Translating romantic love: the reception of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese in China

Abstract This article examines the reasons behind the translation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese in twentieth-century mainland China, as well as the cultural work it performed. I argue that its Chinese afterlife shaped and was shaped by the country’s changing dynamics of love. In the Republican era, it was translated by the Crescent Moon poets to promote a model of companionate marriage based on romantic love and free choice in a post-Confucian society, and to advance formal and metrical innovation in modern vernacular poetry. During the Mao era when romantic love was officially discouraged, the translation of this volume may have been a product of the interplay between Barrett Browning’s political attitudes, institutional regime, and paratextual manipulation. By preserving alternative values, its publication constituted a deviation from ideological orthodoxy. In the early post-Mao era, Sonnets from the Portuguese was enlisted to help shape a new marital norm grounded in love in response to the prevailing practice of mercenary marriage. Despite its period-specific variations, the translation of this sonnet sequence in China was consistently intertwined with Chinese intellectuals’ ongoing efforts to redefine marriage beyond alienating, constraining conventions and towards more liberating and emotionally fulfilling patterns. Through this study, I demonstrate how a Victorian text could be selectively repurposed to serve the evolving needs of a culturally distinct Eastern nation.