The Scholars, Chronique indiscrète or Neoficial'naja istorija? The challenge of Translating Eighteenth-century Chinese Irony and Grotesque for Contemporary Western Audiences

In his Brief History of Chinese Fiction (1925), Lu Xun claimed that Rulin waishi 儒林外史 (‘The Unofficial History of the Forest of the Literati’, by Wu Jingzi吳敬梓, 18th cent.) was the first Chinese novel of social satire, centred as it is on the merciless portrait of the hypocrisy and moral decay of the mandarins. Many scholars, however, have questioned whether the novel should actually be read as satire, stressing the rhetorical and narratological research of the author and his proposal of a reform of Confucian ritualism (Anderson 1997; Shang Wei 2003). Rulin waishi represents one of the highest achievements of the ‘literati novel’, and the satirical tone has, doubtless, a prominent role, although it should not be detached from other aspects of the book. As it happens in the Western tradition of satire (a miscellaneous form in origin), in order to give full play to his satirical aim, Wu Jingzi displays many comical devices, moving from refined irony, a code which belonged to the literati class since ancient times (see the Zhuangzi), to a sort of realistic-grotesque manner, more typical of literature inspired by folkloric themes. At the same time, however, the reader is constantly reminded that the author stands on a moral highground, observing from this height the human reality, which is desperately distorted by corruption and by ethical blindness. After a series of partial translations, realised since the 30s of the last century (see Li Hanqiu 2012), the novel in its entirety was translated in a few European languages between the 50s and the 70s. The aim of this contribution is to observe how the novel, with its complexity of themes and registers, its debts to refined and vulgar literary traditions, and its richness in doctrinal and philosophical contents, has been presented to Western readers. In particular, I analyse how the peculiar expression of humour in the Chinese text, rooted as it is in the highly ritualised social codes of the literati, has been reproduced in the English, Russian and French versions and which strategies were adopted by the translators in order to give a new life to the 18th century Chinese humour and satire. Moreover, the analysed translations were aimed to very different publics (from the ideal international reader of the Yang-Yang translation, the Soviet reader of the Chruščëv time, to the French reader of the Seventies). In order to observe the transmission of the novel to the West, we should also pay attention to the context in which these versions were created. The final aim of the study is to observe what happens to humour, and to the peculiar expression it assumes in a didactical-satirical novel, when transferred from its original context to a very distant culture, and how the actors of this transmission (the translators) concretely operate.