Chinese Translation of Modal Verb Shall in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure

Modal verbs are a type of verbs which express meanings such as volition, ability, possibility, necessity, etc. In Shakespeare’s plays, modal verbs are characterized by their large numbers and rich meanings, with some of their meanings different from their present-day English descendants. For instance, shall has the meaning “order to”, besides “intend to”, “ought to”, “be to”. This paper focuses on the differences among the Chinese translations of SHALL in Measure for Measure, by Zhu Shenghao, Liang Shiqiu, Fang Ping, Ying Ruocheng, and Peng Jingxi, its aim being to find out SHALL’s exact meanings and appropriate ways to render them in Chinese. The result shows that SHALL in Measure for Measure appears 86 times with 4 different meanings, which are “intend to”, “ought to”, “order to”, “be to”. Liang Shiqiu and Peng Jingxi tended to adopt formal equivalence in their translations, and Zhu Shenghao, Fang Ping and Ying Ruocheng tended to adopt functional equivalence in their translations.

A Displaced City and Postmemory

This chapter examines how Sinophone writers from PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong compose their Beijing narratives to articulate their anxiety and desire, frustrated and fluid subjectivities. Liang Shiqiu a Beijing native, Taipei dweller, literary guru, and sophisticated connoisseur of fine cuisine, writes about Beijing cuisine to evoke emotional affiliation, gastronomic nostalgia, and imagined reunion. Both originally from Taiwan, Lin Haiyin romanticizes her memory of the south side of Beijing from an innocent girl’s perspective, while Zhong Lihe sharply criticizes the inferior and filthy life of Beijing’s social underclass and paints a bleak urban picture in his disillusioning discovery of the old capital during the Chinese Civil War. Hong Kong émigré writer Jin Yong intertwines literary topography and martial-arts fantasy, inscribes post-loyalist attachments and detachments onto the city, and suggests a hybrid and flexible identity, formed in the chivalric gestures of intervening in core political urban settings and fleeing to the margins and frontiers. In the shadow of World Wars and Cold War, a dislocated and relocated Beijing appears in the border-crossing diasporic writing and Sinophone postmemory.

Mapping Modern Beijing

Mapping Modern Beijing investigates five methods of representing Beijing- a warped hometown, a city of snapshots and manners, an aesthetic city, an imperial capital in comparative and cross-cultural perspective, and a displaced city on the Sinophone and diasporic postmemory—by authors traveling across mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas Sinophone and non-Chinese communities. The metamorphosis of Beijing’s everyday spaces and the structural transformation of private and public emotions unfold Manchu writer Lao She’s Beijing complex about a warped native city. Zhang Henshui’s popular snapshots of fleeting shocks and everlasting sorrows illustrate his affective mapping of urban transition and human manners in Republican Beijing. Female poet and architect Lin Huiyin captures an aesthetic and picturesque city vis-à-vis the political and ideological urban planning. The imagined imperial capital constructed in bilingual, transcultural, and comparative works by Lin Yutang, Princess Der Ling, and Victor Segalen highlights the pleasures and pitfalls of collecting local knowledge and presenting Orientalist and Cosmopolitan visions. In the shadow of World Wars and Cold War, a multilayered displaced Beijing appears in the Sinophone postmemory by diasporic Beijing natives Liang Shiqiu, Taiwan sojourners Zhong Lihe and Lin Haiyin, and émigré martial-arts novelist Jin Yong in Hong Kong. Weijie Song situates Beijing in a larger context of modern Chinese-language urban imaginations, and charts the emotional topography of the city against the backdrop of the downfall of the Manchu Empire, the rise of modern nation-state, the 1949 great divide, and the formation of Cold War and globalizing world. Drawing from literary canons to exotic narratives, from modernist poetry to chivalric fantasy, from popular culture to urban planning, this book explores the complex nexus of urban spaces, archives of emotions, and literary topography of Beijing in its long journey from imperial capital to Republican city and to socialist metropolis.