MCLC: Mo Yan and Chinese literary studies essay (1)

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Mo Yan and Chinese literary studies essay (1)
I much admire Lucas Klein’s scholarship and translations; his “A Dissonance of Discourses: Literary Theory, Ideology, and Translation in Mo Yan and Chinese Literary Studies” in Comparative Literature Studies (vol. 53.1, 2016, pp. 170-197) is erudite, sensitive, and enlightening. It reminds, me, though, of the problem that arises when there are different editions of the Chinese text that is translated. Goldblatt’s rendition of Red Sorghum (p. 4) translates as “I didn’t realize until I’d grown up” a phrase that in the ostensible Chinese original says “after I had grown up and diligently studied Marxism” (Klein, p. 188).  But the Taiwan text that Goldblatt worked from, “at the request of the author” (CIP page), which I presume is the same as my Taibei Hongfan copy, (3rd ed., 1989, after the 1st ed.,  Dec. 1988), p. 2, does not contain the words “and diligently studied Marxism.” I leave it to Mo Yan experts like Goldblatt and Shelley Chan to say which text is “original” and whether we are observing an addition or a deletion.  In my recent book on the “new” historical novels, I kept to the Taiwan text.  The peculiar reference to Marxism was to me a red flag (pun intended) that I was reading something that didn’t belong there.  Readers of PRC printings of Mo Yan’s masterpiece may not be aware that Communist and Nationalist affiliations of major fighting forces that are spelled out in PRC editions of the text generally do not appear in the Taiwan editions.
Klein acknowledges that there are  different editions of Mo Yan’s novel in an endnote, but I think the mystery of Mo Yan’s meaning remains.  Now I’m thinking of “after I had grown up and diligently studied Marxism” as possibly a deliberately ironic comment by the author, though Mo Yan’s harsher critics will understandably think of it as toadying.  I’m even getting visions of new Ph.D. dissertations (maybe by Perry Link’s students!), on words an author inserts in a literary text as a wink at the reader (or the censor—an alternative explanation), well knowing that they do not fit the rest of the text.
Jeff Kinkley <jeffreykinkley at gmail.com>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on April 7, 2016
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