Voices from Afar: Modern Chinese Writers on Oppressed Peoples and Their Literature

The translation of literary works from one language and one cultural context into another poses questions common to both literary and intellectual history. Other people may learn of new literary techniques and subjects by means of translations or come in contact with new ideas and ways of thinking. Voices from Afar seeks to understand the function of translations of Western literature in twentieth-century China, and to show how the translation of certain literary works was at specific times related to some major literary and intellectual currents. It considers three aspects: how Chinese commentators viewed the people whose writers wrote these literatures, what critical comments they made about literary works, and what kinds of works were actually translated. [xi]