Translating China by Xuanmin Luo; Yuanjian He;

Author:Xuanmin Luo; Yuanjian He;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Channel View Publications

Intertextuality at the Reception End

So far, I have focused on the direct relationship between the translation and the audience. Yet, the model of reception is much more complex. What is discussed above is only one point in the intertextuality in the reception of the text. To analyze the meaning generated by the English translation for an English-speaking audience, we must situate this reception in the intertextual web of her/his home culture (or more apt, her/his globalized home culture). Like it or not, the reception of kunqu by the western audience has to start in a context plagued with the imperialist relationship in which Orientalism has been and still is a dominant approach to Asia. However, it is not the only discourse. Within the 'west' there is a heterogeneity of responses to the Orientalist attitude. In arts and literature, progressive works that question such a position are not lacking. Let's return to the example of the image of traditional female beauty and its stock metaphor of peach blossom. For an English audience who grew up in the 1960s, the expression 'peach blossom' repeatedly flashing on the surtitles display could be associated with the highly popular radio comedy Round the Horne. Some of the comic sketches in the program feature an Asian mastermind criminal and his two 'beautiful assistants' with the names Lotus Blossom and Peach Blossom, both played by gruff male voices. These sketches themselves were spoofs on Orientalist stereotyping texts, such as Sax Rohmer's Dr Fu Manchu stories. Embodying at the same time the Oriental and the Camp and playing up the stereotypical traits often attributed to them as categories, these two characters push the foreign and the taboo to the extreme and explode it with anarchic humor, to such an extent that they become ironic remarks ridiculing the hegemony. Yet, for the listeners of Round the Horne, these characters, the Oriental and the Camp, are still no more than tropes. But the kunqu audience is confronted with the corporeality of the performers, the very subjects who are being described as peach blossom and lotus blossom. All the flat stereotypes of the Oriental are juxtaposed with the physical reality of these characters in their own context. They express intense emotions with an energy that is real. The theater is a real space rather than a discursive one. Representations including the translation, the house program, the write-ups, or associations with other texts and received ideas of the Orient, all have to enter into negotiation with the physical dimension of the signified. Dialogism is ingrained in the theater.

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