“Uncle Tom's cabin : the first American novel translated into Chinese” (Publication, 2009)
Year
2009
Text
Tao, Jie. Uncle Tom's cabin : the first American novel translated into Chinese. In : Prospects ; vol. 18 (Oct. 2009).
http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2F8498_
093BD0FA883AB7737A31F745CC4DD820_journals__
PTS_PTS18_S0361233300005007a.pdf&cover=
Y&code=bef66ec07ab3984fa239898b8d35813a (Stowe35)
http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2F8498_
093BD0FA883AB7737A31F745CC4DD820_journals__
PTS_PTS18_S0361233300005007a.pdf&cover=
Y&code=bef66ec07ab3984fa239898b8d35813a (Stowe35)
Type
Publication
Contributors (1)
Tao, Jie
(um 1990) : Professor of English, School of Foreign Studies, Director of the Women's Studies Center, Beijing University
Mentioned People (1)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
(Lichfield, Conn. 1811-1896 Hartford, Conn.) : Schriftstellerin
Subjects
Literature : Occident : United States of America
Chronology Entries (8)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1901 |
[Stowe, Harriet Beecher]. Hei nu yu tian lu. Lin Shu, Wei Yi yi. [ID D10429]. Lin Shu. Translator's notes to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Preface In American history the enslavement of blacks in Virginia can be dated to 1619, when the Dutch transported twenty African blacks in a warship to Jamestown and sold them. This was the beginning of the enslavement of blacks by whites. That was before the United States had been established as a nation. Later, when the public-spirited Washington governed selflessly, not seeking a private fortune, he was still unable to change the laws on slavery. It was not until Lincoln's time that the slaves were fortunately emancipated. Recently the treatment of blacks in America has been carried over to yellow people. When a cobra is unable to release its poison fully jt vents its anger by biting wood and grass. Afterwards, no one who touches the poisoned dead branches will escape death. We the yellow people, have we touched its dead branches? Our country is rich in natural resources, but they are undeveloped. Our people's livelihood is impoverished to the extent that they cannot make ends meet. Thus they try to support themselves by going to America to work, and every year send money back to support their families. Of the Americans, the more calculating ones are alarmed at the draining off of their silver and so treat the Chinese workers cruelly so as to stop them from coming. As a result, the yellow people are probably treated even worse than the blacks. But our country’s power is weak, and our envoys are cowardly and afraid of arguing with the Americans. Furthermore, no educated person has recorded what has happened, and I have no way to gain factual knowledge. The only precedent I can rely on is A Black Slave's Cry to Heaven. This book was originally called The Oppression of Black Slaves, and also appeared under the title Tom's Family Affairs. It was written by the American woman writer, Stowe. I did not like the inelegance of these titles and hence changed the title to the present one. In this book the miseries of black slaves are depicted in detail. This is not because I am especially versed in depicting sadness; I am merely transcribing what is contained in the original work. And the prospect of the im¬minent demise of the yellow race has made me feel even sadder. The vociferous [antiforeign] libel-mongers these days are too narrow-minded to reason with. Those who favor the white race, on the other hand, under the erroneous illusion that the Westerners are generous with vassals, are eager to follow or join them. In this respect, there are indeed quite a few readers for whom this book should serve as a warning. The work owes much to Mr. Wei Yi of the Qiushi Academy, who rendered the story orally, which I then put down in writing. It was completed in sixty-six days. preface written by Lin Shu (Lin Qinnan) of Min county, at Seavieio Tower over the lake, on Chongyang festival of year Xinchou during the Guangxu reign [1901]. Lin Shu : Afterword Stowe is an American woman. The reason why the title 'Mrs.' was not attached to her name at the beginning of the volume is because according to Western custom men and women are treated as equals. Furthermore she did not call herself 'Mrs.' in the original book and that term appears only at the end of the book, so we have not changed this. According to Stowe herself, the book is largely based on what she personally heard and saw. Seventy or eighty percent actually happened, and only twenty or thirty percent is fiction. The names of men and women in the book are mostly false, but in reality there were such persons. In translating this book, Mr. Wei and I did not strive to describe sorrow for the purpose of eliciting useless tears from readers. It was rather that we had to cry out for the sake of our people because the prospect of enslavement is threatening our race. In recent years the American continent has severely restricted the immigration of Chinese laborers. A stockade has been erected at the landing place where hun¬dreds of Chinese who have come from afar are locked up. Only after a week do they begin to release one or two people, and some people are not released even after two weeks. This is [like] what is referred to in this book as the 'slave quarters'. Up to the present, letters have never been opened in civilized nations, but now these people are opening all the letters of Chinese without exception. Wherever the word 'America' is mentioned [in a letter], it is taken to be an offense against the nation and no effort is spared to arrest and deport the person. Therefore I ask, do we Chinese have a nation or not? As we can read in George's letter to his friend, a person without a country will be treated like a barbarian even by civilized people. So if in the future we Chinese become material for slaves, will this not be the basis? The Japanese are of the same yellow race. When the wives of their officials were humiliated by the health examination, they were en¬raged and fought the case in the American courts, organizing groups among themselves in order to resist. How brave the Japanese are! Do not our Chinese officials realize that their own nationals, though guiltless, are ignominiously being put in prison and wasting to death there? This situation of dominating and being dominated is like that of [the ancient states of] Chu and Yue. Our national prestige has been bounded; need more be said? Fittingly, this book has been completed just as we are beginning to reform the government. Now that people have all thrown away their old writings and are diligently seeking new knowledge, this book though crude and shallow, may still be of some help in inspiring deter¬mination to love our country and preserve our race. Perhaps those gentlemen in the nation who are well-informed will not consider these words too excessive. Lin Shu, Seaview Tower above the lake, ninth month of Xinchou [1901]. Lin Shu schreibt in der Einführung : "The book tells a fictitious story. But it may become a good lesson to Chinese laborers in the United States. The overseas Chinese in Peru and the Chinese laborers in America are now badly persecuted. It is hard to foretell the miseries of us yellow people. It is my hope that my readers will not take the story merely as fantasy." Wei Yi schreibt im Vorwort : "In recent years, America has been engaged in expelling Chinese laborers. It is likely that we Chinese would be slaves. To be slaves is shameful. To be slaves in foreign countries is even more shameful. Yet, we are not even allowed to be slaves in foreign countries. I don't really know how we Chinese think of ourselves or how foreign countries regard us Chinese. This novel offers us an important lesson. I sincerely hope our readers will not ignore it as mere fiction but learn from it what we should do with ourselves." Sekundärliteratur Ling Shi schreibt in seiner 'review' : "The calamity is not about to befall our yellow race : the exclusion of Chinese labourers in the U.S. and the maltreatment of Chinese in various countries in the West are already a fact. Their predicament was in no way different from that of the Negroes, but worse than the latter. I weep for my yellow people with the tears I shed for the Negroes ; I grieve for the present of my yellow people in the same way I lament the past of the Negroes. I wish that every household had a copy of Uncle Tom's cabin." Xin Shi schreibt in Xin min ri bao (1903) : "When we think of the grim future of the yellow race, it is not the black slaves that we should grieve over." Hui Yun schreibt in Guo min : "Chinese laboreers are now shut up in stockades by Americans. How sad it is that China has lost its power, even its national rights. Seeing ourselves in the black slaves, I cannot refrain from weeping for the yellow race." Jin Yi schreibt : "The black slaves are able to sing of freedom after the Civil War while it is now the yellow men's turn to be slaves. They have to bow their heads and be submissive even if they are shut up in chicken coups or pigsties. A.R. Davis : Lin had adopted an especially patgriotic note, comparing the situation of the slaves with the treatment of Chinese labourers in America, a topic of high indignation in late 19th century China. Martha Cheung : If Stowe was motivated by humanitarian and religious reasons to write, then Wei Yi and Lin Shu were motivated by political and patriotic reasons to translate, particularly by their anxiety about the fate that awaited the Chinese if they became a people without a nation. |
|
| 2 | 1906 |
Wai guo lie nü zhuan. Chen Shoupeng yi ; Xue Shaohui bian. [ID D29955]. "Mrs. Stowe is a daughter of Beecher the minister. Born in Connecticut on June 15, 1812. When fifteen, she became, at the request of her sister and her neighbors, a teacher at a girls' school in Hartford. After she [Harriet Beecher Stowe] married Pastor Stowe in 1836, her literary talent bloomed under his tutorship. She published a volume of stories called The mayflower, which was deemed a suitable school text for young persons, as a result of which Stowe became well known all over New England. In 1851 she wrote an other book called Uncle Tom's cabin, which was published in Boston in 1852. This was received very enthusiastically, going into four reprints and selling 400'000 copies. It also sold 500'000 copies in Britain, and was translated into the main European languages, besides being adapted for the stage. It was supplemented in 1853 by the author's The key to Uncle Tom's cabin, which enhanced its standing." |
|
| 3 | 1907 |
Aufführung von Hei nu yu tian lu = "Black slave's cry to heaven" von Zeng Xiaogu nach Hei nu yu tian lu in der Übersetzung von Lin Shu und Wei Yi [ID D10429], unter der Regie von Li Shutong [Li Xishuang] und Ouyang Yuqian, durch chinesische Studenten der Chun liu she (Spring Willow Society) im Hongô Theater in Tokyo, June 1-2, 1907. Adaptation von Uncle Tom's cabin von Harriet Beecher Stowe. Li Shutong played Amelia Shelby, her husband was played by Huang Nannan and George Harris was played by Xie Kangbai. Ouyang Yuqian played a slave girl. Song and dance were improperly intruded. A visitor from China sang an aria from a Beijing opera. The play was divided into five acts. This, for a Chinese audience accustomed to an unbroken action upon the stage, was an innovation which the new drama companies of the early period found hard to sustain. The whole play, in preparation at least, was in spoken dialogue from a completely written text, a feature which became impossible to maintain in the circumstances in which the Spring Willow Society was forced to play in Shanghai. This first version of the story was used to reflect the abjection of China in her anticolonial struggle at the beginning of the twentieth century. The play was the beginning of the Chinese spoken drama hua ju. The most striking differences between Stowe's novel and the adaption are the absence of Christian religion in the Chinese play and the ending. Whereas the novel ends with the emancipation of the slaves by the character George Shelby, in Zeng's play the slaves liberate themselves. This play was unlike previous Chinese xi qu in excluding dance and song and disallowing recitation, soliloquies, or asides. The theme of oppression and liberation had an obvious appeal for the young Chinese students in Tokyo. Their dramatized version completely removed the Christian emphasis of Stowe's book and made the theme a struggle between the negro slaves and their oppressors, the slave-dealers, with final victory for the slaves in their slaughter of the slave-dealers. In the programme of the play is declared : The Aims of the Spring Willow Society's 1907 Grand Performance. "The greatest task of artistic performance is in enlightenment. Therefore this society's creative work begins with this. It has established a special section to study old and new drama. It hopes to be the leader of the reform of our country's world of the arts." Ouyang Yuqian, who participated in the performance recalled : "The play was divided into five acts and consisted totally of dialogue, with no recitation, no chorus, no soliloquy or asides. It was rendered in the typical form of the drama. Although the play was adapted from a novel, it should be considered the first created script of Chinese drama because there had never existed before in China a play in the form of divided acts." Zhang Geng (1954) described the performance "as a most memorable performance in the history of Chinese drama. It was the first performance presented by the Chun liu she and was fairly successful in content, form, and technique. It made a deep impression on the audience and had a great effect on the development of drama". Cao Xiaoqiao (1987) : "Although only male actors performed in the play, the use of stage settings and the division of acts were breakthroughs as compared with traditional operas." |
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| 4 | 1934 |
Zheng, Zhenduo. Zhongguo wen xue lun ji [ID D29986]. Memorial article about Lin Shu : "Lin Shu helped Chinese intellectuals to learn about the Westerners, their societies, and their national characters and to see that the West was not too different from China. He showed them that Chinese literature was not the only beautiful and wonderful literature in the world. There existed in Europe and the United States literary works that were as great as those written by Sima Qian, the most respected writer in Chinese history." |
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| 5 | 1958 |
Aufführung von Hei nu hen = "Sorrows of the black slaves" = Uncle Tom's cabin von Harriet Beecher Stowe = 黑奴恨, in einer Adaptation von Ouyang Yuqian, durch das Zhong yang xi yu xue yuan shi yan ju chang (Experimental Theater of Central Academy of Drama) in Beijing, zur Feier des 50. Geburtstages des 'hua ju'. Ouyang Yuqiao schreibt im Nachwort : "Because of differences in viewpoints, changes have to be made in the plot, especially in characterization. It is impossible for my characters to think or act in the way Mrs. Stowe prescribe in the original text. I have mad George Harris into a man tempered in suffering, full of revolutionary ideas, endowed with organizational capabilities and therefore unafraid of taking action. The Tom of my creation is sincere, honest, noble, willing to sacrifice himself for the welfare of others. He has, at the beginning, some illusions that, with his kindness, he may effect changes in his greedy master. After he is put on sale twice and cruelly treated, he begins to think of rebellion. His class consciousness is being raised. At the time of his death, he has come to realize that all bosses are Legrees, as cruel as Legree, and that blood has to be paid by blood, accounts have to be settled with the oppressors." The portrayal of the cruel slave owners and traders follows Stowe's novel closely, but Stowe's more sympathetic characters, such as the Shelbys, George Harris and the factory owner Wilson, are also exposed as hypocrites. Tom is portrayed as loyal, kind, and self-sacrificing. Unlike Tom in the novel, who is a devout Christian unto death and forgives his tormentors, Ounyang's Tom comes to a gradual awakening as a result of his bitter experiences. When he is first sold by Shelby to pay a debt, Tom is still grateful to this old master. After Tom is beaten by his new master Simon Legree, Tom is no longer sure of his old beliefs. He says "I used to believe that all the people could be changed with kindness. Today I realize that you big slave owners cannot be changed with kindness." In contrast to Tom's generally meek submission to oppression, George Harris is full of fighting spirit. Harris's dream of being free is finally realized when he arrives in Canada with his family. Ouyang's portrayal of Harris as a freedom fighter is an affirmation of resistance as the effective means against oppression. The emphasis on resistance and class struggle in the play was in keeping with the communist ideology and China's stated foreign policy in the 1950s : to support the anti-imperialist struggles of the oppressed peoples in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Chinese critics commented that the play succeeded in 'making the past to serve the present, and the foreign to serve the Chinese' and commended Ouyang for transforming himself from a patriotic youth of his student days into a proletarian warrior in his old age. |
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| 6 | 1961 |
Aufführung von Hei nu hen = "Sorrows of the black slaves" = Uncle Tom's cabin von Harriet Beecher Stowe = 黑奴恨 in der Adaptation von Ouyang Yuqian unter der Regie von Sun Weishi, zum 100. Geburtstag der Publikation des Buches, in Beijing und Guizhou. Tian Han schreibt : “The dramatization is not just to commemorate the rise of the new drama movement. It is also a significant support to the liberation movement of the black people in Africa and in the United States. The play is a powerful exposure of the United States. It is a powerful exposure of the reactionary nature of U.S. imperialism.” Tian Han commends Mrs. Stowe for her success and criticizes her for placing too much hope in Christianity. He then compliments Ouyang Yuqian for looking at slavery from the perspective of 'socialist ideology' by creating a most touching character in Tom and 'endowing him with class consciousness at the time of death'. |
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| 7 | 1978 |
Dong, Hengxun. Meiguo wen xue jian shi [ID D29603]. Article about Uncle Tom's cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. "As its subject matter was based on reality, its writing techniques tended to be realistic. Thus, the book was a break from the romantic tradition that had been dominated in fiction writing for a long time. Its descriptions are vivid and accurate, with strong artistic appeal in some places. It creates with great success different types of black slaves and paints truthful pictures of the disgusting nature of the slave owners, reproducing vividly the Southern society through the experiences of different characters. Although Uncle Tom's cabin is rather loose in structure, and affected in language, and although some of its characters are not fully developed, it deserves to be regarded as an important realistic novel in the history of American literature, a precursor of the movement of realistic fiction emerging after the Civil War." |
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| 8 | 1986 |
[Stowe, Harriet Beecher]. Tang mu shu shu de xiao wu. Tang Jun yi. [ID D29987]. Tang Jun schreibt im Vorwort : "The novel is a very good book from which young readers may gather some ideas about the capitalist society, the slavery in the United States, and the racial discrimination that still exists there. Through reading the novel, we may not only learn about the prejudice and the oppression black people have been suffering in the United States, but also broaden our horizon by learning something about the history, geography, and the customs and habits of the United States." |
Sources (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1934 |
Zheng, Zhenduo. Zhongguo wen xue lun ji. (Shanghai : Kai ming shu dian, 1934). [Enthält eine Liste von Lin Shus Übersetzungen]. 中國文學論集 |
Publication / ZheZ2 |
Cited by (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2000- | Asien-Orient-Institut Universität Zürich | Organisation / AOI |
|