1. The Visibility as a Translator

The issue of visibility for H.A. Giles (1845–1935) as a translator of Chinese literature is quite evident from a large portion of his translated literary works. Before we continue, though, I want to clarify my use of the term ‘visibility’. I do not use it in the sense given to it by Lawrence Venuti (Reference Venuti2008) in The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. For Venuti, ‘visibility’ means ‘foreignization’, with the target or translated text retaining the syntax and other features of the source or original text. In other words, the reader cannot avoid noticing the intervention of the translator. ‘Visibility’, in the sense in which I use it, refers to how Giles turns his history into a literary anthology featuring mostly his own translations of the works he selects for inclusion.

In the preface to A History of Chinese Literature, Giles (Reference Giles1973, xvii) announces that

This motive is manifest in that more than half of Giles’s 400-page book, supposedly a literary history, is actually made up of translations. For instance, the section ‘Taoism – the Tao-Te-Ching’, which takes up pages 56 to 74, for the largest part consists of translated passages of literary works interspersed with Giles’s own at times sparse discursive commentary. Undoubtedly, the cause has to be sought in Giles’s rich previous experience translating from the Chinese. In fact, he had devoted more than two decades to translating Chinese literature under different genres, thus accumulating enough materials for the completion of this book. His skills as a translator were praised by Ball (Reference Ball1901, 208) in his review of Giles’s book:

Prior to A History of Chinese Literature, Giles had already published Gems of Chinese Literature (Reference Giles1884), an anthology of classical Chinese literary texts. As Hong Zhang (Reference Zhang1992) has pointed out, this work may well have motivated Giles to write a history of Chinese literature. Here is Giles (Reference Giles1922, i) himself in his ‘Preface’ to Gems of Chinese Literature:

A collection of translations, then, or a proper narrative literary history? It seems that Giles was facing a dilemma: he wanted to construct a coherent literary history, but he ended up including a great number of translations because he decided it was better to let the works themselves speak to the English readers. As a result, his literary history becomes, to some extent, simply another version of Gems of Chinese Literature without achieving a real breakthrough from his previous scholarship.

Giles’s visibility as a translator also shows in his selection of original texts for his History. The inclusion of works such as dictionaries, encyclopaedias and medical jurisprudence makes the book quite unwieldly. Of course, Giles’s scholarship was subject to the limitations of his time. For one thing, Giles drew mostly on the resources of the library of Cambridge University, which did not come close to representing the entire reach of Chinese literary history. Guogong Zhang (1995, 89) noted in Reference Zhang1995 that ‘Until very recent times, Sinology in Cambridge only dates back to one hundred years’. Giles’s brief and simple references to other books, journals, or catalogues are also telling for this limitation. For example, when it comes to references to other books, these are limited to the anthology The Chinese Classics (5 vols. Reference Legge1861–1872) by the Scottish missionary and sinologist James Legge (1815–1897), the Cursus Literaturae Sinicae (5 vols. Reference Zottoli1879–1883) of the Italian Jesuit Angelo Zottoli (1826–1902), headmaster of the Collège St Ignace in Shanghai, the first volumes of Les Mémoires Historiques de Se-ma Ts’ien (Records of the Grand Historian; 5 vols. 1895–1905) by the French sinologist Edouard Chavannes (Reference Chavannes1865–1918), and Notes on Chinese Literature (8 vols. Reference Wylie1867), a collection of notes on 2000 separate Chinese works classified into Jing (Classics), Shi (History), Zi (Philosophy), and Ji (belles lettres), as in the Imperial Catalogue, by the Protestant missionary Alexander Wylie (1815–187).

But it is not only the lack of relevant resources at the time that is at play. Giles’s own concept of literature, which underlies his selection of works for translation, is unclear and ill-defined. Here, a brief review of the evolving meaning for the word ‘literature’ may help in clarification. As Weigui Fang (Reference Fang2014, 13) notes, ‘The pure and exclusive meaning for literature only came into being around one hundred years ago’. The word ‘literature’ derives from the Latin ‘litteratura’ where the root ‘littera’ refers to knowledge, grammar, and writing. The emergence of concepts such as ‘nation’ brought along the use of the term in its modern sense. Literature then comes to embody a nation’s culture, ‘an autobiography of nations’ (Palmer Reference Palmer1956, 39). Until the eighteenth century, though, it could be used to broadly mean ‘all written products’ (Leitch Reference Leitch2001, 28) and it came to be narrowed down to ‘creative or imaginative works’ (Eagleton Reference Eagleton2004, 16) only during the Romantic period. Obviously, then, ‘literature’ in Giles’s History of Chinese Literature more closely approximates ‘all written products’. Moreover, Giles’s selection of works may also have been influenced by the general tendency in European literary historiography and in the study of world literature in general at the turn of the twentieth century, when it came to non-European literatures, to pay attention only to older works and to treat all such works as having no scientific or scholarly value, and therefore part of the realm of ‘literature’ rather than of fact.

Giles’s extensive experience in translating and anthologizing Chinese literature undoubtedly facilitated the completion of his History of Chinese Literature, especially during a time of limited resources. As such, his role as a translator is a highly ‘visible’ one. However, we should not be blind to the drawbacks of the book as an anthology of literary works pretending to be a literary history. A literary history’s distinctiveness lies in not only taking literary texts as its basic objects of analysis, but also in presenting such works in a logical narrative context and discussing their background and poetics. Thus, a qualified literary history is also an intellectual history validating the necessity for its own (re)writing. In Giles’s case this is a questionable assumption, as I will highlight shortly.

Interestingly, Giles’s ‘visibility’ as a translator, in the sense that I have given to it earlier, on the macro-level, turns into ‘invisibility’, in the sense given to it by Venuti, on the micro-level of actual translation. Invisibility here refers to the translator’s domesticating, to use the terminology of Shunqing Cao (Reference Cao2013), or naturalizing the source or foreign text’s diction, syntax and style according to the target literary system’s conventions and expectations. In the process Chinese literary works are familiarized for English readers.

2. The Invisible Translator

At the very start of The Translator’s Invisibility, Venuti (Reference Venuti2008, 1) points out that the term invisibility

As to the first phenomenon, ‘the illusion of transparency is an effect of a fluent translation strategy, of the translator’s effort to ensure easy readability by adhering to current usage, maintaining continuous syntax, fixing a precise meaning’ (Venuti Reference Venuti2008, 1).

The second phenomenon leads to what Venuti (Reference Venuti2008, 1) calls the invisibility of the translator in contemporary Anglophone cultures:

Such a naturalizing or domesticating translational strategy actually seems to run counter to Giles’s (Reference Giles1973, xvii) claim in the preface to his History of Chinese Literature that he will ‘let the author speak for himself’. In most instances, it is in fact the translator that speaks on behalf of the author: a domesticating strategy leaves readers no chance to appreciate the aesthetic features of the source text since what they are reading looks like a smooth, ‘natural’, in fact a ‘native’, text. Now, the value of a literary work lies in both its content and its aesthetic form. The transmission of artistic form should not be sacrificed in a compilation of translations being passed off as a literary history. The selected works represent a nation’s classics, the status of which, next to their content, also derives from their artistically innovative character. In this connection, what should be avoided is precisely the translator’s invisibility on the levels of vocabulary, image, and style as displayed in Giles’s literary history.

On the first level, Giles replaces certain original words with distinctively Western cultural terms. Take the word ‘purgatory’ for example. In his analysis of the Hsiao Lin Kuang Chi (A Forestry of Jokes), an anthology of classical Chinese jokes, under the section of ‘Wit and Humor’, Giles (Reference Giles1973, 436) uses the phrase ‘the King of Purgatory’ to render the original word ‘Yanwang’ (阎王) (Yama, king of hell). A brief review of the meanings for ‘purgatory’ reveals the cultural differences between the two words. Purgatory usually refers to ‘the place where, according to Roman Catholic beliefs, the souls of the dead people must suffer for the bad things they did, until they are pure enough to enter heaven’ (Yang Reference Yang2002, 1146). One can find vivid visual representations of this place in Western literary works such as, for instance, Dante’s Divine Comedy where Purgatory is divided into seven levels where souls with different sins reside. In contrast, in ancient Chinese culture, similar places can be found in the concept of ‘Shidian Yanwang’ (十殿阎王), as in Buddhism, which refers to the ten Yanwang in charge of hell. After death, people come here to be judged for their deeds by the Yanwang without knowing definitely where to go after the judgement. The adoption of this term by the translator aims to present a familiar scene to the English readers for their better understanding. Such pursuit of familiarity reflects ‘the general tendency to read translations mainly for meaning’ (Venuti Reference Venuti2008, 1). Real cultural exchange, however, only occurs when a translator, and the compiler in Giles’s case, pays due attention to the aspect of artistic forms and features, such as the cultural terms and images that make up the essence of a nation’s literature. This may partly explain the rising popularity of foreignization over domestication in recent translation scholarship. Thus, ‘the simple free and forced translation should be avoided for its failure to convey the culturally semiotic dimension of classical Chinese literary terms’ (Zhuang Reference Zhuang2017, 55) and transliteration may be an appropriate option in this regard, owing to the strong prescriptiveness of Chinese characters, since it is an effective weapon for avoiding ‘neutralization’ in translation. ‘Prescriptiveness’, concretely speaking, refers to ‘prescribed pronunciation, writing and meaning of the Chinese language that originated from pictographs’ (Zhao Reference Zhao2016, 86). Due to the fact of prescriptiveness being socially bound, the meaning of Chinese characters (dominated by such prescriptiveness) cannot be carried over across cultures. Originated from pictographs, another name for Chinese characters, is ‘wen’ (文), meaning ‘pictures’. Zhao Yuanren (1892–1982), a famous Chinese linguist (Zhao Reference Zhao1968, 103–104), expounding on the ‘four-kind of methods of word-formation’, holds that ‘Pictographs equal icon, and the other three, namely Ideographs, Compound Ideographs and Phonetic Compound, are all index developed based on pictographs.’ The phenomenon of increased ‘Phonetic Compound’ in modern Chinese further promotes ‘evolution in the Chinese character from icons into indexes and further into symbols guided by prescriptiveness’ (Zhao Reference Zhao2016, 87). No wonder the translation of Chinese literary and cultural terms with their prescriptiveness still poses great difficulties for translators.

On the second level, that of imagery, domestication also prevails in the reconstructive representation of the literary scenes in translation. Classical Chinese literature has a tradition of conveying the internal ambitions and feelings of a poem’s speaker through external objects, and this poses difficulties in translation. The translator should strive to find a balance between rigidly copying the juxtaposed images into the target language according to the source text’s syntactical order and the total abandonment of such syntax. Take Giles’s translation of the third poem ‘Qiannong’ (Slim-Stout) in the book ‘Twenty-four Stanzas on the Appreciation of Poetry’ composed in eighth-century China. Each poem expounds on a certain poetic style and is tinged with philosophical and religious (mainly Taosim and Buddhism) colour in the expression of literary thoughts. ‘Qiannong’ symbolizes the third literary style:

The first eight sentences of the poem describe beautiful scenery, presenting an artistic realm of tranquillity and beauty, integrating motion into stillness. For instance, ‘窈窕深谷’ (Away in the depth of a wild valley) centres on the still side while ‘时见美人’ (Anon I see a lovely girl) focuses on the motion in the scene, thus creating a ‘realm of images viewed on its own without man’s interference’. So ‘the elements of sound, color, light, fragrance, object and man harmonize with each other and form a realm permeated with life so as to set forth the artistic realm in this poem just like a landscape poetry’ (Yu Reference Yu2010, 129). Giles’s efforts to recreate this exquisite scene are not effective because of the way that he makes the meaning of the poem transparent. He proceeds from the personal angle hidden in the poem rather than from the scene itself, thus the ‘realm of images viewed on its own without man’s interference’ is changed into ‘realm of images viewed from man’s perspective’, which does not reflect the flavour of the poem. The ‘realm of images viewed from man’s perspective’ means appreciating the scene from the angle of a person and so everything is tinted with a personal flavour, while ‘realm of images viewed on its own’ refers to ‘viewing the object without any human interference just on its own’ (Wang Reference Wang2003, 7). A look at the translation of the first four lines reveals that Giles compresses the four scenes into one sentence by adding the subject ‘I,’ the participle ‘gathering’ and the ‘from’ and ‘away’. The shift to the first person by the use of ‘I’ destroys the tranquil beauty in the scene that thus is rendered into the realm with man’s interference. The addition of ‘I’ determines the angle of the whole poem and fails to convey the reaching out to a realm beyond the existing scenes. Further, ‘a lovely girl’ in the rendition of ‘美人’ does not conform to the delicate style of this image since the latter suggests a quiet girl in the deep valley while the former sketches a vivid and dynamic picture of the girl. Giles also misreads the meaning of ‘采采’ in the poem by using the verb ‘gathering’ where it actually means the crystalline state of the waters.

Lastly, Giles’s macro-structural rendering of the literary text in translation also demonstrates his preference for domestication. For example, ‘Qingmingri Duijiu’ (‘In face of Wine on Tomb-sweeping Day’) by Gao Zhu (1170–1241) is a poem that criticizes the custom of social sacrifice and ponders on the eternal issues of life and death. It does so via the depiction of the far away and adjacent scenery. The inclusion of this poem by Giles reflects its status as the classic among poems on Tomb-sweeping Day, but the ‘variations’ in its translation as compared with the original text need further discussion. First, the number of lines in the translated version varies greatly from the original one:

Each of the eight short lines in the original poem is rendered into two lines so as to conform to English grammar without fully representing the semantic correspondence within two adjacent lines and the rhyme in the original poem, such as 然 ran, 鹃 juan, 前 qian, 泉 quan. A comparison between the source and the target text reveals that only the translation of ‘日落/狐狸眠/冢上，夜归/儿女笑/灯前’ (The sun sets, and the red fox crouches down beside the tomb; Night comes, and youths and maidens laugh where lamps light up the gloom) complies with the corresponding feature. The first two lines change into a coordinate independent clause, the next two become an adversative clause and the last two are rendered into adverbial clauses of cause. Thus, the whole poem loses its succinctness and reads like an idiomatic English paragraph.

The target text also changes the tense of the source text. The active tense adopted in the original poem, in both the scenery and sacrifice description in the first four lines and the sublimation in the last two, aims to convey a direct communicative effect. But the passive tense used in the translation of ‘泪血/染成/红杜鹃’ (‘While mourners’ robes with tears of blood a crimson hue are dyed’) along with the omission of the cultural image ‘杜鹃’ (cuckoo) is rather weak in displaying people’s grief at that time. Hence retaining the active tense may be a better option: ‘and tears of blood dye the hills a crimson hue comparable to that of a cuckoo.’ In addition, although ‘let him’ in the last lines is no typical passive tense, it still fails to depict the author’s assumed easiness but also real pessimism about life, which can be better conveyed if one turns to using an affirmative sentence with ‘I’, ‘We’, or ‘drink wine’ (We should enjoy the wine of life and get tipsy while we may. For no man, when the long night comes, can take one drop away).

The rendition of culturally loaded terms and the absence of any further explanation for important allusions are a further problem. For example, the free translation of terms such as ‘清明节’ and ‘九泉’ as ‘the sacred day’ and ‘the long night’ indicates a sense of cultural filtering, which diminishes the cultural distinctiveness of the original poem. The translator sacrifices the nuances to the overall meaning. The absence of any explanation for some allusions further increases the difficulty for readers to fully understand what is going on: ‘白蝴蝶’ (butterfly) and ‘狐狸’ (fox) are not random images; they have their own cultural and historical contexts. ‘白蝴蝶’ derives from Zhuangzi, the great third century bc Chinese philosopher. In one of his allegories, Zhuangzi in a dream finds himself changed into a butterfly, which can be interpreted as the thought of harmony between heaven and humanity, as pointed out by Wang (Reference Wang2002, 22): ‘The metaphor through these two allusions, besides the function of enhancing vividness in the poem, contains the deep implications of devoted ancestor worship’. It also demonstrates the influence of early literary classics on succeeding literary creations and thus the persistence of a historical literary inheritance. Thus, a brief explanation is needed to clarify the deep meanings of what otherwise may seem random metaphors and images.