Rewriting the Orient: Asian Works in the Making of World Literature

By Yunfei Bai

In this ambitious volume, Yunfei Bai delves into the creative adaptations of classical Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan literary texts by four renowned nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors in France and Argentina: Theophile Gautier, Stephane Mallarme, Victor Segalen, and Jorge Luis Borges. Without any knowledge of the source languages, the authors crafted their own French and Spanish retellings based on received translations of these Asian works. Rewriting the Orient not only explores the so far untapped translation-rewriting continuum to trace the pivotal role of Orientalism in the formation of a singular corpus of world literature that goes beyond the Anglophone canon, but also sheds light on a wide range of innovative discursive strategies that readily challenge traditional notions of cultural appropriation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Department of Romance Studies
• Release date: Mar 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781469677729

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

THE DISCOVERY

It must have been the summer of 2014. I had been invited by Hélène Merlin-Kajman to give a talk at Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. The topic of the conference was—if memory serves me right—the specialization of literary scholars in an age of transition. What I then had in mind was the specialization of world literature experts. To be honest, I was somewhat dissatisfied with the ethos of monolingualism pervading the anglophone academy and scholars’ sluggish reliance on theory to deconstruct practically everything, including the imperative of second language learning, to begin with. Predictably, this was a sensitive topic, though perhaps less so in France, where la littérature mondiale had yet failed to gain much discursive ground. Anecdotally, in 2014 I was still a grumpy novice in the field (not yet even an ABD) and therefore had more than one reason to downplay my hubris. The talk itself went quite well; it was mannerly and urbane. Then, during the Q&A part, Jérôme David from the University of Geneva chimed in, pointing out the similarity between my take on world literature and Erich Auerbach’s philology of Weltliteratur . It was meant to be a compliment, I knew. But to my embarrassment, I misheard the name Auerbach as Roland Barthes, and my response veered off course in a bizarre direction before hushed spectators.

Shortly after my awkward debut in Paris, I decided to dig down the rabbit hole of world literature under Auerbach’s aegis. I started off with Mimesis, in the preface to the fiftieth-anniversary edition of which Edward Said spills much ink on the Jewish professor’s pathos as a European humanist living in exile in Istanbul (Said, Introduction i–xxiv). Reading Auerbach’s sense of uprootedness against the historical backdrop of the Kemalist regime’s endeavors at Europeanization, Kader Konuk sniffs out the irony in Auerbach’s teaching Weltliteratur to an Islamic audience dying to Westernize itself while Europe is on the verge of self-destruction (Konuk 4). From this predicament, one may deduce a correlation between Auerbach’s exilic persona and his fundamentally dialectical, perhaps Hegelian, envisioning of a movement in the making. In his landmark essay, "Philology and Weltliteratur, Auerbach historicizes the development of world literature as an irreversible process of homogenization at the end of which only a few literary languages, and perhaps even a single literary language will triumph. Were this prognosis ever to be actualized, the notion of Weltliteratur would be at once realized and destroyed" (3). This pronouncement is revelatory, and the political message, carefully conveyed. If the standardization of global literary cultures as a corollary of the expansion of Western traditions helps transcend both the nationalism and the territorial patterns of knowledge production holding sway in Auerbach’s time, this unifying impetus will inevitably entail the loss of pluralism. Admittedly, world literature is a double-edged sword, both emancipating and inhibiting. This is perhaps the reason that Auerbach apprehends world literature’s coming of age with a certain nostalgia, so much so that he concludes his essay by looking back at medieval Europe’s pre-national cosmopolitanism that had paved the way for the short-lived blossom of Goethean humanism.

Yet, what is this single literary language predicted by the Jewish professor of Romance literatures in Istanbul that will eventually dominate the scene? In a letter to Walter Benjamin on January 3, 1937, Auerbach hints at the Internationale of Triviality and Esperanto culture (Scholarship 751). To be sure, he was at the time witnessing, in Istanbul, the fading away of the Ottoman ancien régime and the rise of hideous replicas of European modernity. Prior to that, he had witnessed, in Nazi Germany, an atmosphere of jingoistic mass culture which, banning dissident voices, had induced an Orwellian yet seemingly anodyne addiction to propaganda and frivolities. But when looking back in time at Auerbach’s statement in the 2020s, it almost strikes me as prophetic that this single language might also have been an adumbration of global English, which has come to dominate, in every sense of the word, world literature discourse in today’s liberal academy. Tellingly, although Auerbach overlooked the substantial English contribution to the making of European cultural identity (a blind spot in his vision according to Said) (Introduction 7) when forecasting the advent of a single lingua franca, Weltliteratur has become today a distinctively anglophone business in spite of the term’s German pedigree.

The expansion of English has been twofold. Parallel to the sustained assimilation of non-English writings through translation and transculturation, the terrain of English literature has also multiplied itself along postcolonial lines. Ironically, however, the development of global anglophone literature as an academic discourse from the periphery (Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean) often reifies the hegemony of the English language and, in worst cases, reinforces an Anglocentrism it purports to dismantle. In this respect, Ian Almond has noted the irony in Said’s Orientalism wherein not a single Arab voice is heard. Similarly, Pheng Cheah’s drawing on high theory (Heidegger, Arendt, and Derrida) and English-language bestselling authors (e.g., Amitav Ghosh and Timothy Mo) in What is a World to show the disruption of a premodern world order by colonial juggernauts, turns out to be mildly disappointing. For Almond, deconstruction, as a whole, pays only lip service to the urgency of decentering the Eurocentric discourse of world literature. Such is the case with Emily Apter’s Against World Literature. Building profusely and expertly on French Theory, the book still remains a comfortably European book despite Apter’s well-intentioned effort to wean World Literature from its comfort zone (Almond, World Literature 13–14). Nick Admussen has diagnosed a similar problem in Eric Hayot’s dismissal of both in-depth knowledge of non-Western languages and a periodized canon of works in On Literary Worlds to suggest a novel metatheory of worldedness. For Admussen, Hayot’s Eurocentrism in disguise ends up even affecting the robustness and usability of the theory (Admussen).

Whilst most readings of "Philology and Weltliteratur are theory-driven, Auerbach’s essay offers as well practical advice on how to grapple with concrete texts. In a nutshell, he sees philology as the method of choice to trace the history of world literature. When translating the essay into English, Maire and Edward Said note that Auerbach’s philology is meant to be taken broadly, to the extent of including a study of all, or most, of human verbal activity" (Said and Said 1). This may sound vague, but Auerbach does talk about philology more specifically elsewhere, notably in his prosaically titled Introduction aux études de philologie romane, a pedagogical manual he wrote in French in 1943 during his sojourn in Turkey and published somewhat belatedly in Germany, in 1949. A cursory perusal of this work reveals Auerbach’s cultural elitism. He firmly puts philology on a pedestal, calling it the most noble and the most authentic activity of highly civilized people eager to preserve their spiritual patrimony from both the ravages of time and the changes, mutilations, and additions that popular consumption or the indifference of scribes unavoidably entail (Auerbach, Introduction aux études 9). But as Suzanne Fleischman has observed, philology, for Auerbach, is rather narrowly defined; it is the learned craft of using textual scholarship and stylistic analysis to understand the literary monuments of earlier ages (Fleischman 94). In particular, Auerbach sees close reading, or l’explication des textes, as the soundest and most fertile method of literary investigation (Introduction aux études 37). Unsurprisingly, Auerbach’s interest in other aspects of philology — such as the edition of critical texts per se, etymology, and general linguistics—proves incidental (Henry 526–28). Hence, philology for Auerbach is a modus operandi of doing literary criticism in an age of Weltliteratur that allows him to pursue a higher goal, that is to say, tracing a cultural history of Western literature with a few exemplars from a clearly prescribed literary phenomenon. He has in turn so brilliantly proved the validity of this approach in Mimesis.

To repeat, in "Philology and Weltliteratur, what grabs my attention is not Auerbach’s sense of homelessness, but his methodological innovation. He rethinks the dialectic of the general and the particular, or more precisely, the impossibility of handling the superabundance of materials, viewpoints, and scientific methods available to scholars in an age of world literature. Indeed, the possession of literatures ranging over six thousand years, from all parts of the world, in perhaps fifty literary languages makes a mastery of them virtually impossible (Philology 8). Yet, the solution is not to be found in critical theory, or any modish intellectual trend, which Auerbach likens mockingly to the desire of neophytes (and acolytes) to master a great mass of material through the introduction of hypostatized, abstract concepts of order (10). Instead, the key to dealing with an excessively copious archive lies in the art of synthesis"—but how? Auerbach puts forward the following principle:

In order to accomplish a major work of synthesis it is imperative to locate a point of departure [Ansatzpunkt], a handle, as it were, by which the subject can be seized. The point of departure must be the election of a firmly circumscribed, easily comprehensible set of phenomena whose interpretation is a radiation out from them and which orders and interprets a greater region than they themselves occupy. (13–14)

Auerbach further clarifies that this point of departure is in fact a cohesive and circumscribed literary phenomenon describable in technical, philological terms (14). A mere agglomeration of miscellaneous items would not be able to do the trick; what one needs instead is a structured synthesis of seemingly disparate literary works. Throughout his essay, Auerbach keeps asking himself: what can still be done with an outmoded and unsexy way of parsing obscure texts by dead authors? What is the point of wrestling with a flood of stylistic minutiae? Close reading itself is nothing revolutionary. But Auerbach directs our attention to the big picture, that is to say, a cartography of literary history inferable from a finite corpus of primary sources through a clever use of close reading. To this end, he explicitly warns philologists (in the broader sense of textual scholars) against the danger of limiting themselves to a narrow field of expertise while paying no heed to the influx of new materials and novel scientific methods.

TRANSLINGUAL ADAPTATION: A NEW APPROACH

As a caveat, I did not parrot Auerbach in 2014, nor will I repeat him mechanically in 2024. Yet, I acknowledge his influence on this book. To sum up the gist of his (and my) take on philology: one needs to locate a point of entry (Ansatzpunkt), or better put, a concrete literary phenomenon describable in technical terms from which a cultural history of European/world literature can be synthetized. Auerbach’s Ansatzpunkt-phenomenon metaphor recalls Archimedes’ Law of the Lever. For a close reader equipped with a lever long enough (a single, finite, graspable literary phenomenon with broad significance) and a fulcrum on which to place it, he or she shall move the world, the world of world literature for sure. In this book, I believe I have found such a literary phenomenon which—through an effect of centrifugal radiation as Auerbach puts it—allows me to pinpoint the worldliness of world literature in its fullest range (though I have never leapt out a public bath and rushed home naked crying Eureka!). I call it translingual adaptation, by which I mean the phenomenon of creatively rewriting translated texts without knowing the source languages. I have borrowed this concept from Lydia Liu’s seminal work on translingual practice, although my emphasis departs from Liu’s attention to lexicography, whereby she examines the politics of translation in Late-Qing and Republican China that warranted the codification of loanwords in tripartite Chinese-Japanese-Western cultural flows. Instead, this book traces — with an emphasis on the metropolitan reception—the multi-layered transmission of literary works from Asia to Europe and beyond in a broad spectrum of time, space, and literary traditions. Particularly, it draws attention to four creative adaptations by celebrated Romance language authors of Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan literary works based on previous received translations (anglophone practitioners of world literature have thus far neglected these texts in motion despite their unusual global reach). As I see no point in performing close reading simply for its own sake, I fully consider the adapters’ writerly creativity, especially when their discursive strategies deviate, or fail to deviate, from the assimilative approaches of what over the past few decades scholars have come to call Orientalism in the sense of imperialistic cultural appropriation.

As a rule, the translingual movement of texts often retains its momentum when foreign works are translated into the target language. The ensuing rewritings and adaptations of these fresh imports by authors not conversant with the source language display a wide range of discursive strategies that transcend the binaries of assimilation and foreignization, multiculturalism and Eurocentrism, aesthetic innovation and nativist insistence on the incommensurable original. This book probes the complexity of this translation-adaptation continuum with surgical precision. I am particularly attentive to how the four adapters’ editorial interventions altered their Asian sources in such a way as to reflect the same artistic intentions displayed in their creative writings. I also argue that a philologist’s expertise is needed to solve a number of technical challenges characterizing this distinctive literary phenomenon that I call translingual adaptation.

As often noted, the study of indirect translation (a translation of a translation) is the area, within translation studies perhaps, most akin to philology and the time-honored practice of close reading in literary criticism (Assis Rosa et al. 125). Yet, descriptive studies of indirect translations are both scarce and far from reaching a satisfactory level of sophistication. This apparently simple task requires, in fact, considerable expertise in examining works forensically across a multitude of languages, including those of the ultimate target, the source, and the mediating texts. Therefore, being a polyglot is perhaps a prerequisite for pinpointing the working mechanism of translingual adaptation from a world literature perspective. But there are other hurdles too, such as the difficulty, if not impossibility, of identifying the urtext.

As a case in point, when translating Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava’s most influential biography, the Padma bka’ thang shel brag ma, French Tibetologist Gustave-Charles Toussaint (1869–1938) unwittingly obfuscated the authorship of his manuscript by mistakenly paraphrasing the Tibetan authors’ names, Yeshe Tsogyal and Guru Orgyen Lingpa, into such mythopoetic yet unrecognizable monikers as Reine-de-la-Mer-de-Gnose [Queen-of-the-Sea-of-Gnosis] and un Guru du pays d’Oḍḍiyāna [a Guru from the land of Oḍḍiyāna] (Toussaint, Le dict de Padma (1933) 481–82.). To use an inappropriate analogy, this would be akin to rendering the English surname Churchill into French as église-malade [sick-church]. If only Toussaint had known that both Yeshe Tsogyal and Orgyen Lingpa were personal names, he might have refrained from breaking them down into a concatenation of beguiling morphemes (unless his fixation with onomastics compelled him to do so). Frankly, had Toussaint not mangled the name Orgyen Lingpa (Wylie: U-rgyan gling-pa) beyond recognition, he would have saved me the trouble of a guesswork that ended up costing me dearly.

Here is roughly what happened. When I first set out to write about the cultural history of translating Padmasambhava—the founding father of Tibetan Buddhism so to speak—for Western readers, I had access only to a 2000 paperback reprint of Toussaint’s French translation (the first full rendition of the Padma bka’ thang ever to be published in a European language). As it turned out, this new edition stripped away the fragments of the original Tibetan printer’s colophon enclosed by Toussaint in facsimile in the original 1933 version. This missing colophon contains unequivocally Orgyen Lingpa’s note on his rediscovery of a treasure text initially concealed by Yeshe Tsogyal, thereby casting an unsuspected light on the authorship of Toussaint’s manuscript (Toussaint, Le dict de Padma (1933) 480, Fol. 367a, 367b). But at the time I was unaware of this abridgement. Worse still, as I could not ferret out the exact Tibetan source of Toussaint’s translation based on the French text alone, I became impatient with the detective work. In 2017, I published (prematurely in retrospect) an article in which I took Toussaint to task for his failure to reproduce his primary sources in facsimile (Bai, Is it possible 195–96). Obviously, this was a false accusation. As fate would have it, in 2019, I landed a superb postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Hong Kong and finally had enough research money to get my hands on a copy of the original 1933 edition of Toussaint’s translation (which I got from Amazon for 500 US dollars, a sum beyond the bounds of a graduate student’s miserly stipend). Following a line-by-line perusal of three smudged folios of a colophon written in inflated Tibetan prose, I quickly ran into Orgyen Lingpa’s name and thereby solved the authorship conundrum. To conclude, a philological approach to translingual adaptation is no inexpensive task. Textual archeology requires not just linguistic proficiency, but also patience and sustained input of financial resources. Lesson learned.

Though informed by Auerbach’s methodology, I do not uncritically take sides with him, as his Judeo-Christian/Greco-Roman genealogy of Weltliteratur remains Eurocentric. As a matter of fact, Auerbach went so far as to see the emergence of non-Western literatures and languages as a threat to the Goethean ideal (Said, Introduction viii). Today, it is no longer a secret that Boccaccio, Cervantes, and Chaucer all borrowed elements from vernacular translations of the Arabian Nights. Still, many scholars of world literature housed in English/European languages departments feel reluctant to acknowledge the non-Western origins of Western literature. In contrast, Egyptologists, Assyriologists, Buddhologists, Sinologists (or any textual scholar working along philological lines) seldom lose sight of this influence and rarely do they hold on to a self-contained deconstruction jargon as a cure-all to remedy the inveterate Eurocentrism in Western epistemology. For instance, using limpid, descriptive language, Donald Lopez and Peggy McCracken have done a brilliant job tracing how the Buddha’s life story morphed into the popular medieval tale of Barlaam and Josaphat.¹ The Christianization of Prince Siddhārtha’s legend involved much meandering, from India to Jerusalem via Persia and then spread throughout Europe, leaving behind it a host of variant versions in Georgian, Arabic, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew translations alongside the Sanskrit original. Tidbits of the story were even incorporated by Shakespeare into The Merchant of Venice. Another work of Lopez that provides the conceptual bedrock for this book is The Lotus Sūtra: A Biography, which traces the global reception of a signature text of Mahāyāna Buddhism in Nepal, China, Japan, France, and the United States. Pinning down the contingencies, key actors, and ideological considerations that facilitated the Lotus Sutra’s global dissemination, Lopez brilliantly summarizes the sheer number of details in crystal-clear English prose. I have tried to emulate Lopez’s craft of storytelling that deftly marries forensic reading with general observation.

Generally speaking, the massive translation, dissemination, and absorption into major European languages of works from Asian countries took off following the discovery of such non-Western classical languages as Sanskrit and the ensuing philological breakthrough in the eighteenth century. This influx of fresh materials culminated in a decisive moment in 1827 when the elderly Goethe proclaimed the advent of Weltliteratur while praising an enigmatic Chinese novel which, despite its anonymity,² has become all too familiar in a scholarly discussion about world literature today. Arguably, not all Western appropriators of Eastern literatures are cronies of imperialism as such. But scholars following the tenets of postcolonialism tend to cast too negative a light on Orientalism and its literary manifestations, which have yet played an indispensable role in the historical making of world literature. In this respect, Dorothy Figueira convincingly breaks with the undifferentiated view of non-Western cultures as victims of European political domination. In Translating the Orient: The Reception of Śākuntala in Nineteenth-Century Europe, she draws attention to the reliance by nineteenth-century European writers on a famous Sanskrit play—the Abhijñānaśākuntala by Kālidāsa—to creatively tackle their own aesthetic crises at home rather than serving an imperialistic ideological agenda. Figueira excels in both her philological examination of a multitude of translations and her attentiveness to the translation-adaptation continuum, which allows her to tease out astoundingly variegated examples of artistic responses to the Śākuntala among English, French, German, and Italian translators and later adapters. I am indebted to her for setting up an analytical model that masterfully combines macroscopic reception studies with a linguistically-informed, microscopic reading of primary sources.

More recently, Aamir Mufti has noted the blatant inattention to Orientalism in Franco Moretti’s advocacy for distant reading as a method par excellence to bear on the core–periphery dynamics of a global literary system. Likewise for Mufti, Pascale Casanova’s oversight in failing to address how Orientalism has historically shaped the emergence of a Paris-centered world republic of letters in her landmark monograph The World Republic of Letters is equally disappointing.³ Building on Mufti’s observation, my book rethinks the historical influx of translated Asian works in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe and how their later adaptations by four iconic authors in France and Argentina contributed to the nascent landscape of world literature. Hybrid in nature, these texts in motion stand out for their distinctive mode of translingual genesis and unusual global reach; neither European nor Asian per se, they therefore pose huge difficulties to textual scholars working within conventionally defined boundaries of national traditions.

Understandably, academic monographs in English that closely examine a set of literary texts’ successive avatars in a string of radically distant languages through translation, rewriting, and adaptation remain relatively rare. My book thus seeks to help fill this void. It is innovative in three respects. First, I see English as but a mediating language among many others in world literary networks rather than an instrument