At the suggestion of Dr. Banerjee and after thinking about my project more critically, I’ve decided to switch up my project to focus on translation. Given my lack of knowledge of Classical Chinese and the fact that this new project direction can offer some legitimately new insights into global intellectual history and translation, I’ve decided to focus my project not on Kang Youwei directly, but on the translation of Datong Shu I was going to use for my previous project.
Upon reading book reviews of the work, a translation of Datong Shu published in 1958 by sinologist Laurence G. Thompson, I realized there was more to pick apart than I originally imagined.[1] I read such conclusions by asking questions that Dr. Banerjee left me with: why was this work translated in the first place? What does this say about its author, its times? Most importantly, why does this matter?
Perhaps the most striking revelation that was made was Thompson’s choice to translate Kang’s vision as a unified world as a “One World.” Previously, I had thought nothing of the usage of this term, but a book review of the translation I read revealed that the term was borrowed from an influential 1943 work authored by Wendell Willkie, an American politician. It spoke of world federalism, an end to colonialism, equality for non-whites in the United States. It was appropriately titled One World.[2] One World has since been purchased as a library e-book, and I’m confident it may help to provide some context for the guiding question of this empirical essay. Namely, why does this translation matter? Why does Laurence translate Kang’s universalist idea of a datong community into the terms of a American concept, inevitably subtly changing its meaning?
Of course, I’m going to have to narrow down my focus, but there’s quite a lot to unpack with the concept of translation. Translation itself is a means of global connection and communication, bound to and problematized by power relations and differing worldviews. Lydia Liu’s Tokens of Exchange (also now available as a library e-book) raises a lot of important points and questions. It asks how translations, as products, represent the universalization of knowledge, and how they are created out of unequal relations of power and colonial, Western-centric contexts.[3] Owen in a previous post has already commented upon Pernau and Sachsenmeier’s Global Conceptual History, which I’m likely going to make use of; in short, the text considers the translation and circulation of concepts within history.[4]
There’s also plenty of potential for this work to go meta – its point of inquiry based in an academic text, after all. What might Laurence’s translation and its book reviews tell us about academic trends, how academia thought about Chinese history in the 1950s? An interesting point I picked up was that Laurence’s translation played an important role of boosting knowledge of Kang’s life and work in the West; one book review notes Laurence’s brief biography of the intellectual, included with his translation, is the most detailed English-language account of Kang’s life to exist at its time.[5] What does Laurence’s translation tell us about the circulation of knowledge? What can such an inquiry teach us about the method and drive of global intellectual history?
This project certainly isn’t going to be an easy one; as a history student, I’ve always struggled with complex jargon and argument, historical writing based more in theory than empirical fact. Lydia Liu, for instance, provides great insights, but I find myself having to read her words over and over again to understand their meaning. In pursuing this project, I hope to find something of value, and translate theories of translation and exchange into a more readable form.
[1] K’ang Yu-Wei and Laurence G. Thompson, trans., Ta T’ung Shu (New York, 1958).
[2] Wendell Willkie, One World (New York, 1943).
[3] Lydia Liu (ed.), Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (Durham, 1999).
[4] Margit Pernau and Dominic Sachsenmeier, Global Conceptual History: A Reader (London, 2016).
[5] Richard C. Howard, “Ta t`ung shu. The One-World Philosophy of K`ang Yu-wei. by Laurence G. Thompson (Review),” The Journal of Asian Studies 19, no. 2, (1960): 206-208.