Intimacy and alienation: Mór Jókai in China

• Published in: Neohelicon (Budapest) 2022-12, Vol.49 (2), p.739-763
• Main Author: Li, Zhenling
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; Alienation; Chinese languages; Comparative Literature; Cultural and Media Studies; Cultural factors; Hungarian language; Jokai, Mor (1825-1904); Literary translation; Literature; Perceptions; Political discourse; Social factors; Sociocultural factors; Translations; Writers
• ISSN: 0324-4652; 1588-2810
• DOI: 10.1007/s11059-022-00660-y

The 20th century witnessed two Chinese translation booms of the Hungarian writer Mór Jókai’s work. In order to have a better understanding of Jókai in China, this paper focuses on the Chinese translation of Jókai’s work, providing an overview of its history, and offers insights into the socio-cultural context of the translation, the features of Jókai’s writing highlighted in translation, and the Chinese understanding of his literary world. It will be shown that the Chinese translation of Jókai’s work in the 20th century was almost always dominated by political discourse: in the early 20th century it was “the literature of marginalized nationalities,” and in the second half of the century “the literature of socialist countries.” While the readers in the earlier period inserted modern China’s national consciousness into their interpretation of the writer, who therefore appeared as strangely familiar to them, the readers in the later period were under the influence of socialist ideology, thus distinguishing themselves from the writer, who was regarded as a bourgeois novelist. For the latter, they not only constantly warned themselves of his idealist parochialism but also thought of him as a tragic Rousseau/Owen-style utopian.