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Title |
An Androgynous Flower Blooming in Foreign Lands: A Study on the Heterotopia Ideology in the English Translation of Notes of a Desolate Man |
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Author |
Lee, Ming-Che |
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Ph.D. Student, Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation, National Taiwan Normal University |
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Abstract |
This essay appropriates the “heterotopia” concept elaborated by Michel Foucault to re-contextualize Chu T'ien-wen's post-modernism queer-fiction classic Notes of a Desolate Man, while analyzing the translators' strategies deployed in its English version. The first section provides an overview of available literature about the novel and briefly introduces what has motivated this study. The second section investigates the source text's gender politics with roots in “women's writing” (écriture feminine). Borrowing Foucault's multi-translated renditions of “heterotopia,” this essay aims to de-construct the first-person gay narrator's “homosexualized utopia” and his self-indulgent imaginations of the alienated sphere he dwells in. Based on the“translator’' manipulation” perspective and David Damrosch's World Literature paradigm, the third section examines the translators' strategies and identifies the limitations of previous scholarship on the novel’s English translation, elucidating how the English version has dealt with the Chinese original's heterotopia ideology while enhancing its global visibility in the World Literature terrain. I argue in the concluding remarks that the English version, rendered in sync with the “domestication approach,” employs standardized English to elevate the book's intelligibility and accessibility for the Anglophone audience, whereas the queered heterotopia allegory in the Chinese original is inescapably subject to a certain level of semantic inadequacy. |
