Journal of World History, Vol. 22, No.

3
2011 by University of Hawaii Press
553
Cultural Translation and the
Transnational Circulation of Books
*
mark gamsa
Tel Aviv University
W
hat does translation have in common with transnational his-
tory, apart from sharing the same prefix? The connection has
been little explored, and in what follows I will try to look into it by
developing ideas arising from my previous studies on the dissemination
of Russian literature to China.
1
While taking my examples from the
record of one cultural encounter, I will argue that their relevance may
be extended and that by thinking of books as both cultural products
and physical objects, we gain new perspectives for a study of translation
as part of world history.
To begin from the second half of my title: the circulation of books.
This is very familiar, but perhaps deceptively so. We may buy a book in
an airport of a foreign country, start reading it in the air and finish it
at home. People also read on train journeys; in the nineteenth century
and the first half of the twentieth, when travelers would still spend
weeks voyaging by sea, they used their time to read through much
lengthier novels than we could on a flight, and even to learn new lan-
* I am grateful for the opportunity to have presented a draft of this article as a lecture
at the summer school on comparative and transnational history, organized by the Depart-
ment of History and Civilization at the European University Institute in Florence, on 16
September 2009.
1
Mark Gamsa, The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature: Three Studies (Leiden:
Brill, 2008), and Gamsa, The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and
Manual of Practice (New York: Palgrave, 2010). The present article is in no way a summary
of these books, and, in developing its conceptual argument, it largely draws on new reading.
554 journal of world history, september 2011
guages.
2
But give it another thought and you will see that examples
such as these may not be the best: a book read on the train will often
make a circular journey, returning to the same bookshelf on which it
had stood before the vacation or the business trip; books read on steam-
ships usually belonged to the ships library and so would travel back and
forth between ports in different parts of the world without, as it were,
setting foot ashore.
Here is a better example: most readers of this article will have ordered
books from online bookstores and seen them arrive in their local post
office, or delivered to them at home, from unknown and irrelevant
locations in North America or Britain (if the books ordered were in
English). Before we had the Internet, or even credit cards, we needed
to know the physical address of the bookstore or publisher, because
we had to write them a letter, ask for a catalogue, and send a check.
These days you dont necessarily have to buy printed books since you
can read them scanned on your computer, and if you read them that
way, you no longer need to hold a book in your hands. I want, however,
to discuss a time period, the early twentieth century, when there were
neither international airlines nor a World Wide Web, when a book was
a commodity that traveled much more slowly than it does today. But I
will insist that, even when the means of transport were limited, books
did travelas indeed they had ever since they began to be written,
and even before they began to be printed. For the sake of this discus-
sion, I also ask you to think of books not as the abstract containers or
receptacles of ideas, or the disembodied carriers of fictional plots, but
as material objectsin a word, as things.
METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES
This material nature of books is now primarily studied within the still
young discipline known as book history or the history of books.
3
It
has existed under this name since about the mid 1990s, has successfully
2
See Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond, eds., introduction to Books without Borders:
The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture, 2 vols. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008), 1:1011. On railway reading as one of the most remarked upon phenomena of the
Victorian age, see Stephen Colclough and David Vincent, Reading, in The Cambridge
History of the Book in Britain, vol. 6, 18301914, ed. David McKitterick (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2009), pp. 281323, here pp. 308309.
3
An introductory article by Jonathan Rose, The History of Books: Revised and
Enlarged, in The Darnton Debate: Books and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Haydn
T. Mason, pp. 83104 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998), opened with the words: As I
write, a new academic discipline is being constructed from the ground up.
Gamsa: Cultural Translation & the Transnational Circulation of Books 555
incorporated the older history of reading, and has swallowed whole
what had been referred to earlier as the sociology of literature.
4
His-
torians of the book conduct research on such subjects as the history
of publishing firms, or the history of copyright (where, as we shall see
later on, they do come across the transnational aspects of book pub-
lication), and they analyze, often in great detail, the process of books
being printed, bound, distributed, and sold. However, in general they
are not much interested in tracing books travels beyond their origi-
nal language environments;
5
studies on the transatlantic book trade
between the United States and Britain still fit into that category. The
cultural history of things also has a flourishing history, launched with
a volume edited by Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Com-
modities in Cultural Perspective.
6
Here we are in the world of anthropol-
ogy, to which we shall return. Naturally, much is being said within this
framework on the movement of goods from Europe and America to
places in Asia, Africa, or the Caribbean. The branch of study situated
between anthropology and cultural geography goes under a name of its
own, geography of consumption.
The problem is that these approaches never seem to meet: while
book historians are still mostly content to remain within the borders
of the cultural region, where their books had been produced,
7
scholars
of consumption and material culture study the travels of commodi-
ties, not of books. For example, the dissemination of foreign objects in
China from the late Qing dynasty to the end of the republican period
(the mid nineteenth century up to the late 1940s) is the subject of
Frank Diktters Things Modern: Material Culture and Everyday Life in
China,
8
but among the things in this pathbreaking study, books are
4
(S)ociology of literature, as it used to be called; history of the book, history of read-
ing, as we call it nowadays. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 18001900 (Lon-
don: Verso, 1998), p. 143.
5
This is not even what Rose, History of Books, p. 103, has in mind when he says:
some scholars have broached the prospect of a global history of the book, but too much
blank space remains on that particular map. The prospect Rose discusses is that of com-
posing histories of the book for each country, rather than tracing books cross-national
movements. Thus the global history of the book would be the sum total of national book
histories, not the history of their interaction.
6
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
7
Despite announcing a turn in that direction, Sydney J. Shep, Books without Bor-
ders: The Transnational Turn in Book History, opening chapter in vol. 1 of Fraser and
Hammond, Books without Borders, furnishes more slogans than significant examples.
8
London: Hurst and Company, 2007 (the U.S. edition was published by Columbia
University Press as Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China). See the
digest in Frank Diktter, Objects and Agency: Material Culture and Modernity in China,
in History and Material Culture: A Students Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources, ed.
Karen Harvey, pp. 158172 (London: Routledge, 2009).
556 journal of world history, september 2011
not mentioned. The reason may be that we (at least, those of us not in
the publishing business) find it hard to think of a book as a commod-
ity: indeed, the capacity of the book to unite metonymically with its
contents is such that we usually forget about its being an object (its
thingness, if you will) altogether. Another reason lies in the different
interests of people in the social sciences and the humanities: the his-
tory of the book as a traveling object falls between these particular two
cultures, whereas cross-disciplinary research is more often preached
than practiced.
9
Here translation comes in, as the very fuel that allows books to travel
beyond the language environment of the writer and reach readers he or
she could never have imagined. As a case study in the transnational
circulation of books, one will read with profit Isabel Hofmeyrs The
Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrims Progress.
10
It
is a sophisticated investigation of the dissemination history of a single
canonical book, a Protestant classic of the late seventeenth century,
which in the nineteenth century was translated into most of the worlds
languages. Focusing on translations into African languages, Hofmeyr
shows that translation constructed a bridge between Bunyan and the
Congo, and that traffic on this bridge could go in both directions. This
is what happened, for example, when African readers attributed to
the book magical powers familiar to them from their own religions, or
when their interpretations of The Pilgrims Progress traveled back to the
source, so to speak, as through the pages of the transnational mission-
ary press they reached Victorian Britain. Hofmeyrs study connects the
history of books and the history of things, an endeavor for which her
thorough bibliographic work provides an essential foundation: general-
izing on translation is useless before you know who translated what and
when.
A Christian allegory and the story of a religious quest, The Pilgrims
Progress naturally lent itself to religious reinterpretation by the cultures
it reached. It is not, therefore, a representative case of either cul-
tural translation or transnational circulation; to be one, this book
is too special. Hofmeyrs research has been followed by detailed study
of the trade in educational textbooks between Britain, Bengal, and
9
Chap. 5, Things in Motion: Ming Luxury Objects as Commodities, in Craig Clunas,
Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1991), which takes its cue from Appadurai, occasionally mentions books while
being more concerned with establishing the commodity nature of works of art.
10
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Gamsa: Cultural Translation & the Transnational Circulation of Books 557
South Africa from 1800 to 1920, a project currently involving histori-
ans of the book at the universities of Pretoria, Jadavpur, and London.
11

With the stated purpose of mapping out the translation and reception
of main Anglophone works and genres outside the Western world, on
the one hand, and of Eastern literary monuments in the West, on the
other, the Blackwell e-journal Literature Compass launched its Global
Circulation Project in 2010. Researchers in Germany have included a
study of the consumption of English books in Hamburg in a project
called Travelling Goods / Travelling Moods: Cultural Appropriation
of Foreign Goods, 18501950.
12
These ventures all attest to new interest in the circulation of books
(so far, mainly books in English). The work of Franco Moretti, at Stan-
ford University, is less concerned with the material movement of books.
Within comparative literature, which has always been interested in the
reception of writers and their works both within and beyond the bor-
ders of national literatures, Moretti stands out for his emphasis on what
he calls literary geography: the inner geography of novels (where,
in which concrete space, the plot of the novel takes place), or the dis-
semination of the novel as a particular literary genre, that is to say,
where novels are published and where (and which kind of) novels are
translated. Here he operates on a truly global scale.
13
Cultural Translation and Its Pitfalls
From the 1950s onward, anthropologists employed this term to describe
the work of reinterpreting for readers at home the distant customs they
had met with in the field. Used in this way, cultural translation pre-
supposed some confidence in the translatability of cultures. One hears
it far less often in this sense now, partly due to the effects of an article in
an oft-cited volume of 1986, in which Talal Asad attacked the assump-
tion of British anthropologists to be practicing cultural translation.
In his view, this notion reduced the alien culture that anthropologists
11
Respectively, Francis Galloway, Swapan Chakravorty, and Simon Eliot.
12
The Literature Compass project is under the editorship of Regenia Gagnier of the
Department of English, University of Exeter, UK. The Travelling Goods / Travelling
Moods project is led by Christian Huck of the Department of English, University of Kiel,
Germany.
13
Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 18001900. Moretti, The Novel: History and
Theory, New Left Review, no. 52 (JulyAugust 2008): 111124, is an experimental analysis
of the European novel as a departure from the earlier, Chinese, model.
558 journal of world history, september 2011
encountered to a text one felt able and entitled to translate.
14
The
direction of Asads critique, aimed at Ernest Gellner, was quite in the
spirit of Edward Saids Orientalism, which it preceded by a year. Like
Said would, Asad constructed a one-sided image of Western exploita-
tion of the East while dismissing the possibility that cultural transla-
tion was practiced in the East, as people there tried to make sense of
the exotic West, no less than vice versa.
As already mentioned, the study of translation in the humanities
used to be part of comparative literature; with good reason, George
Steiner considers the translation of literature to be properly one of the
main concerns of this discipline, and the act of translation a basic com-
ponent of the human condition.
15
Already in the 1970s, however, trans-
lation studies began to lay claims for an independent status. Among
practitioners today, those studying the history of translation make up a
small group,
16
while many more are engaged in theoretical speculation
deriving from remarkably homogenous political positions.
17
It is within
14
For Asad, cultures were not texts to be translated but practices to be learned; the
position of the anthropologist was therefore not that of a translator but the more mod-
est one of a student. Talal Asad, The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social
Anthropology, in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford
and George E. Marcus, pp. 141164 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). The
road from here is exemplified in Doris Bachmann-Medick, Meanings of Translation in
Cultural Anthropology, trans. Kate Sturge, in Translating Others, 2 vols., ed. Theo Hermans
(Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2006), 1:3342. A challenge to Western translation
authority in the name of contemporary, postcolonially informed cultural theory, this
article rejected cultural understanding as a purpose of either anthropology or translation.
The same author, a seasoned turn spotter, has since identified culture with translation
to boldly redefine the humanities as translation studies in her The Translational Turn,
Translation Studies 2, no. 1 (2009).
15
George Steiner, What Is Comparative Literature? an inaugural lecture delivered
before the University of Oxford on 11 October 1994 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995);
Steiner, Translation as conditio humana, in bersetzung/Translation/Traduction: Ein inter-
nationales Handbuch zur bersetzungsforschung/An International Encyclopedia of Translation
Studies/Encyclopdie internationale de la recherche sur la traduction, 3 vols., ed. Harald Kittel et
al. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 1:111.
16
Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia, eds., introduction to Cultural Translation in Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 2, is right in citing the
example of the Gttingen school and work such as that by the late Antoine Berman
on translation in romantic-age Germany, but clearly wrong to interpret these examples as
signifying a historical turn. Cf. Harald Kittel, ed., International Anthologies of Literature in
Translation (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1995) and Kittel, Inclusions and Exclusions: The Gt-
tingen Approach to Translation Studies and Inter-Literary History, in Translating Litera-
turesTranslating Cultures: New Vistas and Approaches in Literary Studies, ed. Kurt Mueller-
Vollmer and Michael Irmscher (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1998), pp. 313.
17
See, for a depressing example, the forum on cultural translation in Translation Stud-
ies 2, no. 2 (2009): 196219. Historically, translation rarely served the counter-strategies of
subversion and resistance that postcolonial critics would (ahistorically) like to see prac-
Gamsa: Cultural Translation & the Transnational Circulation of Books 559
this framework that cultural translation has been rediscovered and
given an interpretation as a metaphor, usually for the situation of the
migrant or cultural convert. Typically, proponents of translation as a
token for otherness cite Salman Rushdie, who, in the title essay of a
collection published in 1991, parenthetically called himself and fellow
British Indian writers translated men.
18
In the way cultural translation was first employed by Homi
Bhabha in his book The Location of Culture (1994) and has since been
used repeatedly and repetitively by translation theorists, it is no longer
meant to signify the translation of culture, nor does it refer to transla-
tion at all in the familiar sense of words or text being rendered from one
language into another. Rather, translation and negotiation stand
here as general catchwords for the relativity of meaning and identity
in the postcolonial condition. Most of this metaphorical talk about
translation is conducted in one language: English.
19
In this usage, only a nod is made to the older Latin sense of transla-
ticed by their imagined others. In both West and East (as the Chinese example shows),
much of the translation enterprise was subordinate to efforts of nation building, a purpose
that present-day engaged theorists loathe. Culture may not be a monolithic construct, but
for most people it does mean a set of shared understandings with which to see, and translate,
the world.
18
So often has this definition been wrenched out of context to support positions dia-
metrically opposed to it that it will be useful to quote the entire paragraph: But the British
Indian writer simply does not have the option of rejecting English, anyway. His children,
her children, will grow up speaking it, probably as a first language; and in the forging of a
British Indian identity the English language is of central importance. It must, in spite of
everything, be embraced. (The word translation comes, etymologically, from the Latin for
bearing across. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally
supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion
that something can also be gained). Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (1982), in
his Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 19811991 (London: Granta Books, Penguin
Books, 1991), p. 17. The last words are a matter of agreement for almost all the writers,
whose essays are collected in Isabelle de Courtivron, ed., Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writ-
ers on Identity and Creativity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); they are explicitly
endorsed by the Chinese American writer Ha Jin in his The Writer as Migrant (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 60. By contrast, chap. 9 of Pascale Casanova, The
World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2004), bears the title The Tragedy of Translated Men.
19
Critiques of the proliferation of translation as metaphor are Loredana Polezzi,
Translation, Travel, Migration, Translator 12, no. 2 (2006): 173177; Harish Trivedi,
Translating Culture vs. Cultural Translation, in In Translation: Reflections, Refractions,
Transformations, ed. Paul St-Pierre and Prafulla C. Kar, pp. 277287 (Amsterdam: John Ben-
jamins, 2007); and Haun Saussy, Media Creoles and the Invention of the Delfeng (paper
given at the conference Translations and Transformations: China, Modernity and Cultural
Transmission, University of Cambridge, 13 May 2008). Asads, Bhabhas, and Trivedis
positions are summarized in Kate Sturge, Cultural Translation, in Routledge Encyclopedia of
Translation Studies, 2nd ed., ed. Mona Baker, pp. 6770 (London: Routledge, 2009).
560 journal of world history, september 2011
tion, that of transference; removal or conveyance from one person,
place, or condition to another.
20
In exploring the concrete manifes-
tations of the connections between translation, transfer, and travel,
transnational history should have been more helpful than translation
studies, yet it has been slower to address this cluster of concepts.
21
The
transnational migrations of people and books can be connected: mi-
grs carried books with them to their new homes all over the world,
and in their host country some later opened libraries and bookstores in
their native language. But books can also travel unaccompanied, their
journeys facilitated by the international book trade.
Not all of the theoretical pretension against which one comes up
when looking up the term cultural translation today deserves to be
taken seriously. I would suggest that we translate cultural translation as
translation into another culture (or: between cultures). But then this
term is tautological: every interlingual translation involves a passage
between cultures. The only merit it therefore may have is to remind
us that the translation of any complex text is never just the portage
of nouns and verbs from one vocabulary into another. Peter Burke, in
the first chapter of Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, a book
he recently coedited, uses a motto from Umberto Eco: translation is
always a shift not between two languages but between two cultures.
22

I would add nothing to it in the way of theory but rather proceed to
some concrete examples. What these intend to demonstrate is that a
transnational history can and should deal with the translation and cir-
culation of books, and that without turning thereby into translational
history, it will then be able to shed new light on processes as important
20
Cf. comments on translation as transference in John S. Dixon, Translation, Culture
and Communication, in Kittel et al., bersetzung/Translation/Traduction, 1:1123, at p. 12.
On the survival in English of the double meaning of translatio, as both translation and
displacement in medieval Latin, see Karlheinz Stierle, Translatio Studii and Renaissance:
From Vertical to Horizontal Translation, in The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the
Space Between, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1996), at pp. 5556. No longer used in regular spoken English, the verb was mostly
employed in the passive tense and often in a religious context.
21
Cf. Wen-hsin Yeh, National Learning and International Study: Travel and Trans-
lation in the Writing of Chinese History, in Global Conjectures: China in Transnational
Perspective, ed. William C. Kirby et al. (Berliner China-Hefte, vol. 30, 2006), pp. 821, at
p. 16 (on translation as a cultural phenomenon of history), and see Translation, Travel,
Migration, special issue, Translator 12, no. 2 (2006).
22
Burke, Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe, in Burke and Hsia, Cul-
tural Translation in Early Modern Europe, p. 7. Cf. Umberto Eco, Experiences in Translation,
trans. Alastair McEwen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).
23
Cf. Michel Espagne, Transferts culturels et histoire du livre, Histoire et Civilisation
du Livre 5 (2009): 201218.
Gamsa: Cultural Translation & the Transnational Circulation of Books 561
as the transfer of ideas between cultures.
23
Further links with develop-
ments in world history, intellectual history, and cultural geography that
make this approach timely and enhance its potential will be pointed
out in the conclusion.
Revolutionsgeschichten and Best Russian Short Stories
A book by a Russian author little known beyond Russia today but
much-read in his time reached China in a very particular way: Lu
Xun (18811936), the great Chinese writer, who was also a dedicated
translator, was working in the Chinese Ministry of Education when
he and others were assigned to sort out the library of a German club
in Shanghai. This library was confiscated and brought to Beijing as a
war trophy after China had joined the Allied Powers and, in August
1917, declared war on Germany. The spoken recollection Lu Xun
left of his work on this assignment
24
makes us want to imagine him
standing or maybe squatting in front of a pile of German books and, at
some felicitous moment, noticing and pulling out Revolutionsgeschich-
ten. The result was that, in the course of 1920 and 1921, he translated
two stories and a short novel from this book, Stories of the Revolution
a collection, published in Munich and Leipzig in 1909, of works by
Mikhail Artsybashev (18781927).
25
The interest Lu Xun developed
for Artsybashev was taken up by other Chinese translators of Russian
literature, working via English. As everything written or translated by
Lu Xun was cherished and reprinted, Artsybashev remained known in
Chinahis stories associated, for some, more with the revolution of
1917, from which he fled abroad, than that of 1905, with which he
had sympathizedlong after Soviet censors had removed the migr
writers works from bookstores and libraries at home.
For book lovers, cases such as this are irresistible. But we must
beware of magnifying the suggestive detail of the accidental event,
just as we had better stay clear of the kind of romantic statements made
about the circulation of books in which rhetoric takes flight to soar
24
Record of a Speech (1926), in Lu Xun, Selected Works, trans. Yang Xianyi and
Gladys Yang, 4 vols. (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980), 2:300305, at pp. 301302.
25
The frontispiece photograph, which Artsybashev had sent to his translator in Ger-
many, was thereby reproduced in the Shanghai edition of his short novel Worker Shevyrev in
Lu Xuns translation and in subsequent reprints. See Gamsa, Chinese Translation of Russian
Literature, pp. 12, 156 (China severed diplomatic ties with Germany on 14 March 1917
and declared war five months later). Lu Xuns intellectual biography and dialogue with
Artsybashevs work are considered in ibid., pp. 141189.
562 journal of world history, september 2011
far above verifiable fact. There is a long tradition of such statements,
from Benjamin and Pound to Derrida and de Certeau, who mused on
the meaning of texts as something created entirely by the readerthe
other impressionable end of the German reception theory, which,
ignoring the form of the text, of which it spoke, maintained that
there were universal patterns of reader response.
26
One will be well
advised to think not of impersonal texts but of concrete books and
other vehicles of stories, novels, poems, or plays. What happens to indi-
vidual books is unpredictable and can go under the old heading habent
sua fata libelli.
27
More usefully, such unpredictability of the transmis-
sion (dissemination, diffusion) of literature through translation and
retranslation may also be conceptualized as the literary variety of the
butterfly effect in chaos theory.
To illustrate this by the example we have just considered: for a
reason we do not know, a German library in China had ordered or
obtained in some other way a translated Russian book titled Stories of
the Revolution for its reading audience of merchants and, probably, mis-
sionaries. Note how different the Lu Xun case is in this regard from the
African translations of Pilgrims Progresstranslations that missionar-
ies promoted and (with the help of their native assistants) produced.
Here a Russian book in German translation was picked up indepen-
dently by a Chinese writer, one of the few leading translators of his
time with a reading knowledge of that language. Even this became pos-
sible only after the Chinese authorities had unexpectedly found them-
selves in the position to temporarily seize a colonial club library, which
otherwise (at least until early 1917) would have been out of bounds to
Chinese readers.
28
While being accidental, an event such as this is
26
Roger Chartier quotes and sympathetically summarizes Michel de Certeau in the out-
set of his Laborers and Voyages: From the Text to the Reader (1992), now in David Fin-
kelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds., The Book History Reader (London: Routledge, 2002),
pp. 4758. One must agree with Chartier when he says that forms produce meaning and
that, contrary to the arguments of reading phenomenology, the specific dispositions that
distinguish communities of readers and traditions of reading do so, too.
27
The full quotation, from Terentianus Maurus of the late third century A.D., is Pro
captu lectoris, habent sua fata libelli: According to the capacity of the reader, books have
their [own] destinies.
28
Franoise Kreissler, Laction culturelle allemande en Chine: De la fin du XIXe sicle la
Seconde Guerre mondiale (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de lhomme, 1989), pp.
1314, 23 (see pp. 211213 on the rarity of German books in China until the 1920s). In
1924, the former president and leader of the Nationalist Party Sun Yat-sen still protested
that Chinese could not even enter the grounds of some leading Shanghai clubs. Jeffrey
N. Wasserstrom, Global Shanghai, 18502010: A History in Fragments (London: Routledge,
2009), p. 68.
Gamsa: Cultural Translation & the Transnational Circulation of Books 563
more than only suggestive, for it allowed the unintended readers of a
book to act upon the object that has come into their control.
Let us now turn our attention to another book, the Modern Library
anthology Best Russian Short Stories. The Modern Library, which mainly
aimed to meet the growing demand in the United States for European
and new British fiction, and would become an institution in American
literary life, was founded by Boni and Liveright in March 1917, and
this anthology was its eighteenth title.
29
The first edition was prob-
ably published in July 1917; after a slight reordering of the preliminary
pages it was reissued twice in September that year, with a fourth print-
ing done in February 1918 and more printings following in the 1920s.
Subsequently an enlarged edition of Best Russian Short Stories came out,
with copyright given as 1925, the year when Horace Liveright, former
partner of Albert Boni, sold the firm to Bennett Cerf. In August 1925,
Cerf and his business partner Donald Klopfer established The Mod-
ern Library Inc.; two years later, they founded Random House.
30
This
enlarged edition of the anthology was in fact first produced in 1934,
not (pace the copyright year it indicated) in 1925. Type was reset in
1945 and reprints were published until as late as 1970.
31
The anthology initially included nineteen, then (from 1934)
twenty-two stories, by sixteen (from 1934: seventeen) writers. Con-
sider the many stations that these stories had passed since being written
in Russian, first published in a literary periodical, then in a collection
of the writers works or an anthology in Moscow or St. Petersburg,
before being translated into English, perhaps published first in that
language in a journal in Britain or the United States, then collected in
an anthology, arranged in a certain order, given a brief interpretation in
the introduction and released for sale. Their subsequent world travels
cannot be fully mapped out.
But let us look at these books as both physical objects and cultural
products, and then use these two perspectives to think about what
29
Gordon B. Neavill, The Modern Library and American Cultural Life, Journal of
Library History 16, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 241252. See also Tom Dardis, Firebrand: The Life
of Horace Liveright (New York: Random House, 1995), chap. 3.
30
See Jay Satterfield, The Worlds Best Books: Taste, Culture, and the Modern Library
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), chap. 1.
31
I owe this information to the kind assistance of Gordon B. Neavill of Wayne State
University, Detroit. His descriptive bibliography of the nearly eight hundred titles included
in the Modern Library between 1917 and 1991 is due to be published in electronic form by
the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. Much useful information is also
available on the book collectors website Collecting the Modern Library (www.modernlib
.com). The refurbished Modern Library continues today as an imprint of Random House.
564 journal of world history, september 2011
happened to them in China. Remember, then, that these books had
to travel farther to reach the Far East, and the fact that a Japanese
retranslation of Best Russian Short Stories appeared in Tokyo already
in 1919 shows that they could do so fairly quickly. The same year is
notable in Chinese history because of the student demonstrations that
took place in Beijing on 4 May and soon spread to other Chinese cities.
Their immediate trigger was political (protest against the decision of
the Paris Peace Conference not to restore to China territory that had
been seized by Japan during the First World War), but the so-called
May Fourth movement became largely identified with cultural reform:
the simplification of Chinese literary writing and a commitment of
educated youth to the introduction, through translation, of new ideas
from the West. It must be pointed out that fascination with the West
did not begin in China in 1919; translation had gathered in strength
since the 1900s, so much so that bibliographers would later accept the
claim that in the last fifteen years of the Qing, from 1896 to 1911, more
translations were published than original writings in Chinese.
32
Demand for foreign literature rose rapidly among educated Chinese
in the 1920s, whereas the foreign book was not merely a repository of
texts but a coveted tangible object. The great majority of translators
and publishers, certainly from the middle years of the decade, lived and
operated in Shanghai, the capital of new Chinese consumerism as well
as of the publishing industry.
33
The short story, because of its form, was
an ideal fit for the many journals of fiction coming out (again, chiefly
in Shanghai) at that time. The journals carried a profusion of short
prose and poetry, both homemade and imported; while these literary
genres flourished, the modern Chinese novel would take a longer time
to emerge. The many translators who were eager to introduce Russian
literature into China did not know Russian, however; they knew, usu-
ally not very well, English and Japanese. So anthologies in these lan-
guages (and there were many more of them in English) were a godsend;
they were broken again into separate texts for publication in the jour-
nals and later were redistributed between new Chinese anthologies.
One translator brought out Best Russian Short Stories, under the same
32
This was the influential claim of the bibliographer Ah Ying (19001977), refuted in
Tarumoto Teruo, A Statistical Survey of Translated Fiction 18401920, in Translation and
Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 18401918, ed. David E. Pol-
lard (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998), pp. 3742. Tarumoto concedes that translations
slightly exceeded original titles from 1902 to 1907 (p. 39).
33
Cf. Peter N. Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of
Desire (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 87.
Gamsa: Cultural Translation & the Transnational Circulation of Books 565
title, in 1921. Retranslations of two other stories from the same anthol-
ogy were published in book form in 1928 and 1931, respectively.
34
Of the sixteen authors included in the 1917 edition, eight were still
alive, and there were three living authors among the seventeen writ-
ers in 1934; how many of them knew of their being included in this
American anthology? Most did not, and those who did could not do
much about it. Here we must recall that, in order to travel between
languages today, books do need a passport: copyright laws mean that
not only the rights for published work by a living author belong to
him or her, but even the work of a deceased writer does not enter the
public domain until at least fifty (in some countries, seventy) years
after his or her death. By this logic the New York publishers in 1917
should have located and requested the permission of the descendants of
Fedor Dostoevsky (18211881), Ivan Turgenev (18131883), Mikhail
Saltykov-Shchedrin (18261889), and certainly of Anton Chekhov,
who died in 1904 (Leo Tolstoy, who died in 1910, had waived the rights
for his works). But of course they did not. The United States did not
join the Berne Convention on copyright of 1886, and neither did Russia
or China.
35
A number of the writers whose stories entered the anthol-
ogy, such as Maxim Gorky (18681936) and Leonid Andreev (1871
1919), had some of their work published (in Russian) first in Germany
and only later in Russia itself. This gave them control over republica-
tion and translation rights at least in the European countries that had
signed the convention, such as Britain (where the Berne Convention
was made into law with the Copyright Act of 1911), Switzerland, Bel-
gium, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. But they would have had no
control over their texts as these were hijacked to the United States and
were completely in the dark about their retranslation from European
languages into such exotic ones as Chinese or Japanese.
34
Ye Jinfeng, trans., Eluosi duanpian jiezuo ji [Anthology of Short Masterpieces by Rus-
sian Writers], vol. 1 (Shanghai: Gongmin shuju, 1921), which may have been based on
the Japanese translation of 1919, included ten stories from the Modern Library anthology;
the second volume, which would have included the rest, was never published. Successive
translations from Best Russian Short Stories appeared in the journals Dongfang zazhi [East-
ern Miscellany] in 1920 and 1921, and in Xiaoshuo shijie [Story World] in 1923. The later
anthologies were Wang Yuanfang, trans., Puren [The Servant] (Shanghai: Yadong tushu-
guan, 1928), which included four of the Modern Librarys stories along with two French
stories by Maupassant, and Li Ni, trans., Yinying: Luxiya duanpian ji [The Shades: An
Anthology of Russian Short Stories] (Shanghai: Xin shidai shuju, 1931), a selection of six
stories from the American anthology.
35
The United States did sign the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC) in Geneva
in 1952 and finally became party to the Berne Convention in 1988. China signed the UCC
in 1992 and Russia in 1994.
566 journal of world history, september 2011
The interest in Russian literature in China was very much a
response to the revolution of 1917. In the United States, the publica-
tion of Best Russian Short Stories in July 1917 may have been spurred
by the February revolution; the socialist sympathies of Thomas Seltzer,
as well as those of Boni and Liveright, are well attested.
36
Dramatic
political events in Russia would have contributed to the commercial
success of the anthology in the following years; it was the fifteenth
best-selling title in the Modern Library list (which by then counted
about a hundred titles) in the period from 1921 to 1924. Nevertheless,
translated literature appealed to only a small niche of the American
book market; since 1945 especially, the levels of cultural importation
in the United States and the United Kingdom have been low in com-
parison to the number of books being translated into the worlds more
marginal languages.
37
By contrast, in China, translation in general and
of Russian literature in particular occupied center stage in the 1920s. It
reached new peaks in the 1950s, when Soviet literature was translated
so widely as to dominate Chinese literary life, and again in the post-
Mao period of the 1980s. Demand for foreign literature remains large
in China (and in Japan) today.
Now to the mechanics of the process: how was this book (this
thing) made? Textual study of the anthology compiled and edited by
Thomas Seltzer (18751943), the uncle of Albert Boni and manager
of the Boni and Liveright editorial department until November 1918,
shows that it relied in considerable part on unidentified and unac-
knowledged work by previous translators.
38
Although some copyright
36
Seltzers introduction spoke of the overthrow of Czarism and the inauguration of a
new and true democracy, marking the beginning, perhaps, of a radical transformation the
world over (1917 edition, p. x; these words were reprinted along with the rest of the text in
the 1934 edition, p. xi). Cf. later on: now, with the revolution victorious (p. xiii in 1917;
p. xv in 1934). On Boni and Liveright, see Dardis, Firebrand, pp. 46, 61, 65.
37
See the discussion of translation flows in Johan Heilbron, Towards a Sociology
of Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural World-System, European Journal of Social
Theory 2, no. 4 (November 1999): 429444. Similarly, Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel
18001900, pp. 151158, shows a consistent decline in British demand for literature in
translation from the peak of interest in French novels in the mid eighteenth century to
1850. In twentieth-century Britain, foreign literature had another peak period in the inter-
war years.
38
Comparison with earlier publications reveals that One Autumn Night and Her
Lover had their origin in Tales from Gorky, trans. R. Nisbet Bain (London: Jarrold, 1902).
God Sees the Truth, but Waits first appeared in Twenty-Three Tales by Leo Tolstoy, trans.
Louise and Aylmer Maude (London: Henry Frowde and Oxford University Press, 1906).
The Bet was found in The Bet and Other Stories by Anton Tchekhov, trans. S. Koteliansky
and J. M. Murry (Dublin: Maunsel and Co., 1915), part of that publishers Modern Russian
Library; another volume in this series, Alexander Kuprin, The River of Life and Other Stories,
Gamsa: Cultural Translation & the Transnational Circulation of Books 567
protection was for the first time given to foreign writers in U.S. law in
the Chase Act of 1 July 1891, such protection was limited to authors
whose work appeared in Britain, France, Belgium, and Switzerland,
while the manufacturing clause allowed publishers to print work for
which they had no copyright, provided that the type was not set in
the United States. The 1909 Copyright Act added that, for foreign
works to qualify for U.S. copyright, they had to be printed, bound, and
set in the United States.
39
The Modern Library used texts published
in the United States before 1 July 1891 as these were in the public
domain, and it imported the plates of British editions for more recent
foreign works.
40
This did not stop its publishers from placing a copy-
right statement for the anthology on the page facing the contents list
of Best Russian Short Stories in 1917, and renewing it with the establish-
ment of The Modern Library Inc. in 1925. But had the publishers in
Shanghai, who in the 1920s drew freely on this American anthology
of Russian stories, contacted the Modern Library about getting rights
to the individual works (something which they never did),
41
the New
York publisher would have had no rights to sell them; the copyright
it had established was valid only for the selection of the stories, not for
the texts as such. The retranslation of the anthology into Chinese was
therefore not an infringement on the rights of the American publisher
but merely another act of disregarding the intellectual property of the
Russian authors.
trans. S. Koteliansky and J. M. Murry (Dublin: Maunsel and Co., 1916), was the source of
The OutrageA True Story. Hide and Seek came from The Old House and Other Tales
by Feodor Sologub, authorized trans. by John Cournos (London: Martin Secker, 1915). Some
of these translations had already been published in the United States before reaching Best
Russian Short Stories. On Seltzer as a translator, cf. Gamsa, Chinese Translation of Russian
Literature, pp. 205, 341; on him as publisher from 1919 to 1926, with summary of his earlier
career, see G. Thomas Tanselle, The Thomas Seltzer Imprint, Papers of the Bibliographical
Society of America 58 (1964): 380448.
39
See Peter Jaszi and Martha Woodmansee, Copyright in Transition, in A History of
the Book in America (general editor David D. Hall), vol. 4, Print in Motion: The Expansion
of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 18801940, ed. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A.
Radway (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 90101, here n. 31.
The only foreign authors to whom copyright protection was extended before 1891 were
those resident in the United States or writing in collaboration with an American citizen;
otherwise, the United States was in this period the foremost haven for international copy-
right piracy (p. 94).
40
Information from Gordon B. Neavill. See also his review of Satterfield, The Worlds
Best Books in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 98, no. 4 (December 2004): 545.
41
Gordon B. Neavill writes, in an e-mail of 17 July 2009: Ive never encountered any
reference to [the Chinese translations of Best Russian Short Stories] in the archives Ive been
able to see. I suspect they were unauthorizedbut most of the early Modern Library titles
were themselves unauthorized.
568 journal of world history, september 2011
What does the travel route (the dizzying trajectory) of this assort-
ment of Russian literature to China add to our understanding of the
historical and cultural process of which it was part? There was some
irony in having to rely on English translations for access to the litera-
ture of a neighboring country, as well as some damage to the represen-
tation of Russian literature in China: secondhand translation simply
meant that quite a lot was lost along the way. This was but natural,
however, in a situation when English was usually the only Western
language that Chinese translators could read.
By its very name, The Modern Library of the Worlds Best Books
signified the kind of library to which many in China wished to get
access; the word modern (initially transcribed in Chinese as modeng)
was an icon of the time. As to the best, this offered a tempting idea:
Given that identifying the best foreign literature and then transmitting
it to China was the original aim of the May Fourth translation project,
the worlds best books gave the impression that someone has already
selected for us the most worthwhile of everything we had missed.
42
It
was an advantage also from a practical point of view, potentially sav-
ing time in searching for translations of individual Russian writers that
were not easy to get in China, and the expense of buying them too.
Since the 1920s, Modern Library books became a feature of the librar-
ies that writers, translators, and publishers in Shanghai used, as of the
personal book collections they formed.
43
42
The jacket text of the 1917 edition began: This volume gives the largest possible
representation to the prominent authors of the Russian short story and presents specimens
characteristic of each. While one volume could hardly exhaust all that is best, this book is
the most comprehensive anthology of the Russian short story in the English language. This
was adapted from Seltzers introduction, which concluded: It was, of course, impossible in
the space of one book to exhaust all that is best. But, to my knowledge, the present volume
is the most comprehensive anthology of the Russian short story in the English language, and
gives a fair notion of the achievement in that field (p. xvi).
43
The writer Mao Dun (18961981) recalled that both the Modern Library and the
Everymans Library book series were available at the library of the Commercial Press in
Shanghai, the largest publishing firm in China. In the early 1920s, Mao Dun edited for
the Commercial Press one of the main vehicles of translated foreign fiction during that
decade, Xiaoshuo yuebao [Short Story Magazine]. See Mao Dun, Wo zouguo de daolu [The
Road I Have Taken], 2 vols. (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1981), 1:113114. The writer
Shi Zhecun (19052003), editor in the 1930s of the Shanghai fiction journal Xiandai (The
Modern; subtitled Les Contemporains), apparently owned many Modern Library books,
although the reference to this in Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New
Urban Culture in China, 19301945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p.
124, wrongly identifies their publisher as Macmillan. An avowed admirer of Modern Library
and Everymans Library (the series founded by publisher J. M. Dent in London in 1906) was
the Shanghai publisher and editor Zhao Jiabi (19081997). See Lydia H. Liu, Translingual
Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated ModernityChina, 19001937 (Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 222.
Gamsa: Cultural Translation & the Transnational Circulation of Books 569
The risk was that, whereas time and money were saved, submission
to the authority of a preselected text could rob one of the freedom
to choose for oneself. Thus the original edition of Best Russian Short
Stories presented a hierarchic view of Russian literature as it opened
with a frontispiece portrait, bearing the caption Anton P. Chekhov.
Russias Greatest Short-Story Writer (this portrait was removed from
the enlarged edition in 1934). If one could argue about that, the dubi-
ous selection of stories for the Modern Library anthology was hardly
justifiable even by the principles of its editor, who treated literature as a
didactic tool. Modernist Russian literature, which, with the exception
of a story by Fedor Sologub (18631927) and Lazarus by Andreev,
had been almost absent from the edition of 1917, remained insuffi-
ciently represented with the addition of two more stories by Andreev
and another by Ivan Bunin (18701953) in 1934, when Seltzers intro-
duction was reproduced and its message even strengthened on the dust
jacket.
44
The inclusion of a total of three stories by Andreev in the
expanded edition attested not to the rise of this writers literary fortune
(which had declined markedly since his death in 1919), but to the
mere availability of texts: The Seven That Were Hanged and The
Red Laugh had appeared in the Modern Library already in 1918.
45
On
that occasion Thomas Seltzers name was again given as editor, but
The Red Laugh, at least, had been surreptitiously appropriated from
a 1905 British translation by Alexandra Linden.
The idea that the stories by Ignatii Potapenko (18561929) and
Sergei Semenov (18681922), included in all editions of Best Russian
Short Stories, came even close to displaying the best of Russian litera-
ture should make every lover of that literature blush. They were not
any nearer to that category even in 1917. Potapenkos Dethroned
was a trivial and predictable sketch of rivalry between two society
ladies over the opportunity to become queens of the officers ball in a
44
Following as a corollary from the love and pity for mankind that make a leading
element in Russian literature, is a passionate search for the means of improving the lot of
humanity, a fervent attachment to social ideas and ideals. A Russian author is more ardently
devoted to a cause than an American short-story writer to a plot. Thomas Seltzer, ed.,
introduction to Best Russian Short Stories (1917 edition, p. ix; 1934 edition, p. x). The jacket
text of the 1934 edition began: Those who demand of fiction more than mere diversion
turn inevitably to the works of the great Russian writers. In this volume the men who gave
their country an unexcelled art and a redeeming conscience are represented by such short
stories as no other nation has yet paralleled.
45
Both novellas were included in The Seven That Were Hanged, ed. Thomas Seltzer
(New York: Boni and Liveright, Modern Library, 1918). Neavills bibliographical entry on
their reprinting in Best Russian Short Stories in 1934 makes the comment that the combina-
tion of the two sets of plates [was] typographically inharmonious.
570 journal of world history, september 2011
provincial town in the Ukraine.
46
The Servant conveyed the social
message, which Thomas Seltzer most admired in Russian literature, in
its most unadorned and artless form. In China, the impression that sto-
ries such as this did belong to the best led not only to the inclusion
of The Servant in Chinese in one of the three book-form selections
from Best Russian Short Stories, but was also reflected in three separate
journal translations of the same story.
47
It hardly deserved a total of four
translations into Chineseand there may well have been even more of
them, still to be discovered.
Thomas Seltzer apparently chose The Servant (1888) by Sergei
Terentevich Semenov
48
because he had come across Leo Tolstoys
praise of it, for sincerity of feeling, in a brief introduction to a col-
lection of Semenovs stories in 1894.
49
The plot is the simple tale of
a peasant lad who had just lost his job in Moscow and is desperate to
find another. But when he does finally get the position of a servant,
46
Any interest the story does have hinges on the colorful portrait of a Jewish tailor,
whom both ladies try to recruit into their service. While a Chinese reader would never
suspect that the tailor was less Russian than the other characters in the story, his name
and stereotyped description made his ethnic identity transparent for Russian readers. A
retranslation of Dethroned into Chinese by Qiu Peiyue appeared as Tuiwei in Dongfang
zazhi 18, nos. 4 and 5 (FebruaryMarch 1921). As the introduction to Best Russian Short
Stories did not mention this story or its author, one can only speculate about the reasons
for its selection by Thomas Seltzer, himself a Ukrainian Jew. Another story with a Jewish
background in this anthology from the Jewish publishers Boni and Liveright was Alexander
Kuprins The Outrage.
47
The journal translations I have seen are S. T. Semyonov, trans. Jingxuan zhuren (a
pseudonym, meaning Master of the Tranquil Studio), Puren [The Servant], Xiaoshuo shijie
2, no. 2 (13 April 1923); Puren, trans. He Gongchao, Wenyi yuekan 3, no. 2 (28 Feb.
1932), and Puren, trans. Chen Wei, Wenxue congbao 2 (1 May 1936). The earliest retrans-
lation of The Servant into Chinese was published by Wang Yuanfang in October 1919, in
the Xuedeng [Lamp of Learning] supplement of the Shanghai newspaper Shishi xinbao [China
Times]. Because this was the first story he ever translated, Wang placed it first in his small
anthology of 1928, called after the same story. He relied on the English translators introduc-
tion to give readers a brief presentation of Semenov as a peasant-turned-writer who received
the encouragement of Tolstoy. Wang Yuanfang, Yizhe de hua [Words by the Translator],
in Puren (see n. 34 above).
48
A now forgotten village writer, who for many years was a follower of Tolstoy. See
entries on Semenov by S. P. Zalygin and D. U. Iakibova in Russkie pisateli 20 veka: Biogra-
ficheskii slovar [A Biographical Dictionary of Russian Writers in the Twentieth Century], ed.
P. A. Nikolaev (Moscow: Bolshaia rossiiskaia entsiklopediia, 2000), p. 630; by V. P. Peresyp-
kina and Z. I. Rozanova, in Nikolaev, ed., Russkie pisateli 18001917: biograficheskii slovar
[A Biographical Dictionary of Russian Writers, 18001917] (Moscow: Bolshaia rossiiskaia
entsiklopediia, 2007), 5:561563.
49
As Seltzer wrote, Semyonov is a unique character in Russian literature, a peasant
who had scarcely mastered the most elementary mechanics of writing when he penned his
first story. But that story pleased Tolstoy, who befriended and encouraged him. Tolstoys
introduction, as well as the story Dvornik (i.e., The Servant), are reproduced in S. T.
Semenov, Rasskazy i povesti [Stories and Short Novels] (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1983), pp.
1920, 2833.
Gamsa: Cultural Translation & the Transnational Circulation of Books 571
he realizes that taking it up would mean the ruin of the old man who
had occupied it before him, and he proves honorable enough to prefer
unemployment to committing a sin. The Christian concept of sin
was already for the Jesuit missionaries notoriously difficult to translate
(culturally) into Chinese, and there is some variation in the way Chi-
nese translators of this story dealt with it.
50
The English word servant,
reproduced in Chinese as puren, had been a very unsuccessful transla-
tion of the Russian dvornik (yard keeper), a line of occupation that did
give trouble to translators of Russian literature worldwide. Chinese as
well as American readers accordingly only got a vague idea of the job
that the hero gets and then refuses to take up. What would have been
the likelihood of this story being translated four times in China (and of
an anthology to be named after it) had translators of Russian literature
in the republican period been able to read this literature in the original
and consequently make their own selections from it? Had this been
the case, this story may never have been translated to this day. Indeed,
neither it nor any other work by S. T. Semenov is known to exist in
English anywhere outside Best Russian Short Stories.
51
The retranslation of The Servant into Chinese, however, was no
mere act of servile kowtowing to the authority of the Modern Library.
Finding this story in what was a readily available American anthology
may have provided some translators with a chance to retell a story of
the kind that socially committed Chinese writers of the time (partly
under the influence of Russian literature) told their readers, stories
about honest, maltreated coolies and exploited but upright rickshaws.
52
50
Sin occurs twice in the story as a key moral imperative. In section 3, the merchant
who would need to sack the old man in order to hire young Gerasim is aware of committing
a sin but would not allow that to stop him; in section 4, Gerasim is moved to decline his
hard-won position after overhearing a conversation between the old man and his wife in
which sin is again mentioned. Jingxuan zhuren (1923; see n. 47 above) translated sin as
zuiguo in the first instance, using the more traditional formulation zuonie (to do evil) in
the second. Gongchao (1932) followed the same practice. Chen Wei (1936) used the verb
zui on both occasions.
51
My thanks to Richard Davies of the Leeds Russian Archive, University of Leeds, for
checking this for me in bibliographies of English translations of Russian literature by Louis
Sinclair, Roger Sleigh Johnson, and Garth M. Terry, preserved in the archives collection.
Of the four translated works attributed to Semionov, Sergei Terentyevich in Richard
C. Lewanski, ed., The Literatures of the World in English Translation: A Bibliography, vol. 2,
The Slavic Literatures (New York: New York Public Library and Frederick Unger, 1967), p.
350, all except The Servant were actually by the Soviet writer Sergei Aleksandrovich
Semenov (18931942).
52
In its conclusion, The Servant brings to mind such Chinese examples as Lu Xuns
A Small Incident, included in his celebrated collection Call to Arms (1923). Stories about
rickshaw pullers as the targets of newly imported humanitarian compassion are discussed
in Gamsa, Reading of Russian Literature in China, pp. 3233. Two more stories in Seltzers
572 journal of world history, september 2011
Perhaps this too, then, is a reason why The Servant was repeat-
edly retranslated into Chinese: in the republican period it fitted per-
fectly with the social agenda of mainstream Chinese literature. This
literature, as moralistic and didactic as this story, was often as simplistic
in the execution of its lofty ideals. Among the stories in the Modern
Library anthology, The Signal by Vsevolod Garshin (18551888), an
important work describing the self-sacrifice of a lowly trackman (and
raising, once more, the religious notion of sin), saw six translations
into Chinese from 1920 to 1943, although not all of these six can be
identified as done on the basis of the version in Best Russian Short Sto-
ries; contrary to The Servant, another translation of The Signal
into English existed.
53
If our conjectures about the appeal of these texts
are correct, we have here, in the words of Peter Burke, the principle
of confirmation, according to which people in a given culture translate
works that support ideas or assumptions or prejudices already present
in the culture.
54
However, another story from the American anthology, a cruel tale
of a childs death by Fedor Sologub, was also retranslated four times
from 1921 to 1931, and not by translators known (although we do
not know enough) to have been attracted to the modernist aesthet-
ics that Hide and Seek represented.
55
So was, from 1920 to 1933 (in
at least two of the four caseson the basis of the translation in Best
Russian Short Stories), Andreevs novella Lazarus, a somber retelling
of the biblical parable of a miraculous resurrection.
56
Obviously, not
anthology that dealt with the unexpected sensitivity of the poor were Maxim Gorkys One
Autumn Night and Her Lover.
53
The Signal, translated as Jihao by Wan Liangjiong in the Xuedeng supplement in
1920 and as Qi by Hu Zhongchi in Dongfang zazhi later in the same year; further transla-
tions as Haoqi by Jingxuan zhuren in Xiaoshuo shijie of March 1923, as Qihao by the poet
Dai Wangshu (collected in an anthology of 1929), as Xinhao by Li Ni (in his anthology
of 1931), and again as Xinhao (but now retranslated from Japanese) by Lin Huanping, in
a wartime anthology published in Guilin in 1943.
54
Burke, Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe, p. 20.
55
Hide and Seek, translated as Micang xi by Ye Jinfeng in 1921 and as Zhuomi
cang by Qiu Peiyue (1921; collected in an anthology of 1923), Wang Yuanfang (collected
1928) and Li Ni (collected 1931). On Ye Jinfeng, see Gamsa, Chinese Translation of Russian
Literature, pp. 349351; on Li Ni, ibid., pp. 318320.
56
Gamsa, Chinese Translation of Russian Literature, pp. 379380. Next to stories already
mentioned, the Modern Library anthology included the following works, all of which would
also be retranslated into Chinese: Alexander Pushkin, The Queen of Spades; Nikolai
Gogol, The Cloak; Ivan Turgenev, The District Doctor; Fedor Dostoevsky, The Christ-
mas Tree and the Wedding; Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, How a Muzhik Fed Two Offi-
cials; Vladimir Korolenko, The Shades: A Phantasy; Anton Chekhov, The Darling and
Vanka; and Mikhail Artsybashev, The Revolutionist. Thomas Seltzers introduction was
repeatedly quoted by Chinese translators and commentators on Russian literature.
Gamsa: Cultural Translation & the Transnational Circulation of Books 573
only those stories that could be translated culturally were translated
(via English), and the 1920s in China were also a time of mounting
resistance to the overt cultural translation that earlier translators had
practiced by editing foreign works for unsuitable content and siniciz-
ing their protagonists.
57
In the same decade, a number of young Chi-
nese made first efforts to satisfy their thirst for new Soviet literature by
learning Russian and traveling to the Soviet Union. Once there, they
would obtain and translate as many Russian books as they could read
on the spot, send by mail to China, or carry back in their suitcases on
the Trans-Siberian railway.
58
Conclusion
It has been argued here that the travel of books through translation,
a complex and fascinating process, is one in which stories and novels
are translated not only into a new language but also into a new culture
(however slippery the term). In some of the aspects we have considered,
the fortune of Best Russian Short Stories provides us with an example of
the cultural translation of books. It serves as a clearer example of
their transnational circulation: with the anthology we have looked at,
stories from Russia reached China by passing through Britain and the
United States. To assume that cultural translation is always at work
may be counterproductive if the term is indiscriminately applied, but
awareness of this dimension in the transfer of books and commodities
is important: for one thing, it helps us notice that local agents were not
the passive receivers of goods somehow imposed upon them.
The process is essentially two-sided and reciprocal; too many claims
about the inequality of translation
59
have rested on ignorance about
57
See examples in Alexander C. Y. Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cul-
tural Exchange (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), chap. 3; forthcoming mono-
graph on the pioneering translator Lin Shu (18521924) by Michael Gibbs Hill (University
of South Carolina).
58
See on the travelers to new Russia in Gamsa, Reading of Russian Literature in China,
chap. 3.
59
I remain unconvinced by the Eurocentric (and Paris-centered) argument of Pascale
Casanova; for a summary of her approach, see Conscration et accumulation de capital
littraire. La traduction comme change ingal, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 144
(September 2002): 720. To raise only a few reservations: Contrary to Casanovas schema
of international literary relations, literary works have often been translated unbeknownst to
their distant authors; not all authors in dominated languages (i.e., all other than French
and English) crave translation into a dominant language (which, if it does occur, does not
automatically elevate the status of a writer in his or her home environment); while there
574 journal of world history, september 2011
the history, scope, and methods of translation in the non-European
world. This is not to deny that less has been translated into English or
French from Chinese or Japanese than vice versa, and that such trans-
lations as have been published remained less visible in Western literary
cultures when compared with the prominence given to European works
in the East. The reciprocity of the process comes into sharper view
when seen in a world historical perspective: since the eighteenth cen-
tury, books from the West reached China along with numerous other
modern commodities, just as Asian products and objects, including
books, traveled in the opposite direction.
60
Uniting an analysis of intel-
lectual flows with that of commodity transfer, realms hitherto usually
approached in separation from each other, offers a potentially new way
of thinking about the global spread of ideas and the circuits of cross-
cultural exchange. In addition to the innovative work on literature by
scholars such as Hofmeyr and Moretti, mentioned above, this method
connects with current trends toward a globalized intellectual history.
61
The traveling Western book most conspicuous in late imperial and
is truth to an interpretation of translation as a means of bridging temporal gaps, offering
the Chinese case as proof (ibid., pp. 1213) cannot be done with the assumption that
the Chinese literary world had been closed to outside influence before Gao Xingjian, future
laureate of the Nobel Prize for literature and emigrant to France, published an introduction
to French modernism in 1981.
60
See for example Joanna de Groot, Metropolitan Desires and Colonial Connections:
Reflections on Consumption and Empire, in At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture
and the Imperial World, ed. Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, pp. 166190 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), on the wide-reaching effects of imported Asian tea. On
the arrival of Chinese books in Europe, including Russia, in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, see the work of Hartmut Walravens; for example, on Chinese and Manchu books,
which fifteen camels carried from Peking across Mongolia, to be delivered to libraries
and translators in St. Petersburg, his Fnfzehn Kamelladungen Gelehrsamkeit: Russische
Bcherkufe in Peking im Jahre 1821, in Elena V. Boikova and Giovanni Stary, eds., Flo-
rilegia Altaistica: Studies in Honour of Denis Sinor on the Occasion of His 90th Birthday (Wies-
baden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), pp. 227251.
61
With regard to a founding document of U.S. history, rather than to a book, cf. the
round table on translations of the Declaration of Independence in Journal of American His-
tory 85, no. 4 (March 1999); and David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global
History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). See also Robert Darntons call
to bring together intellectual history and the history of books, Discourse and Diffusion,
Contributions to the History of Concepts 1, no. 1 (2005): 2128 (followed by the response of
Quentin Skinner, On Intellectual History and the History of Books, pp. 2936). Most
pertinent is the question posed in the conclusion of Charles W. J. Withers, Place and the
Spatial Turn in Geography and in History, Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 4 (October
2009): 637658: How do ideas and their material containers and shapers such as books
and periodicals, letters and visual depictions move between places? (p. 658). See now Miles
Ogborn and Charles W. J. Withers, eds., Geographies of the Book (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate,
2010).
Gamsa: Cultural Translation & the Transnational Circulation of Books 575
republican China, a book widely distributed and translated by mission-
aries, was the Bible. Around 1818, a Chinese printer in the employ of
Scottish missionaries in Canton who had just set in print the transla-
tions of Deuteronomy and Joshua was inspired to write Christian tracts
of his own. In 1836, an American missionary gave one of them to Hong
Xiuquan (18141864). As in Hongs mind these writings gave rise to
the vision of the Taiping, a Chinese Heavenly Kingdom, they occa-
sioned the most remarkable case of cultural translation in Chinese his-
tory ever since Buddhist sutras were brought to China from India in
the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. and were absorbed there with the
help of popular (above all, Daoist) local traditions.
62
Other examples
of cultural translation would include the story of porcelain. Following
two centuries of import from China, porcelain was finally appropri-
ated in Europe once the Meissen manufactory near Dresden in Saxony
became the first to produce it in 1710 (the tercentenary of European
porcelain was therefore celebrated in 2010). But already in the seven-
teenth century, Chinese potters had been willing to translate their art
to fit the taste of European consumersjust as they had done in the
fourteenth century, after coming into contact with Islamic decorative
conventions.
63
By drawing on new insights from transnational and world history,
studies of material culture and intellectual geography, this article seeks
to reclaim literary translation for history. It maintains the need to be
aware of books as objects and of books journeys. Resisting the ambi-
tion, prevalent in translation studies, to construct theoretical systems
and models meant to account for all possible scenarios of translation,
it also defends the value of the particular case study. Some cases will
fit into larger patterns of cause and effect; some will not. Rather than
attempt to force translation into a system, we should be prepared to
acknowledge the random, even chaotic nature of translation as an
unforeseen eventas any cultural encounter is and not unlike the
events that, in retrospect, we tie together and call history.
62
See Jonathan Spence, Gods Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiu-
quan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), pp. 1617, 51. On the acculturation of Buddhism
in China see, from the perspective of world history, Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters:
Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993), pp. 6984.
63
Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History, Journal
of World History 9, no. 2 (Fall 1998): 156157, 182186. See now Robert Finlays book by
the same title (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
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