Outdoing the original: belles infidèles theories of translation from Perrot d’Ablancourt to Xu Yuanchcong

Two leading figures of the Chinese translation scene in the 1990s, Lin Shaohua (translator of modern Japanese fiction) and Xu Yuanchong (translator of classical Chinese poetry into English and French, and of major French writers into Chinese), have seriously engaged with the theorization of an aesthetic approach to literary translation. Lin highlights the many merits of an elegant Chinese prose that he deploys, in which elements of the literary language figure prominently in the modern idiom. He sees his stylistic deviations from the original texts as justified by the desire to pursue “spiritual resemblance,” a term consistently associated with proponents of the Aesthetic School since the early twentieth century. Xu goes one step further by suggesting that the re-creative translator can challenge fidelity as a paramount principle and “improve” on the original through stylistic intervention. The most controversial part of his theory is his belief that the translated text can demonstrate the superiority of the target language.