. In fact, his widely influential Orientalisrt and laterwritings; al tackle the representation and translation of cultural difference in the: prientalist textual tradition of the West, and Said himself has become a ~ e d i n g contemporary critic of the history of colonialism, imperialism,and ethnocentrism in the West. 5R I t is i ronic, therefo re , that his notionp traveling theory is generally interpreted as if theory (read Westerntheory) were a hero f rom a European picaresque narrative who initiateshe trip, encounters obstacles en route, and always ends up being accom

~ o t e one way or another by the host country.59 Inasmuch as languageransact ion is always a con tested terr i tory in national and internationaltruggles, one must rethink one s priorities in theorizing the migration ideas and theory and ask what role translation and related practices

~ a y in the construction of relations of power between the so-called Firsthd Third worlds. Indeed, what happens when languages meet during theast-West encounter? Are the relations of power between the two always

INTRODUCTION

What happens when a word, category, or discourse travels fromone language to another? In nineteenth-century colonial and imperialistdiscourse, the travel of ideas and theories from Europe to the rest of theworld usually evoked notions of expansion, enlightenment, progress, andteleological history. In recent years, the move to historicize and decolonizeknowledge in various academic disciplines has led to a growing number ofstudies that scrutinize these notions. The word travel is no longer seenas innocent and is often put in quotation marks. Edward Said s notionof traveling theory has gained wide circulation in the past decade andis worth critical reflection here. This notion registers a tendency t o pushcontemporary Marxian theory beyond some of its dominant lllode1s, suchas the mode of production, consumption, and the like, to arriveat a morefluid sense of literary practice. With t he help of what he terms crit i cal consciousness -a notion ill-defined but daring enough to evoke aspace beyond (not outside) theory-Said introduces a concept of literary practice that emphasizes creative borrowing, appropriation, and themovement of ideas and theories from place to place in an internationalenvironment. 55 Apropos of the manner in which theories and ideas travel,Said sees four main stages:


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Here the notion of discourse is of methodological value. The assumptionis that ideas and ideologies expressing as well as informing colonial praxisare formulated and perpetuated and occasionally changed) in ways of talking and writing about the oeuvre civilisatrice. In interpreting this sort of talkas discourse one is less interested in the truth value of specific statements,in the question, for instance, whether a certain author really expressed his

The study of language has acquired a fresh urgency in these varioushistorical projects . Words, texts , discourse, and vocabulary enter one sscholarship as veritable historical accounts per se, not just as sources ofhistorical information about something more important than themselves.Obviously, Foucault s work has greatly influenced this line of thinkingamong those who study former European colonies in Asia, America, andAfrica. For example, in research on the relationship between colonial control and the use of Swahili as a lingua franca in the former Belgian Congo,anthropologist Johannes Fabian expounds the relevance of the Foucaultiannotion of discourse to his own work:

reducible to patterns of domination and resistance? Is the cultural criticno t risking too much for granting too little t o the agency of non-Westernlanguages in these transactions?

Recent work in poststructuralist and postcolonial studies has initiatedan important rethinking of the problem of language and translation inhistorical terms. The idea of historicity used in this body of scholarship ispitted against teleological History written with a capitalH. It emphasizes,instead, effective history, an idea borrowed from Nietzsche wirklicheHistorie and Gadamer Wirkungsgeschichte that refers to the par t of the pastthat is s till operative and meaningful in the present. This understanding of historicity enables postcolonial critics to raise questions about theeffective history of the text: Who uses/interprets the text? How is itused, and for what? 61 Inputting their questions this way, these critics arenot t rying to reduce his tory to texts, but are emphasizing texts as socialfacts like any other facts, capable of being deployed for political or ideological purposes. As Mary Louise Pratt puts i t in a recent study of travelwriting and European colonialism:

How has travel and exploration writing produced the rest of the world forEuropean readerships at particular points in Europe s expansionist trajectory? How has it produced Europe s differentiated conceptions of itself inrelation to something it became possible to call the rest of the world ?How do such signifying practices encode and legitimate the aspirations ofeconomic expansion and empire? How do they betray them?62

23anguage and Cross-Cultural Studiesconvictions, gave an accurate report of facts and so on. Instead one seeksto appreciate the documentary value of a style by discerning key notions,rules of combining these and theoretical devices used to build arguments. Inshort, one concentrateson elements which determined the shape and contentof colonial thought irrespective of individual intentions.63Fabian s analysis of Swahili language manua ls and other colonial

documents relating to Katanga demonstrates that promotion of this language was a vi ta l part of the promotion of the symbolic power of thecolonial administration.64 One might object that there is nothing newabout languages being used to serve political and ideological goals.65 Bu tFabian raises an important question by placing language practice at theheart of colonial history whilelinking that effective history with a seriesof genealogies of imperialist expansion and of the development of modern linguistics and anthropology as scientific disciplinesyi For instance,he r eminds us tha t one of the earliest linguistic undertakings to includeAfrican and Asian languages for comparative research in Europe was anambitious collection of vocabularies called Linguarum totitls orbis vocabulariacomparativa , a project conceived and initiated by Catherine the Great,Empress of Russia, and completed by Peter Simon Pallas (Moscow, 1787nnd 1789). Vocabulary lists were sent to the governors of the Russian empire t o be f orwa rded to official interpreters and translators and, through

, Russian ambassadors in Madrid, London, and the Hague, they reached: Spanish, English, and Dutch colonies, and even China. GeorgeWashing(ton took a personal interest and asked the governors of the United States\to participate in the coHection of materia1.67 Thus translations were rel,karded as official business and the wordlists became documents of state, itncssed to with stamps and signatures. oR In a recent study of colonial India and postcoloniality, Tejaswini

iranjana raises a similar point about translation and sees it as part ofhe colonial discourse ofOrientalism and British efforts to obtain infor, at ion about the people ruled by the merchants of the East India Comany. She defmes colonial discourse as the body of knowledge, modesrepresentation, strategies of power, law, discipline, and so on, that

e employed in the construction and domination of colonial subjects.nsed on an interesting re-reading of Benjamin, de Man , and Der rida ,c proposes a postcolonial concept of translation and history and stresses.c linkage between the two i n t he desire to re-translate and to r elite history. To read existing translations against the grain, she says,, also to read colonial historiography from a post-colonial perspective,

INTRODUCTION2


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Rafael's insight is important. His acute understanding of the complexities of linguistic transaction between East and West is no t withoutsome relevance to the concept of translingual practice I discuss here.72However, the idea of resistance and subversion that runs throughout his

For in set t ing languages in motion, transla tion tended to cast intentionsadrift, now laying, now subverting the ideological grounds of colonial hegemony. The necessity of employing the native vernaculars in spreading theWord of God constrained the universalizing assumptions and totalizing impulses of a colonial-Christian order. is this contradiction precipitated bytranslation that we see played out in the history of Tagalog conversion.71

and a cri tic alert to the ruses of colonial discourse can help uncover whatWalter Benjamin calls the second tradition,' the history of resistance. 69Niranjana s re-reading of colonial discourse is enabled by what she callsa post-colonial perspective. But in the course of doing so, she unwittingly privileges European languages as a host language (or target lang u ~ g where meanings are decided. If the postcolonial critic continues toemphasize European languages in these accounts of East-West linguistictransactions and to leave the unspoken part of that history story unaddressed, how farcan she go toward fulfilling her own promise of rewritinghistory? Th e irony is that one often remembers only to forget. By refreshing our memories of the past crimes committed by imperialism, thepostcolonial critic inadvertently erases traces of the previous histories ofanti-imperialist s truggle to which he or she rightly belongs.o Why areMao and Gandhi often forgotten as Derrida or Benjamin is evoked asthe oppositional voice to the hegemony of the West? If poststructuralismis the driving force that gives a new impetus and new meaning to thecontemporary criticism of colonialism and imperialism, t hen one musttake account of the fact that the cri tique of cultural imperialism has itsown genealogies and has long been part of the anti-imperialist legacies ofnon-Western peoples.

What happens when a European text gets t rans la ted into a nonEuropean language? Can the power relationship between East and West bereinvented (ifno t reversed) in that case? If so, how?These are the questionsthat Vicente Rafael has tried to address in his study of Spanish evangelization and the emergence of Tagalog colonial society in the Philippines. Hecompares the different modes of translation in Tagalog and Castilian andshows that this difference greatly complicated the process of native conversion and often confounded the missionaries' expectations. Somethinginteresting happens when two languages are brought into confrontationin these moments:

anguage and ross ultural Studiesbook and prevails in current postcolonial theory in general needs a criticalre-examination. To the extent that the postcolonial critic wishes to decolonize certain kinds of knowledge that have dominated the world forthe past few hundred years, resistance describes his or her own conditionof being just as much as it does that of the colonial world s/he describes.Uut the same idea also runs the risk of reducing the power relationshipbetween East and West to that of native resistance and Western domination, as I point out above.73 There is a certain amount ofdanger in reifyingthe patterns of resistance and domination, however complicated they are,a long the East/West divide, since the boundaries between the two arefrequently permeable and subject to changing conditions. As Lisa Loweputs i t well i nhe r critique of the notions ofOccident and Orient, Whenwe maintain a static dualism of identity and difference, and uphold thelogic of the dualism as the means of explaining how a discourse expressesdomination and subordination, we fail to account for the differences in herent in each term. 74 In my own study of translingual practice, I arguethat a non European language does no t automatically constitute a site ofresistance to European languages. Rather, I see it as a much neglected areawhere complex processes of domination, resistance, and appropriationcan be observed and interpreted from within the discursive context of thatlanguage as well as in connection with other linguistic environments.

Host Language and Guest LanguageIn the following pages I propose the notion of translingual practice to

ground my study of an earlier moment of historical transaction betweenChina and the West in language practices. Since the modern intellectualtradition in China began with translation, adaptation, appropriation, andother interlingual practices related to the West, it is inevitable that this

rinquiry should take translation as its point of departure. Van Fu s inter: pretive translation of Thomas Huxley s volut on and Ethics (1898) andother Western texts had an enormous impact on China and helped fash. ion an entire generat ion ofChinese intelligentsia. In literature, Lin Shu simmensely popular renderings of over a hundred foreign works into l it erary Chinese predated publication of Lu Xun s fust modern shor t s tory(19[8) by many years. Literary historian A Ying (Qian Xingcun) esti,mates that of t he at least 1,500 published works of fiction in the las tdecade of the Qing, two-thirds are translations of foreign literature andmany are English and French works. (The word translation should be

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understood here as a shorthand for adaptation, appropriation, and otherrelated translingual practices .) As several s tudies have pointed out, therise of modern journalism and major publishing businesses such as theCommercial Press in China s metropolitan centers had a direct bearing onthe growing popularity of translated literature.78 The majority of modern Chinese writers fIrst tried their hand at translation and then movedon to o ther literary activities. 79 Xlln translated numerous Russian andJapanese works into Chine se , and his very f ir st book, a collaborationwith his brother Zhou Zuoren dur ing their student days in Japan , wasa collection of translations called Yuwai xiaoshuo (Anthology of foreignfiction; IgOg flO Throughout his life, he translated and encouraged translation of foreign works and continued to do so after he stopped writingfICtion. Among other well-known figures in May Fourth literature, YuDafu translated Rousseau, and Guo Moruo s rendering of Goethe s DieLeiden des jungen Werthers into the modern vernacular became a bestselleramong urban youths.

However, I must hasten to add tha t the point of translingual practiceis no t to study the history of translation, much less the technical aspectsof translation, although one could benefit from excursions into the one orthe other.81 I am interested in theoretical problems that lead up to an investigation of the condition translation and of discursive practices that ensuefrom initial interlingual contacts between languages. Broadly defmed, thestudy of translingual practice examines the process by which new words,meanings, discourses, and modes of representation arise, circulate, andacquire legitimacy within the hos t language due to, or in spite of, thelatter s contact collision with the guest language. Meanings, therefore,are no t so much transformed when concepts pass from the guest language to the host language as invented within the local environment of thelatter. In that sense, translation is no longer a neutral event untouched bythe contending interests of political and ideological struggles. Instead, itbecomes the very site of such struggles where the guest language is forcedto encounter the host language, where the irreducible differences betweenthem are fought out, authorities invoked or challenged, ambiguities dis-solved or created, and so forth, unti l new words and meanings emergein the host language itself. I hope the notion of translingual practice willeventually lead to a theoretical vocabulary that helps account for the process of adaptation, translation, introduction, and domestication of words,categories, discourses, and modes of representation from one language toanother and, furthermore, helps explain the modes of transmission, manipulation, deployment, and domination within the power structure of

Theory Change Neologisms and Discursive Histories

27anguage and Cross Cultural Studies

is my contention tha t the study of modern Chinese history must kc the history of translingual practice into account. The prominence ofthe problem of language in the Chinese imagination of modernity can

the host language. My goal is to reconceptualize the problematic of language in a new set of relationships that is not predicated on some of thefamiliar premises of contemporary theories of language, which tend totake metropolitan European tongues as a point of departure.

A word of explanation about some of the terms I u se here. If it istrue that the translator or some other agent in the host language alwaysinitiates the linguistic transaction by inviting, selecting, combining, andrcinventing words and texts from the guest language and, moreover, ifthe needs of the translator and his/her audience together determine andncgotiate the meaning i.e., usefulness) of the text taken from the guestlanguage, then the terms traditional theorists of translation usc to designate the languages involved in translation, such as source and target/receptor, are not only inappropriate but misleading. The idea of sourcelanguage often relies on concepts of authenticity, origin, influence, ands o on, and has the disadvantage of re-introducing the age-old problematic of translatability/ untranslatability into the discussion. On the otherhand, the notion of target language implies a teleological goal, a distanceto be crossed in order to reach the plenitude of meaning; it thus misrepresents the ways in which the trope of equivalence is conceived in thehost language, relegating its agency to secondary importance. Instead of

. continuing to subscribe to such metaphysical concerns perpetuated by thenaming of a source and a target , I adopt the notions host language andllguest language in this book the Chinese equivalents, zhJdal lg yuyal l andk ~ r n yuyan would even more radically alter the relationship between theoriginal and translation), which should allow me to place more emphasis on the host language than i t has heretofore received. In this light, the

~ n o w l e g e power dyad thatTalal Asad so lucidly describes in the passagequoted at the beginning of this chapter should be re-examined, for hisdescription overlooks the possibility that a non-European host languagemay violate, displace, and usurp the authority of the guest language in theprocess of translation as well as be transformed by it o r be in complicitywith it. These complex forms of mediations during the historical contact between China and the West are the main concerns of the individual,chapters in this book.

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hardly be disputed. What is so modern about modern Chinese historyand literature? asks Leo Ou-fan Lee in a recent article. I n what ways didthe May Fourth generation, and their predecessors, attempt to define theirdifference f rom the past and art iculate a new range of sensibilities whichthey would consider moclern ? 82 Indeed, the quoted statns of the wordmodern highlighted here by Lee alerts one to the quest ion of translated modernity in the history of translingual practice between China andthe West. Rather than continuing to argue about tradition and modernityas essential categories, one is compelled to ask How do twentieth-centuryChinese name the condition of their existence? What kind of language dothey use in talking about their differences from whatever contingent identities they perceive as existing before their own time or being imposedfrom the outside? What rhetorical strategies, discursive formations, naming practices, legitimizing processes, tropes, and narrative modes impingeupon the historical conditions of the Chinese experience of the modern?

The problem of methodology in Chinese historical studies has notgone unexaminedin the past decades. For example, in a r ~ t i q u of American historicalwritings about China sinceJohn Fairbank andJoseph Levenson, Paul Cohen urges historians to rethink their priorities in explainingthe recent changes in Chinese history. He focuses on three dominant conceptual paradigms in his book Discovering History it ChirJa and suggestsan alternative he terms the China-centered approach. To summarize hispoignant criticism in a somewhat reductive fashion, the impact-responsetheory, the fIrst of the three paradigms he discusses, emphasizes China sresponse to the Western challenge and often prompts historians to defineaspects of recent Chinese history that h ad no obvious connections withthe Western presence as unimportant-or, alternatively, as important onlyinsofar as t hey shed l ight on China s response to the West. The second of these approaches-the tradition-modernity model-has deep rootsin nineteenth-century ethnocentrism and imposes on Chinese history anexternal-parochially Western-definition of what change is and whatkinds of change are important. The thi rd , or the imperialism, approachfalls into t he ahistorical trap of assuming for Chinese his tory a naturalo r normal course of development with which Western (and later Japanese) imperialism interfered. f As a corrective to the above, Cohen drawsa tt en tion to the work of a younger generation of China historians whohave turned to a China-centered approach. In his view, thi s approach hasthe advantage of avoiding imported criteria by beginning with Chineseproblems set in a Chinese context, whether these problems are generatedby the West or have no Western connection at alL

29anguage and ross ultural StudiesThis new approach, which effectively challenges the established way

of writing Chinese history, has important implications for literary studiesas welL Instead of continuing to do so-called influence studies in the timehonored sense of comparative literature, one could stress the agency ofthe host language (modern Chinese in this case) in the meaning-makingprocess of t ranslat ion so that the guest language need not carry a signature of authenticity around in order to make sense in the new context.On the other hand, at least in sinological studies, one can afford to beChina-centered without ceasing t o adopt the Western-centered perception ofwhat is important or unimportant for scholarship. I am remindedof a cri ti ci sm Rey Chow made some time ago: In sinology and Chinese studies, where the emphases on heritage are clearly immovable, thehomage to the West has long been paid in the form ofwhat seems t o b e itsopposite-in the idealist insistence on a separate, self-sufficient Chinesetradition that should be lined up against theWestern one because it is asgreat ifnot greater. The rejection of theWest in this instance is solemnlyrespectful; by upholding China, i t repeats the hegemonic overtones ofthat which is rejected. 84

Indeed, to draw a clear l ine between the indigenous Chinese and theexogenous Western in the la te twentieth century is almost an epistemological impossibility. The fact that one writes about China for an Englishspeaking academic audience further complicates the situation. Interest-

ingly, the theoret ical impulse for the China-centered approach does no t originate in China but draws its inspiration from the works of objectivist, sociologists and anthropologists in the contemporary West who empha-, size the regional approach as a more valid one t han those they have

~ d i s r e d i t e d As Pierre Bourdieu aptly puts it, What is at s take here is~ t h power of imposing a vis ion of the social world through principles of di-vision which, when they are imposed on a whole group, establishmeaning and a consensus about meaning, and in particularabout the iden.ilty and unity of the group, which creates rhe reality of the unity and the

~ d n t i t y of the group. 85 In other words, regionalist discourse is a perforativc discourse that seeks to legitimate a new definition of the frontiershereby the region a reali ty thus named, becomes the site of the struggleo tifine reality, rather than simply the reality itself. It is not difficult to

.ee that the theoretical frontiers in this case are, once again, set and framed) contemporaryWestern academic discourses.86: Consider, on the other hand, the situation in,which one does histori:graphy strictlyfor a Chinese academic audience in the Chinese language.ould one no t be using a language already thoroughly contaminated

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the influx of neologisms and theories from China s earlier and u r r ~ tcontact with the West? Paradoxically, contemporary Chinese scholars InChina can assume China-centeredness in their own work even as theyspeak and write an ouhua or Europeanized Chinese language.87 There,as much as here, the indigenous Chinese can no longer be so easilyseparated out from the exogenous Western. Given these difficulties andconstraints, my question is whether one can s ti ll talk about change andtransaction between East and West in twentieth-century China withoutprivileging the West, modernity, progress, or other post-Enlightenmentnotions on the one hand and without holding on to a reifIed idea ofindigenous China on the other.Since the death of Levenson in 1969, as Theodore Buters has recentlypointed out, there has been a curious and very marked silence concerningthe traumatic choices that the coming of theWest presented to China. Thissilence is striking in that modern Chinese literature has traditionally dateditself as beginningin a movement to discard the native literary language infavor ofa literary language explicitly based on Western models. Indeed,Levenson s totalizing statements about Confucian China and its modernfate may no longer obtain, bu t the question of how to explain the traumatic choices made by t he Chinese since their violent encounters withWestern imperialism does not easily go away. This is a historical questionas well as a theoretical challenge to contemporary scholarship. Recently,Gayatri Spivak has brouglit at ten tion to a theory of change developedby contemporary South Asian histor ians that I find interesting and no twithout relevance to what I am t ry ing to talk about here.

The work of the Subaltern Studies group offers a theory of change Theinsertion oflndia into colonialism is generally defmed as a change from semifeudalism into capitalist subjection. Such a definition theorizes the changewithin the great narrative of the modes of production and, by uneasy implication, within the narrative of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.Concurrently, this change is seen as the inauguration of politicization forthe colonized. The colonial subject is seen as emerging from those partsof the indigenous elite which come to be loosely described as bourgeoisnationalist. The Subaltern Studies group seems to be revising this generaldefinition and its theorization by proposing at least two things: first, that themoment(s) of change be pluralized and plotted as confrontations rather thantransition (they would thus be seen in relation to histories of domination andexploitation rather than within a great modes-of-production narrative) and,secondly, that such changes are signalled or marked by a functional changein sign_systems.R

]1anguage and ross ulturalStudiesThe theoretical model advanced by the South Asianhistorians is thoughtprovoking in that they eschew the idea of transition, at least in Spivak sinterpretation of i t -whether from East to West, from tradition to modernity, or from feudalism to capitalism-and turn, instead, to the notionof confrontation, which provides a new perspective for understandingthe kinds of changes that have occurred since the encounter of Eas t andWest. Their approach renders the old problematic of tradition and modernity uninteresting and opens modern h is to ry to alternative avenues ofinterpretation.

One could object that this theory does not apply to the Chinese situation on the grounds tha t India was a Bri tish colony and China was not .I wonder, however , if the real issue here is one of compatibility at the

~ v e of experience. Behind the obvious truthfulness of this objection,lS the re an anxiety Or intellectual bias that gravitates toward Europeantheory as a universal bearer of meaning and value? Objections to the useof European theory in the China field are, however, seldom raised onthe same ground-namely, that Western theory fails to apply to Chinabecause the former has linkages with a colonial/imperialist past whereasthe latter has had an opposite experience. On the contrary, the terms ofdifference are almost always constructed along the l ine of Western theoryversus Chinese reality.91 In that sense, the work of the Subaltern historiansis inspiring, for they do not assume a hegemonic divide between Western

J,theory and someone else s reality. To them, the realities of the West, India,,and other places are to be equally subjected to theoretical crit ique andInterrogated in light of the history of their mutual involvement and conention. Needless to say, the terms of such crit ique need to be constant lyegotiated between the se different localities.

I emphasize historical link ges r ther than commonalities-betweenhcsc localities, the kind of linkages that Lu Xun, for example, discerned

writing Moluo shili shuo (On the power of Mara poetry) in 19 0 7.ommenting on how his compatriots treated their less fortunate neighors or nations that had been colonized by the imperialist forces, he said: One need only step out into the streets of any majo r Chinese city, to meetwith soldiers sauntering about the marketplace, serenading us with martial that rebuke the servility of India and Poland; these have become sowide-.spread as to practically constitute a national anthem for us. This is due to the.(act that China, in spite of her present situation, is always anxious to jump any chance to cite at length her past glories, yet now she feels deprived the capacity to do so and can only resort to comparisons of herselfwith

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captive neighbors thathave either fallen under the y ? k ~ o f 9 ~ e r v i t u d e or ceasedto exist, hoping thereby to showoff her own supenonty.

Lu Xun is alluding to two popular songs allegedly composed by the reformer Zhang Zhidong entitled Xuetang ge (Song for the new-style school)andJun ge (Army song). The fm t contains the lines: : Poland h e s ~ h a t -tered, Indiais done, / The last of theJews to the four wmds IS flung.the second: Prithee look toward India ast, / As slaves enchamed: they11

I l 93 Lu Xun s critique of the self-perception of the Chmese IIInever as . . the larger context of colon ia lism and imperia lism is a use fu l rernlU erof the dangers of exaggerating China s uniqueness at the expense. erasing the traces of its involvement (and collusion) w ~ t h other localItles andhistories. At issue, therefore, is no t who was colonIzed and who as not,bu t how to interpret the interconnected moments of confrontatlOll between those who sought to conquer the world and those who struggledto survive under such enormous pressures.

This new emphasis inevitably turns our concern with a b s t ~ a c t q ~ e s -tions of continuity or transition i n modern his tory to contmgencles,struggles, and surpris ing twists and turns of events at each moment ofconfrontation between nations or different groups of people. In studyof translingual practice, I am interested in conditions under ,:hIch confrontations occur between China,Japan, and the West at the SIte of translation or wherever the languages happen to mee t, for thi s is where theirreducible differences between the host language and the g u ~ s t ~ a ~ g u a ~ eare fought out, authorities invoked or c ~ a l l e n g e ~ and a m b ~ g U l t l e s ~ I S -solved or created. In short, the confrontatIOns regIster a meamng-makmghistory that cuts across different national languages and histories.

The trope for change in the context of translingual ~ r a c ~ i c e isologism or neologistic construction. This metaphorical prOjectIon of lInguistic mediations will be better u n d e r s t o ~ d after we. take close look atthe actual routes by which modern neologIsms, espeCIally Smo-JapaneseEuropean ones, traveled and took residence in.modern Chinese. 94 c c o r ~ -iug t o Gao Mingkai and Liu Zhengtan, the mfl.ux of c a l q u ~ s semantIc,and other loans into late nineteenth-century and early t w e n t I e t h c ~ n t u r yl iterary and vernacular Chinese followed a typical pattern; that IS, theJapanese used kanji (Chinese characters) to. translate E ~ r o p e a n t erms , andthe neologisms were then im:ported back Into the ~ h I l l e s e language. Themajority of these borrowings fall under three headIngs: 1) two-ch.aractercompounds made up of Chinese characters that are found only pre-

JJanguage and r o s s ~ u l t u r a l StudiesmodernJapanese and do no t appear in classical Chinese. Examples are renlihe (rickshaw; jinrikisha , changhe (occasion; baii , and zongjiao (religion;shilkyo);95 (2) classical Chinese expressions used by theJapanese to translateWestern terms tha t were then imported back into Chinese with a radicalchange in meaning, such asgeming (revolution; kakumei , wenhua (culture;Imnka), jingji (economy; keizai ; and kexue (science; kagaku 3) modernJapanese compounds that have no equivalent in classical Chinese, suchas zhongzu (race; shiizoku , meishu (art; bi)utsu), meixue (aesthetics; bigaku),and guoji (international; kokusai). J7 Chapter 2 of this book is devoted tothe trajectory of one such loanword translation: the Japanese kanji rendering of national character, kokuminsei, which became the Chinese guominxing through loanword translation. This translation is one of several discursive occurrences that have profoundly transformed the sensibilities ofgenerations of the Chinese in the twentieth cen tury . I evoke the wordlloccurrences here in the sense that Paul de Man uses it in discussingBenjamin s essay on translation: When Luther translated, translated theBible, something occurred-at that moment, something happened-notin the immediate sense that f rom then on there were wars and then thecourse of history was changed-that is a by-product.What really occurred

>was that translation. Then there are, in the history of texts, texts which arc occurrences. 98 As Chapter 2 demonstrates, the loanword translation\ of national character into Chinese is an example of just such an event;that catalyzes another important event, which, in Lu Xun s view, is no, ess than the invention of modern Chinese literature itself.

Of the three types ofloanwords identified by Gao and Lill, the secondis the most deceptively transparent, because these return gra1J::ic loanse easily mistaken as direct derivatives from classical Chincse. N Gao andiu warn that one should be careful about equating these loanwords with

_eir classical counterparts. For example , the modern meaning of wen- (culture) derives f rom the Japanese kanji compound bunka, and it isrough borrowing that an equivalence was established between the Chiesc wenhua and the English culture (French culture; German die Kultur ., c lassical Chinese, wenhua denoted the s t a t ~ of refmement or artistic)ltivation as opposed to wu or mili tary prowess, carrying none of theChnographic connotations of culture commonly associated with the

o-character compound in today s usage.t Chapter 9 of this book purthe ways in which this translingual notion of wenhua or culture-an

nipotent cliche that has generated some of the most vibrant and contious debates in the modern world-evolved into a central bearer of

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39anguage and C r o s s ~ C u l t u r a l StudiesChina s pursuit ofmodernity. 116 The tensions generated between some ofthese constructed positions in literary criticism are discussed at length inChapters 5 6, and 7

Neologisms in modern Chinese do more t han bear physical witnessto historical change. I am reminded of a statement Adorno once made in adifferent context: Every foreign word contains the explosive material ofenlightenment, contains in its controlled use the knowledge that what isimmediate cannot be said in unmediated form but only expressed in andthrough reflection and mediation. 117 Catapulted into existence throughtranslingual interaction with foreign words, neologisms and neologisticconstructions occupy an intermediary position of past and present thatdemands a different reading of historical change. For one thing, changecan hardly be a trans it ion from an intac t pas t to the present , for the reexist multiple mediations that do not substantiate the claims of a reifiedpast. ll 8 For another thing, the transformation of a native language cannot be expla ined s imply in terms of impac t from the outside as, for example, Levenson would have argued, because foreign terms are subjectedto the same log ic of translingual readingas is the native classical languagethrough the mediation of translation. In onfucimJ hina and Its ModernPate Levenson asserts that what the West probably done to China isto change the lat ter s language-what China has done to the West is toenlarge the latter s vocabulary. II Although this observation accuratelycaptures the power relationship between China and the West, Levenson sunderlying assumptions about what change is and how it Occurs preventhim from taking the processes of linguistic mediation seriously or lit

; e ra lly (for he is using language and vocabulary as metaphors) and t J ~ o m re-examining the meaning of Chinese agency. The round-trip words~ : . a n d other neologisms in modern Chinese embody an idea of change that.;::rcnders the question of historical continuity and discontinuity less than,meaningful. Rather than continuing to debate how modernized (read:Westernized) China is orhow traditional it still remains-these being two. contradictory positions frequently articulated among scholars of differ

~ ~ n intellectual persuasion12 one might do well to focus on the wayswhich intellectual resources from the We st and from China s past are

CIted translated, appropriated, or claimed in moments of perceived hisorical contingency so that something called change may be produced. In

: y view, this change is always already different from China s own pastend from the West, but have profound linkages with both.

Arif Dirlik provides a useful insight into this problematic of changehis recent study of Chinese anarchism. 121 He shows, for example, that

nunciation /t uo/ proposed by Liu has never materialized. Here, one canprobably glimpse how guoyu (national language), or putongyu (StandardMandarin) as Liu terms i t, achieved its hegemonic status over regionaldialects. 114 On the other hand, one must also keep the ideographic natureof written Chinese characters, in mind; that is, written modern Chineseoverlaps, bu t cannot be simply equated, with spoken Mandarin syllables,unlike romanized characters that are supposed to represent sound. Forinstance, the character ta written with a feminine radical is now widelyrecognized as a third-person feminine pronoun in written Chinese byMandarin speakers as well as by other dialect groups, although no one, asfar as I know, c an p roduce a pronunciation that separates i t f rom its masculine and animal/neuter counterparts either in Mandarin or in regionaldialects.

The gendering of the third-person pronoun in the written languagehas important implications for the study of translingual representationsof gender in modern Chinese literature. The splitting of a formerly ungendered Chinese into feminine and masculine forms introduced a levelof symbolic reality tha t had never existed in written Chinese. It is notas if women and men have not been perceived or spoken of as sexualbeings or yin yang categories prior to the twentieth century, bu t the deictic relationship-in the manner of man speaking to and about woman, orwoman speaking to and about man, and the l ike-that is enabled by sucha spl it at the symbolic level of the pronoun allows gender to shape socialrelations of power in a new language. For instance, the Shen Congwenstory I analyze in Chapte r 6 contains a narrative of class that is consistently played ou t in terms of deictic construction of gender and desire.In it, an anonymous gentrywoman designated by the feminine pronounta is admired by three aspiring lower-class men who are addressed by thenarrator in the first-person plural, women (we/us), constructed specifically as masculine and lower class in the story. These men cannot hopeto enter her world because the deictic impasse between her class andour class is insurmountable. 115 Or consider Lu Xun s New Year s Sacrifice where a deictic narrative about class and gender captures a reversesituation-the upper-class narrator I speaks to and about a lower-classwoman t In a broader sense, deictic constructions of gender reflect andparticipate in a larger gendering process under way since the turn of thetwentieth century, as Chinese men, women, and the state discover separately for themselves and in terms of one another tha t t hey all have astake in deciding how gender difference should be constructed and whatkind of political investment that difference should or could represent in

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anguage and Cross Cultural Studiesmake those words and symbolic constructions that are exclusively ofindigenous origin and have no t been touched by neologistic loanwords?[ answer this question, I would like to recall an example I gave earlier ofthe engendering of the masculine pronoun to. Morphologically speaking,this character has no t changed a bit , yet because of the differential intervention of the feminine ta and the animal neuter ta in the overall system ofmodern Chinese, the word no longer means what i t used to mean and hasbeen made to s tand for the masculine third-person singular. This relationaltransformation behind the appearance of an unchanging construction applies, I t hi nk , t o o ther aspects of modern vernacular written Chinese aswell. The presence of neologisms points to a much more widely basedand deep-seated revolutionary process that has fundamentally changed thelinguistic landscape of China.

It is commonplace in speech-act theory that words exist not s implyto reflect external reali ty but to make things happen. My emphasis ontranslingual practice by no means reduces historical events to l inguistic practices; rather, it aims to expand the notion of history by treating

\ hlnguage, discourse, text (including historical writing itself), as genuine> historical events, no t the least of which is the power of discursive acts

produce the terms of legitimation in shaping the historical rcaP23 Torconclude this discussion, I anticipate Chapter 3 by offering a few remarks

the power of words to shape what is often termed reality. That chapter ~ i s c u s s c s the changing meaning of the translingual notion of geren zhuyi(individualism) in the Chinese theory of modern nation-

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The Problems of Language in Cross Cultural Studies