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with my observations and recollections of what friends and colleagues told me. Where possible, I have consulted my diaries and letters, although these are fragmentary and incomplete sources. I do not claim to have a better memory than other people, and I do not attempt here to deal with the massive amount of literature that is now emerging on memory studies. The episodes that I describe are not major events in world history such as the Holocaust or the Cultural Revolution; trauma and victimhood or victimization are not my central concern. What follows makes no claim to be a definitive account of translation or the literary history of China in the 1980s, much less of China’s cultural or political trends. It does owe a considerable debt to translation theory and to Chinese studies research, although I regret that only the books and articles I have read since this study began to take shape are properly acknowledged here.
Up until very recently, translating Chinese literature into English accompanied but was secondary to my profession of teaching and researching modern Chinese literature and language. It is only in the last five or six years that I have begun to take an interest in translation studies, primarily in regard to translations of modern Chinese literature into English. My initial purpose in doing so was for teaching literary translation to students whose native language was Mandarin or Cantonese.
Turning to translation studies textbooks, I encountered problems. When I first attended conferences on translation in the 1970s, translation studies consisted chiefly of eminent translators explaining how good their own translations were and how faulty others were. Aside from this, there were linguistically based studies that were too technical for me to follow. Translation studies have moved forward since those days; academic and commercial models of translation practice have been comprehensively described and analyzed. Nevertheless, descriptions of the translation practices that marked my own experiences are generally absent from the academic literature. More disconcerting are the accounts of translation functions and of translators in their social context that are virtually unrecognizable to me. This book is in part a preliminary attempt to understand my experiences; more broadly, it seeks to draw attention to certain episodes in literary translation in modern China, not