Translating Traumatic Memory of Twentieth-Century China: Diasporic Literary Works of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre and Their Translations

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My project investigates translation and the traumatic memory of twentieth-century China, specificallyaddressing how diasporic literary works and their translations reconstruct and transmit the memory ofthe Nanjing Massacre across borders, cultures, and generations. The Nanjing Massacre, where over300,000 Chinese people died and whose survivors have decreased to 61 today, has enormous andenduring influence not only on Chinese society, but also on East Asia. Existing studies have examinedthe literary memorialisations of traumatic moments in Chinese history, including the Great Famine,Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square Protests, in a wide range of works by contemporarywriters from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong through the theoretical lenses of postmodernism,poststructuralism, and postcolonialism (Yang 2002; Berry 2011, 2016; Feng 2017; Hillenbrand 2017,2020). Comparatively, my project offers the first investigation of the interconnections betweentranslation, contemporary Chinese diasporic literature, and the memory of the Nanjing Massacre, whichwill not only shed important light on our comprehension of the interlingual and cross-cultural dimensionsof trauma writing and memory formation, but also bring greater reflection on the interweaving of Chinesehistory, memory, and representation.I will offer a comparative textual analysis drawing on an interdisciplinary framework underpinned bySusan Bassnett's conception of 'translation as remembering' (2003, 2011) and Bella Brozki's argumentsabout 'translation as a kind of critical and dynamic displacement' and 'critical processual translation'(2007). Specifically, I will examine different Chinese translations of Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking(1998, 2005, 2007, 2013, 2015) to elaborate how retranslation rebuilds and transmits the memory of theMassacre across generations, and examine its Japanese and Korean translations to explore howtranslation reframes the memory of the Massacre in different political, social, and cultural contexts. I willalso compare the Chinese translation of Shouhua Qi's When the Purple Mountain Burns with its Englishoriginal to investigate how self-translation informs the formation of massacre memories. This work will becompleted in the second year of my PhD (2022/2023). Then I will explore trans-medial translation as avector transmitting trauma memory by examining the English translation and film and TV adaptations ofGeling Yan's The Flowers of War. Beyond the study of translated texts, I will adopt the metaphoricalconcept of translation to approach how diasporic literature as a form of translation transmits andreconstructs the memory of the Massacre overseas by examining cultural hybridity and exophonicwriting in Ha Jin's Nanjing Requiem and Hong Zheng's Nanjing Never Cries. These tasks will be finished inthe third year (2023/2024)