China and the West

[Mansfield, Katherine]. Wei fa xian de guo tu : Kaiselin Mansifei'erde xin xi lan duan pian xiao shuo ji [ID D29995].
Gordon, Ian A. Qian yan = Introduction. Nie Zhenxiong yi.
"Murry, till he arranged her papers after her death, did not know that, increasingly, Katherine Mansfield had come to regard herself as an exile - 'a stranger – an alien' - 'allowed to look, perhaps, but not to linger'. It was obvious enough in the stories : more and more, in spite of the brilliance of stories with an English or a European setting, her themes came to 'linger' on New Zealand. Into that area of her mind and heart, Murry had no entry. Unity there was, and this present collection, by reprinting in a rearranged order Katherine's 'New Zealand' stories and sketches, is an attempt to underline those themes that dominated her life as a mature artist."
Lin, Xiangzhou. Yi zhe xu. [Preface by the translators].
"Katherine Mansfield died in 1923, at the age of thirty-four. The Chinese translations of The garden party, Bliss, and some of her other stories had existed even when she was still alive. Those were done by Xu Zhimo and some other well-known writers of the time…
She has long been regarded as an English writer in China. Few have ever referred to the fact that she was born in New Zealand, and even when it was reported, her New Zealand background has hardly been related to her work. Those who have read her journal all know that she thought it fortunate to have been born in New Zealand, that she discovered herself to be a New Zealander at heart, and that all her life she was devoted to making her 'undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the Old World'…
The most difficult point in the appreciation of Mansfield's work by way of translations is probably her artistic technique. It is precisely because of her new and unique writing techniques that she became one of the masters of the short story, exerting a far-reaching influence. The structure of modern short stories does not necessarily depend on plot, their internal ideas often seemingly incoherent… Mansfield always wrote in a style called by herself 'a special prose', which has increased the challenges for the Chinese reader. Her language looks simple, but, as a matter of fact, it is not. She wrote in the manner of a poet, her words and expressions often producing surprising effects. It is indeed very difficult to convey the above-mentioned artistic uniqueness of her work in translation, and such translations can often be mistakenly judges 'inferior'. However, if an 'elegant' Chinese was adopted and what is ambiguous and implicit in her stories was made explicit, her stylistic quality would surely be blemished…"