Wang Dun
Through translation, Western industrialization and its social, artistic responses gained representation in Chinese letters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. One case in point is a yi-shu (译述), a “translated re-narration” of a science fiction short story, “Flying to the Jupiter,” (1907) which is allegorically a social experiment of changing historical lanes and fictionally a space odyssey. In this representative story, the Chinese “translation” of cultural-materialist modernity merges with implied Chinese doubts about modern social engineering. The heterogeneous messages from such translations generate both micro “Brownian motions” and a macro-level social course, along which many hijacked passengers—the hostages of history—are transported.
In the “Introduction” to the book Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840-1918 the editor David E. Pollard asks, “What was it about that age that created such a demand for translations?”
The age in question is the Chinese early modern period, from the late Qing dynasty to the early Republican period. The late Qing was an age characterized by the changing of cultural-historical lanes. In order to survive such changes, the Chinese struggled to translate not only Western words but also the sense of modern time-space. The translation endeavor was linguistically, spatially, and temporally convoluted. Verbal images from Western languages were taken as representative of the modern course. The translation of foreign books and the importation of railroads and telegraphy were seen as practical ways to change China. Through translation, Western industrialization and its social, artistic manifestations were represented in Chinese letters. Acclaim for modernization was mixed with Chinese doubts as well. One case in point is an yi-shu, (译述) or “translated re-narration” of a science fiction short story. Entitled “Flying to Jupiter,” (飞访木星) the story appeared in a fiction journal The All-Story Monthly (月月小说) in 1907.
This science fiction is about a delirious interstellar journey to Jupiter. The crew includes a fanatic scientist, a foreign engineer, and the first person narrator, a neophyte science student too anxious to seek employment. From the beginning, the narrator doubts the scientist’s rationality in embarking on an unprecedented space trip. At the same time however, he is also intimidated by the scientist’s fanaticism and dares not refuse the invitation to become a crewmember. It turns out that the scientist has already got everything ready except for recruiting a passenger as an eyewitness. And now the narrator becomes the reluctant passenger in this space trip. The deeper they roam into space, the more lunatic the scientist and the foreign engineer become. As a result, their disordered navigation destroys the space ship, which falls back to earth. When the narrator comes to in a hospital, it is already several weeks later. In retrospection he relates the whole story from beginning to end in order to ascertain for himself whether the whole thing is a true experience or a dream.
As a typical yi-shu, the name of the foreign author was omitted. Instead, “Zhou Guisheng,” (周桂笙) the name of the person responsible for the yi-shu, was printed, with the stylistic name of “Master of the Shanghai New Knowledge Workshop.” (上海知新室主人) This stylistic name serves as a kind of branding for the translator Zhou, clearly telling the location and selling-point of yi-shu production. The location is cosmopolitan Shanghai. The selling-point is to “know the new.” Yi-shu, “translated re-narration,” was stylistically “free and indirect,” and entailed making up things and cutting out things at the will of the translator-cum-author. In this way, old imaginations were refurbished with new jargon; “knowing the new” in yi-shu was practiced as “making the new.” A reading of “Flying to Jupiter” reveals the late Qing perceptions of modern speed, magnetism, gravitation, and mechanization. Each of these is couched in terms of classical Chinese allusions, which also were grafted onto the gothic atmosphere that must have come from the now anonymous English original. In this story, the Chinese “translation” of the cultural-materialist modernity merges with an implied Chinese doubt about modern social engineering.
The first person narrator, who is identified as “I”, starts to tell the story in retrospection. On a bleak winter morning, the narrator goes to Chicago to visit a Dr. Ge Lin (Green?), “mechanist of all sorts and scientific inventor,” (各种机器师暨科学发明家) as read from the plate outside the Doctor’s residence. “I” enters, and is impressed by the spacious combination of machine room, laboratory, and library. (机器房、化验所、藏书楼、三者而一) Suddenly he begins a monologue about the celestial life of the yunshi, (陨石) the meteorite. As if talking directly to a late Qing Chinese audience that was ashamed of lacking new, foreign knowledge, he attacks traditional astrology: “People in the past were provincial in knowledge. When they accidentally saw it [the meteorite], they panicked, regarding it as an anomaly, even stretching their explanation of the phenomenon to signs of heavenly calamity. Today, people do not think it strange at all.” (在昔人民知识锢闭。偶然见之。诧为异事。且有以灾祥之说附会之者。在今日则毫不为奇矣。) Whatever his words are, the Doctor’s zest for yunshi strongly echoes of Chinese astrology.
He further explicates that since yunshi contains too much magnetism, its centripetal force will at last overwhelm its centrifugal force, resulting in a “crushing down.” The scientist’s jargon becomes a social parable if one takes the trajectory of the yunshi as a metaphor for the historical course of China. Even though there are no explicit textual indications to link yunshi’s erratic trajectory and China’s bumpy progress together, their affinities are implied all through the story’s fantastic discourse. For example, expostulations such as “for ten thousand things in the world, the keenest importance for them all is to keep balance,” (天下万物。皆贵持平也) and, “when (the pair) are unparalleled in size or in strength, there always engenders trouble of causing something extremely light over something extremely heavy,” (或大小悬殊。或气力不同。则往往有畸轻畸重之弊) are all warnings for keeping a constant orbit for Chinese society when it is threatened by foreign “magnetism.” The lesson from the yunshi is not celestial but terrestrial: how to prevent China from being crushed down, and how to keep the Western attraction from becoming predominant. Otherwise, going “off track” (出轨) will be China’s tragedy. As the story unfolds, the doctor grows progressively more insane as his entanglement with the yunshi gets deeper. He finally becomes a space transgressor in the same way as his beloved yunshi did, embarking on an interstellar journey, and approaching self-destruction at full speed. Fortunately “I” survives the crash to tell the story.
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See Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff eds., Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004). Papers in this volume from many angles argue that the cosmopolitanism of the age was fraught with debates about the indigenous sources of knowledge.
The All-Story Monthly 1.5 (1907) 53-75.
