Translation Zones in Modern China: Authoritarian Command Versus G ...

of policy or principle. With these reservations, part 1 shows the changes and developments during five decades at the FLP in terms of what works did and did not get translated and how translation was effected.

Informal Translation

The other episode in translation practice, described in part 2, could scarcely be more different. While I was working for the FLP, I was at the same time engaged in translating modern Chinese poetry, fiction, and film in the early 1980s in a relatively unstructured and informal environment. Because this kind of translation is also largely undocumented,²⁶ my sources are again mostly restricted to my own experiences plus discussions with writers who were being translated and with other translators.

This episode lasted for only a few years, but it witnessed the first efforts in the translation of what remains the best-known modern Chinese poetry by poets such as Bei Dao, Mang Ke (1951–), Duo Duo (1951–), Yang Lian (1955–), and Gu Cheng (1956–1993).²⁷ Unlike most other translation transactions, the crucial element in this model was that the two parties—the writer and the translator—formed a personal relationship that was not monitored or mediated by an institution, whether academic, commercial, or state-sponsored. They also differ from other personal translations where neither the translator nor the author is subject to political discrimination or persecution.²⁸

Following the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s, while recruitment of foreigners for employment in Chinese organizations was rapidly increasing and foreign students were coming in ever-increasing numbers to universities in major cities, informal relationships between Chinese writers and foreign translators of their works became possible and eventually common. Given the very different circumstances of each of the two parties, however, problems in mutual comprehension inevitably arose.

It is only in retrospect that the lingering influences of the preceding three decades can be seen in the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution. One aspect of that legacy was the deep suspicion with which foreigners in China, including students and foreign experts