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The history of China, as any history, is a story of and in translation.
Translating Early Modern China tells the story of translation in China to and from non-European languages and Latin between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and primarily in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Each chapter finds a particular translator resurrected from the past to tell the story of a text that helped shape the history of translation in China. In Chinese, Mongolian, Manchu, Latin, and more, these texts helped to make the Chinese language what it was at different points in its history. This volume explores what the form of an academic history book might look like by playing with fictioning as part of the historian's craft. The book's many stories-of glossaries and official Ming translation bureaus, of bilingual Ming Chinese-Mongolian language primers, of the first Latin grammar of Manchu, of a Qing Manchu conversation manual, of a collection of Manchu poems by a Qing translator-serve as case studies that open out into questions of language and translation in China's past, of the use of fiction as a historian's tool, and of the ways that translation creates language.
List of contents
- Preface: On History and Its Opposites
- Introduction: On Cities and Their Opposites
- Gathering
- 1: Glossary (1578)
- 2: Documents (1389/1608)
- 3: Grammar (1678)
- 4: Primer (1730)
- 5: Poems (1848)
- Dispersal
- Bibliography
About the author
Carla Nappi is a historical pataphysician whose research tends to focus on Chinese and Manchu texts in early modernity, and who holds the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in History at the University of Pittsburgh. From undergraduate training in paleobiology, Professor Nappi pursued an M.A. in History of Science and then a Ph.D. in Chinese history. Her first book,
The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and its Transformations in Early Modern China (Harvard, 2009), looked at problems of evidence and belief in Chinese natural history. Her two most recent books
Metagestures (with Dominic Pettman, Punctum, 2019) and
Uninvited (with Carrie Jenkins, McGill-Queens University Press, 2020) reflect a growing emphasis on collaborative work and on integrating short fiction and poetry into her practice. Her current work is preoccupied with insomniac temporality; with the relationship between DJ'ing, history, and translation; and with housekeeping as a magical practice.
Summary
A volume on translation and language in China from the fifteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. It uses fictional narrative to discuss translators who worked between Chinese and (mostly) non-European languages and studies dictionaries, language primers, grammars, poetry collections, and conversation manuals.
Additional text
This book highlights the strategic linguistic tactics Chinese rulers continue to employ to control a nation of diverse religions and cultures. Unique but difficult to categorize, this book is a welcome addition to scholarship on not only Chinese history but also the art of linguistics and translation theory.
