Twentieth-Century Chinese Translations of Eugene O’Neill Plays

By the time his ship sailed into the Shanghai harbor in 1928, Eugene O'Neill had already read quite a lot in classical Chinese philosophy (via English translations), especially Taoism. Not wanting to draw publicity or be bothered by snooping government secret police, O'Neill mostly stayed within the walls of the Astor House Hotel during his month-long visit in Shanghai; his plan to write a play featuring Qinshi Huangdi, the first emperor of China, did not come to fruition. Little did he know then that like it or not, he would soon become quite a public figure and in the decades to come China would become a big "O'Neill country," second only to the United States, as indicated in Zhong Yi's Twentieth-Century Chinese Translations of Eugene O'Neill Plays (4).Zhong's book, based on her PhD dissertation, has five chapters. The first chapter is an overview of twentieth-century Chinese translations of O'Neill plays highlighting O'Neill's "fixation" on Eastern (Chinese) culture and Chinese reciprocal "fixation" on O'Neill; the three chapters in the middle focus on Chinese O'Neill translations as cultural texts, as literary texts, and as dramatic/theatrical texts respectively; the last chapter rounds off the study with a brief overview of the reception of Chinese O'Neill translations, including stage performances. Each of the chapters picks the two peak periods of O'Neill translations in the twentieth century, the 1930s–40s and 1980s–90s, zooms in comparatively in terms of the sociocultural and political contexts and translation strategies, and gauges their relative success or lack thereof.As students of modern Chinese history and culture know, the early and late decades of the twentieth century were heydays for Chinese translations of foreign (Western) texts—thanks to China's dire need to strengthen itself for survival in the post–Opium War, post–Boxer Rebellion world in the early decades, and then to recover and revive its sociocultural and economic life after the ten-year ordeal of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). During the thirty-year "strange interlude" (from the late 1940s to the late 1970s), arts and literature in China were planned and organized, like the country's "command economy," in accordance with the dominant ideology of "socialist realism" modeled after the Soviet Union. Translations of foreign literature were tightly controlled (selection and approval) based on what was deemed necessary for building the new socialist society, and depended upon the prospective authors' nationality and political persuasions (progressive, reactionary, or middle-of-the road in their perceived attitudes toward communism), and also the content of their prospective works (uplifting, pro-proletarian/working-class critiques of capitalist society). Apparently, O'Neill, a playwright from a country that was China's geopolitical archenemy for much of those three decades whose dramatic oeuvre presented a tragic vision of life filled with doom and gloom, could not make the cut (25–31).As opposed to "repetitiousness/redundancy" Zhong finds in much of recent scholarship on Chinese O'Neill translations, the originality and hence valuable contribution of Zhong's book is in its informed and careful study of the two periods pursued in the three middle chapters (1). Many among the translators in the 1930s–40s were writers and playwrights themselves whereas the later generation in the 1980s–90s were mostly scholars of Western/American literature. Working in different sociohistorical contexts and serving different cultural and political needs, the two groups employed various strategies in their renditions of O'Neill plays as they weighed the potential gain and loss of "foreignization" (retaining information from the source text at the risk/cost of breaking the conventions of the target language) versus "domestication" (making the text conform to the target culture at the risk/cost of losing information from the source text). The textual struggle between "literariness" and "performativity," as well as other seemingly irreconcilable demands and objectives, often resulted in overtranslation, undertranslation, or mistranslation (deliberate as well as erroneous). Having delved in both Chinese-English and English-Chinese translations, I am particularly delighted by the fact that whenever Zhong points out a mistake in translation, she provides her own alternative translation and in almost every instance the alternative is a better rendition when viewed through the lenses of both the target language/culture and that of the source.The earlier generation of O'Neill translators often altered or condensed the plots and Sinicized characters and places in the plays to serve the sociocultural and political needs of the time, but they didn't always succeed (88–89). For example, a translator of Diff'rent transplanted the story from the United States to China and replaced France (referenced in act 2) with Japan; changed the exact year for act 1 from 1890 to a "certain year"; and changed the year for act 2 from 1920 to "30 years later." These alterations created a big problem for the Chinese text, for example, Qiu Nȕtao (Qiu Furious Sea/Benny Rogers), a Chinese soldier, serves in the Chinese army that invaded Japan, a jarringly nonsensical development contrary to what happened during World War II (94–99). A translation of Beyond the Horizon reset the play in rural China and rendered the story of the two brothers, Andrew and Robert, one longing for the sea and one deciding to stay on the farm and marry his sweetheart, as quite absurd given the conditions of rural China in the 1930s (116–20). By contrast, most of the translations produced in the 1980s–90s used the "foreignization" strategy to provide the full flavor of O'Neill's cultural content while also using available resources in the target language to relay the literary expressiveness of the source text (126–27).If the question of "literariness" proved challenging enough for Chinese translators of O'Neill plays, their endeavors, when viewed through the lens of "performativity," can be said to be even less successful. O'Neill plays are loaded with dialect, colloquialisms, slang expressions, as well as colorful figures of speech befitting characters' socioeconomic milieus and personalities. Early translators, aiming primarily for a reading rather than a theatrical text, were not self-consciously concerned with the issue of "performativity"; they tended to "pretty up" O'Neill's rough and racy language into more "polite" Chinese, which would result in standardization and uniformity at the expense of the idiosyncrasy of each play and character (150–51). The later generation of translators, still translating mostly for reading rather than staging, paid more attention to the sound and rhythm of dialogue (152–53). One seemingly unsurmountable hurdle for translators of every generation is the number of regional dialects in China. Any attempt to write an O'Neill play with a particular dialect (say Shangdong or Shanghai) runs the risk of making the target text less accessible to Chinese readers/audiences who do not speak that particular dialect. How to translate dialect, slang expressions, and culturally specific references and so on, and indeed how to translate for the stage remains a challenge because 100 percent equivalents between any two source and target languages/cultures are rare. Ying Ruocheng's translation of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, which uses Beijing dialect to relay the flavor of Brooklyn, is a notable exception.Zhong rounds off the book with a brief overview of O'Neill productions in China during the two peak periods of her study. In an excellent example from the early period, the wartime capital of China, Chongqing, adapted Beyond the Horizon to contemporary times in 1941 in which the two brothers leave their mountainous village and fight in the war against Japanese aggressions. It served the needs of the country at a time of grave existential crisis and was well received (205). Zhong mentions a number of stage performances of O'Neill plays during the 1980s–90s, including Desire Under the Elms, Beyond the Horizon, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and Mourning Becomes Electra. Overall, Zhong's assessment of Chinese O'Neill translations as cultural, literary, and dramatic/theatrical texts yields meaningful insights and is a valuable addition to the field of O'Neill studies.Chinese "fixation" on O'Neill seems to have cooled off in the twenty-first century, especially during the last decade or so, as is the case for all things Western, thanks to a confluence of socioeconomic, geopolitical, and cultural developments few people could have foreseen even in the 1980s–90s, let alone 1930s–40s. Now, as a big player on the world stage, with an economy second only to that of the United States, China wants to pivot from being an "importer" of culture (from Western countries) to being an "exporter" of its culture, as indicated in the general preface for the translation studies series published by Zhejiang University Press, which includes Zhong's book (1–4). Indeed, at the present time and in the foreseeable future, a priority and goal of China, backed up with funding support, is to wield its culture (arts and literature as well as scholarship) as soft power in the world in part via Chinese-foreign translations. Apparently, what the twenty-first-century generation of Chinese translators face is a new "brave new world" and the specter of a new Cold War quite different from what the earlier generations faced. How would they navigate the cultural, linguistic/literary, as well as (geo)political challenges to make Chinese culture more accessible to readers of other cultures/languages? Indeed, what makes their task even more daunting is this question: Is the rest of the world today, especially the United States and other Western countries, as eager to import these Chinese cultural goods and as welcoming as was China vis-à-vis Western cultural goods for much of the twentieth century?