Translation is a complex process, especially when it involves two long-established, rich, and very different traditions, such as Chinese and European culture. Because it involves the intersection of several disciplines, translation theory confronts many challenges. Defining the object of its research remains a struggle: What is a translation? What constitutes the act of translation? Who can be considered a translator? Scholars of translation theory have a difficult time formulating core concepts: What is equivalence, and should we even be talking about it? Establishing a methodology for translation theory is also problematic: What tools from which disciplines are most useful? Are...

In 1687 a curious work was published in London: The First Volume of Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, Who Lived Five and Forty Years, Undiscovered, at Paris: Giving an Impartial Account to the Divan at Constantinople, of the most Remarkable Transactions of Europe; And Discovering several Intrigues and Secretes of the Christian Courts, (especially of that of France) from the Year 1637, to the Year 1682. Written originally in Arabick, first translated into Italian, afterwards into French, and now into English.¹ In the preface, the narrator claims to have found a cache of letters written in Arabic in a...

Chapter one explored the world of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century oriental tales, both pseudotranslations and authentic translations. It demonstrated how the authors of these works constructed a doubled discourse of the Other stretching from the Ottoman Empire all the way to Japan and Peru in ways that resemble blackface and whiteface. That chapter concentrated on pseudotranslations from Chinese; this chapter will demonstrate that while the first authentic translations from Chinese were also caught up in this discourse, by the early nineteenth century there was a shift away from blackface and whiteface, which are overt practices, toward passing, a covert practice,...

In chapter two, I demonstrated how the issue of authenticity preoccupied translators working from Chinese in the early nineteenth century to such an extent that they sought to pass as Chinese in their translations. Ironically, they accomplished this through performances in English and French that reflected considerable reworking of texts. However diffident the translators may have been about their efforts,¹ such translations were serious in their purpose of making Chinese literature available to a European audience in order to foster a better understanding of China and the Chinese.

Once released into circulation, however, this material was liable to interpretation and...

At the end of chapter three, I suggested that excess theorized as lack was crucial to British drag translations in the early nineteenth century. In this chapter, I will show how a related set of ideas coalesce around representations of the sight and sound of the Chinese language. As Europeans learned first to imitate, then mimic, and finally “master” the Chinese language, they conceptualized difference simultaneously as lack and excess.¹ These issues are present in some of the earliest records we have of linguistic contact between Chinese and English speakers. For example, in The Travels of Peter Mundy (1634–1638),...

Joan Rivière uses the term masquerade to describe the phenomenon of certain women adopting womanliness as a mask. In other words, masquerade looks at the way in which individuals choose to conform to societal stereotypes of how they should behave; it also looks at how such adopted persona can become, effectively, the person’s identity. In such cases, masqueraders often use womanliness to compensate for their exhibition of masculine behavior. Therefore, its use betrays potential anxiety about the ability to perform her proper role and/or the desire to camouflage manliness under a veneer of womanliness. In this chapter I examine the...

In this book I have demonstrated that thinking of translation as cross-identity performance helps to theorize the history of translation from Chinese into European languages, specifically English and French. The metaphor thereby opens up fresh perspectives on a broad range of texts. In the introduction, I noted that the relationship between history and theory was one of the larger issues lurking behind the present study of this particular material. While not wanting to repeat the long list of possible strengths of the metaphor described in the introduction, at this point I do want to reflect upon a few of the...