Path-making translators and the spatial logic of literary circulation: Howard Goldblatt and Mo Yan’s U.S. trajectory

This article examines how Mo Yan’s fiction entered the U.S. literary field not simply through interlingual transfer, but through a route organised across differentiated institutional sites. Drawing on correspondence and publishing documents from the Chinese Literature Translation Archive (CLTA) at the University of Oklahoma, it reconstructs the spatial, institutional, and relational processes through which Howard Goldblatt helped make Mo Yan’s work publishable, mobile, and symbolically legible in the United States. Translation geography provides the article’s primary analytical frame. The article argues that Goldblatt’s role cannot be reduced either to textual translation or to the professional function of a literary agent. Rather, he operated as a path-making translator: a translator whose agency extended from textual mediation to threshold-text selection, route design, institutional negotiation, node switching, and symbolic mobilisation. The Mo Yan–Goldblatt case does not offer a universal model of world-literary circulation; instead, it provides a case-derived account of how translated literature from a non-central language may become visible through the coordinated activation of publishers, universities, journals, events, and evaluative institutions. By reconstructing this process from archival evidence, the article contributes to translation geography, translator studies, and research on the institutional mediation of contemporary Chinese literature in Anglophone circulation.