Reading Rushdie in Translation: Midnight's Children, Postcolonial Writing/Translation, and Literatures of the World

This article examines translations of Salman Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children, into French, German, Italian, and Turkish. Specific examples reveal that while all translators maintain a foreignizing stance toward the source text, their respective target languages and cultures make foreignizing a relative effect, dependent on the target language and target culture's distance from or proximity to the source text/culture. The article also argues that Rushdie's novel fits the notion of literatures of the world, because the translations replicate and also refract the source text in different contexts, thus effectively multiplying a single source novel to become plural in its multiple (language) worlds.

How Changed? Milton, Vida, Vergil, and a Network of Allusion

Satan's first words in Paradise Lost (‘how changed | From him’) famously allude to Book 2 of the Æneid. Interpretations of Satan's character and of the relationship between Milton's epic and its precursor have been enriched through recognition of this arresting intertextual moment. Recent theoretical and methodological innovations can help to reveal yet more about these intertextual dynamics. Milton alludes in a way that takes account of prior links in an allusive chain, responding not only to the Æneid but also to mediating texts, including Vida's Christiad, whose wresting of the Vergilian phrase to fresh use Milton repeats with crucial changes. Milton's allusion should also be situated within an even broader and more generically variegated network of print diffusion. Vergil's phrase became a commonplace, but still ran within semantic circuits relevant to the allusive chain linking post-Vergilian epics. Milton's ‘how changed’ in turn established itself as a poetic formula.

Gender and Chinese Translations of Chinese American Women’s Literature: Marital Sexual Violence in Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife

Comparing three Chinese translations of Amy Tan’s novel The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), this article explores gender issues in Chinese translations of Chinese American women’s literature from a feminist perspective. Using the feminist concept of female alienation, it explores how feminist consciousness and sexual alienation caused by marital sexual violence in the source text are expressed in the Chinese translations, and how far the translations achieve (feminist) translation equivalence. Special attention is paid to the translators’ gender consciousness and ideologies, as reflected in their translations, in order to explore the role played by gender in the translation of women’s writing.