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"Flower language Fiction."
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The case of the bizarre bouquets : an Enola Holmes mystery
Fourteen-year-old Enola Holmes, disguised as a beautiful woman, finds clues in floral bouquets as she searches for the missing Dr. Watson, a companion of her famous older brother, Sherlock.--CIP
Book
Perfect worlds
Perfect Worlds offers an extensive historical analysis of utopian narratives in the Chinese and Euro-American traditions. This comparative study discusses finally the rise of dystopian writing – a negative expression of the utopian impulse – in Europe and America (Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell, Bradbury, Atwood) as well as in China (Lao She, Wang Shuo, and others). The author observes that the utopian imagination thrives in a context of secularization. It appears that in the twentieth century the distinction between utopia and dystopia is blurred as a result of the increasing autonomy of the reader. Fokkema argues that in modern times utopianism in China and in the West has developed in opposite directions, each appropriating attitudes from the other culture which originally were considered alien.
Perfect Worlds biedt een uitgebreide historische analyse van utopische verhalen in de Chinese en Euro-Amerikaanse traditie. Verschillende hoofdstukken gaan onder meer in op de kritiek van Thomas More op Plato, de Europese oriëntalistische speurtocht naar utopieën in China, Dostoevsky’s reactie op Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done, Wells’s Modern Utopia en zijn interview met Stalin, Chinese schrijvers die hun Confucianistische utopie construeren, en sporen van het Daoisme in het gedachtengoed van Mao Zedong en zijn politiek van de Grote Sprong Voorwaarts en de Culturele Revolutie. Deze vergelijkende studie bespreekt tenslotte de opkomst van dystopische fictie – een negatieve representatie van de utopische impuls – in Europa en Amerika (Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell, Bradbury, Atwood) alsook in China (Lao She, Wang Shuo en anderen). De auteur constateert dat de utopische verbeelding tot bloei komt in een context van secularisering. In de twintigste eeuw heeft de toenemende autonomie van de lezer tot gevolg dat het onderscheid tussen eutopie en dystopie vervaagt. Tenslotte betoogt Fokkema dat in de moderne tijd de utopie in China en in het Westen een tegengestelde ontwikkeling heeft doorgemaakt, waarbij elk van de twee culturen zich elementen van de andere cultuur heeft eigen gemaakt die oorspronkelijk als vreemd werden beschouwd.
eBook
Translating Narrative Space in Children’s Fiction Bronze and Sunflower From Chinese to English
Translating narrative space is a necessity due to its fundamental role in children’s literature. To date, studies have shown that efforts to examine the strategy in rendering the space issues in children’s literature translation remain scarce. Responding to that, the paper aims to explore how narrative space is transferred from one language to another. The theoretical framework is based on Ryan et al.’s model of narrative space and Baker’s framing strategies. A qualitative approach is designed to study the renowned Chinese children’s literature Bronze and Sunflower and its English version. A total of 146 examples are purposively selected as the samples. The findings show that selective appropriation is the most frequently used framing strategy. Also, it is observed that the translator prefers to omit some repeated settings and descriptions of spatial frames even though the source text elaborates them, consequently softening the sense of space in the target context. The findings may provide new insights into a better understanding of spatial issues in the translation of children’s literature.
Journal Article
From Bildungsroman to historical fiction: the genre variation of the translation of Bronze and Sunflower
Bronze and Sunflower (Qingtong kuihua 青铜葵花), a Chinese novel by Cao Wenxuan published in 2005, is considered a Bildungsroman in its source culture but is marketed as a work of historical fiction in its target Western culture, thereby entrusting a history-teaching duty to a book that primarily aims to portray teenagers’ personal growth trajectories. This paper aims to explore how this transition of literary genres occurs, its effects on target readers, and the motivations that underlie the transition. The paper examined relevant interviews, notes, blog posts, and book reviews to recount the actions undertaken by the multiple agents who contributed to the transition, revealing that the literary agent’s pitch, the publisher’s notes, critics’ guidance, and readers’ interpretation and acceptance interacted synergistically to make Bronze and Sunflower be taken as a work of historical fiction in the target culture. This genre transition inevitably resulted in unfulfilled expectations and mismatched functions in the translation’s reception. We attempt to argue that this genre variation is attributed to the two cultures’ asymmetrical genre spectra and the unequal cultural exchange from the periphery to the center in the literary field. It demonstrates that the seemingly trivial issue of genre matters, not only because it can influence the reception of a translated work but also because it can reveal the tacit power relations in the translation flow.
Journal Article
Stanisław Lem’s Space Flora and Fauna Translated into English
The article discusses authorial neologisms coined by Stanislaw Lem and their translation into English on the example of 37 plant and animal names excerpted from the short story entitled “Let Us Save the Universe (An Open Letter from Ijon Tichy)”, which, together with their English equivalents, were subject to comparative analysis. Since these names may create translation problems, the purpose of the analysis was primarily to determine the problem-solving techniques used by the translators, Maria Święcicka-Ziemianek and Joel Stern. Another goal was to make an attempt at explaining their translation choices and to determine the impact of these choices on the way in which the equivalents expressed with neologisms perform their naming function and the function through which they create the narrative world in the target text. Therefore, the article lists the possible causes of translation problems evoked by neologisms and presents the characteristics of the analysed names in terms of translation difficulties they may pose. The analytical material is presented taking into account the relationship between neologisms and their equivalents with the accompanying context and/or illustration. The article provides conclusions on the impact of the techniques used and the elements that determined the final shape of equivalents on the way the naming and creative function of authorial neologisms are reflected in the target text. It also shows the methods of overcoming problems related to translating neologisms into a foreign language.
Journal Article
Analogies from the Vegetable Creation: The Botanical Logic of Edgeworth's Belinda
Natural objects in the world of Maria Edgeworth's 1801 novel Belinda express both the cultural capital of scientific learning and moral truth grounded in empirical observation. This is especially true of the novel's treatment of plants. Drawing on the contexts of Maria Edgeworth's own biographical connections to botanists such as her half-brother Michael Pakenham Edgeworth (1812-1881), John Huddlestone Wynne's Fables of Flowers (1773), and Edgeworth's co-authored treatise Practical Education (1798), this essay analyzes the roles of exotic plants in Belinda in order to parse the ways that these living natural objects functioned within and despite networks of empire. The novel's \"botanical logic\" emerges through an application of critical plant studies and object-oriented ontology (OOO) to three of the novel's episodes: the well-known aloe in Lady Delacour's gala; Charles Percival's duckweed; and the extended subplot between Clarence and Virginia. Although Edgeworth's novel settles on an anthropocentric hierarchy placing human over plant, botanical analogies allow Edgeworth's fiction to explore more ecologically equitable ways of seeing the natural world, ones in which natural philosophy offers a new language to describe romantic wonder.
Journal Article
Sadistic Aestheticism: Walter Pater and Octave Mirbeau
In Oxford in 1894, Pater had met with Mirbeau's close friend Stéphane Mallarmé and Mirbeau's acquaintance Paul Bourget, both of whom held the English writer's oeuvre in great esteem; Mallarmé, for example, declared Pater \"le prosateur ouvragé par excellence de ce temps\" (the quintessential writer of finely crafted prose of these times).9 Pater's aestheticism offers a productive, revealing lens through which to examine Torture Garden as it clearly details the methods through which one may treat life as art, illuminating the femme fatale's aestheticist strategies. Pater's expositions on art, as well as his fiction, encompass a subtle invocation of sexuality, deviance, corporeality, and violence-perhaps partly a result of Pater's admiration for French decadent writers such as Théophile Gautier10-that is exploited with tongue-in-cheek animation by Mirbeau.
Journal Article
The art of fiction: Indian diaspora’s gift to Malaysian fiction-writing descendants of other diasporas
In 1921, S. Radhakrishnan wrote in The Hindu View of Life, ‘China and Japan, Tibet and Siam, Burma and Ceylon look to India as their spiritual home’. Today, many Malaysian descendants of nineteenth-century Chinese and Ceylonese diasporas continue to look to India for spiritual, intellectual, and literary inspiration. This paper discusses three contemporary, Englishlanguage novels by Malaysians of non-Indian descent which are informed by Buddhist/ Hindu philosophical ideas of fiction and reality, shaped by narratological strategies found in Indian philosophical discourses and epics, and inspired by the Indian tradition of using literary fiction to expose the fictional nature of received ideas and ideologies mistaken for reality in and by society. Published in 1981, 1994, and 2010 respectively, the novels provide an historical insight into how three representatives of Malaysia’s non-Indian, ethnic minorities respond to the ethnicized ideas and ethnocentric ideologies that have dominated Malaysian life since the 1970s.
Journal Article
Collected poems
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) is one of the giants of nineteenth-century French poetry. Leader of the Symbolist movement, he exerted a powerful influence on modern literature and thought, which can be traced in the works of Paul Valéry, W.B. Yeats, and Jacques Derrida. From his early twenties until the time of his death, Mallarmé produced poems of astonishing originality and beauty, many of which have become classics. In the Collected Poems, Henry Weinfield brings the oeuvre of this European master to life for an English-speaking audience, essentially for the first time. All the poems that the author chose to retain are here, superbly rendered by Weinfield in a translation that comes remarkably close to Mallarmé's own voice. Weinfield conveys not simply the meaning but the spirit and music of the French originals, which appear en face. Whether writing in verse or prose, or inventing an altogether new genre—as he did in the amazing \"Coup de Dés\"—Mallarmé was a poet of both supreme artistry and great difficulty. To illuminate Mallarmé's poetry for twentieth-century readers, Weinfield provides an extensive commentary that is itself an important work of criticism. He sets each poem in the context of the work as a whole and defines the poems' major symbols. Also included are an introduction and a bibliography. Publication of this collection is a major literary event in the English-speaking world: here at last is the work of a major figure, masterfully translated.
eBook
'My neighbour's blooming flower garden': the image of the British in modern Malay writing
This article discusses works of four Malay authors who deal with Malaya's colonial past through parody, and expressions of admiration and disillusion when portraying British characters or describing travel to Britain. It seems that only a few Malay authors have tried to 'write off' their colonial past in the very obvious way of depicting and subverting colonial masters and systems. This may be due to the use of the Malay language, which provides the authors with an 'easy way out' of tackling the perhaps sensitive issue head-on — a similar suggestion has been made in relation to Indonesia.
Journal Article