Translation as Creative Writing: Rewriting The Chinese Maze Murders in Contemporary China

In his article "Translation as Creative Writing: Rewriting The Chinese Maze Murders in Contemporary China," Xiaoquan Raphael Zhang examines four groups of selected writings centered on one of Robert van Gulik's more well-known Judge Dee novels, The Chinese Maze Murders (written first in English but not published until 1956). Different from most publications on van Gulik and his novels, Zhang examines the impact of censorship and self-censorship on the writing, rewriting, and (re)adapting, "literal" and "liberal/free" translation of the Judge Dee stories traveling between Chinese and English, between China and the West, for Chinese and non-Chinese audiences. Focus is given to contextualizing the two Chinese versions and in particular Chen's rendition. Zhang argues that the Chinese translator's (self-)censorship plays a role in generating more creativity and agency, sometimes coerced, in literary translation across different cultures and languages and renders literary translation more a creative mission than merely retelling stories in a different language. Viewed in this light, translators are more like creative writers. What deserves more scholarly investigation is their agency and strategies in (re)creating the texts for their target audience in the target language.