Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
This book reimagines translation studies through the lens of psychoanalysis, proposing that translators and readers move beyond the conventional binary of domestication and foreignization. Drawing on Lacan’s notion of the Real, it argues that true cultural encounter takes place through both meeting and missing—translation as an act of repetition that reveals the simultaneous presence and absence of contact between cultures.
Through close readings of English translations of Chinese literary works by Cao Xueqin, Lu Xun, Eileen Chang, Pai Hsien-yung, and Wong Bik-wan, the book highlights David Hawkes’s The Story of the Stone as an exemplary site where Chinese and Western canons meet—inviting readers to read Hongloumeng with Shakespeare, and Shakespeare with Hongloumeng.
Introduction
1 Translating Hong Kong female writing into English — Wong Bik-wan’s language of the ‘repressed’
2 ‘It is still light outside’: reading and translating Se, Jie and Lust, Caution as world literature
3 From ‘moral supremacy’ to ‘global superiority’: English translations of Lu Xun’s criticisms of Chinese society in ‘The True Story of Ah Q’
4 Re-negotiating domesticating and foreignizing: bridging The Symposium and Niezi through the imagery of emptiness
5 On desire, excess and the untimely — misencountering of The Story of the Stone and Romeo and Juliet
6 On the uncanny and the fools — reading The Story of the Stone with Macbeth and King Lear
7 On misencountering the Real: reading The Story of the Stone with Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice
Closing remarks
Bibliography
Index