Title

Shuttling Between East and West: Ye Si, Hong Kong Literature, and Modern Chinese Literature from the Perspectives of German and French Scholars

Author

Connie Ho-yee Kwong

Genre

Article

Pages

151-185

Download

PDF

Language

Chinese

Key words

Leung Ping-kwan梁秉鈞 (Ye Si也斯), Hong Kong literature, world literature, east and west, literary and cultural translation

Abstract

    When studying the translation of twentieth-century Hong Kong literature, we cannot help but turn our attention to Leung Ping-kwan 梁秉鈞 (Ye Si 也斯, 1948-2013), a renowned Hong Kong poet and scholar. Ye Si reinvestigated the transgression of cultural boundaries through translating his own literary works. Based on his daily life experiences and fully aware of the historical context, he also re-examined the cultural criticism that developed from Edward W. Said’s (1935-2003) theory of Orientalism. Since the 1990s, two Sinologists from the center of European cultures, Wolfgang Kubin of Germany and Annie Curien of France, have started translating Ye Si’s literary works and investigating his cultural perspectives, eventually developing an intercultural dialogue with him. This paper explores how Kubin and Curien, by making reference to their own German and French literary traditions, understand and interpret Ye Si’s literary and cultural perspectives. It further studies how they reconstruct Hong Kong literature and remap it in the frame of modern Chinese literature. Finally, this paper investigates how they re-examine the possibility of the concept of “world literature” by making reference to the literature of Hong Kong, a literature sprung from a city that is marginalized by both the European continent and Mainland China.