The Making of Barbarians

Chinese Literature and Multilingual Asia

Haun Saussy

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780691231983
  9780691231976
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691231969
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Literature

A groundbreaking account of translation and identity in the Chinese literary tradition before 1850—with important ramifications for today

Debates on the canon, multiculturalism, and world literature often take Eurocentrism as the target of their critique. But literature is a universe with many centers, and one of them is China. The Making of Barbarians offers an account of world literature in which China, as center, produces its own margins. Here Sinologist and comparatist Haun Saussy investigates the meanings of literary translation, adaptation, and appropriation on the boundaries of China long before it came into sustained contact with the West.

When scholars talk about comparative literature in Asia, they tend to focus on translation between European languages and Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, as practiced since about 1900. In contrast, Saussy focuses on the period before 1850, when the translation of foreign works into Chinese was rare because Chinese literary tradition overshadowed those around it.

The Making of Barbarians looks closely at literary works that were translated into Chinese from foreign languages or resulted from contact with alien peoples. The book explores why translation was such an undervalued practice in premodern China, and how this vast and prestigious culture dealt with those outside it before a new group of foreigners—Europeans—appeared on the horizon.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Introduction: Intrinsically Extrinsic
• 1. The Nine Relays: Translation in China
• 2. Can the Barbarians Sing?
• 3. The Hanzi wenhua quan: Center, Periphery, and the Shaggy Borderlands
• 4. The Formation of China: Asymmetries in the Writing of History
• 5. Exiles and Emissaries amid Their New Neighbors: The View from the Edge of the World
• Conclusion: Frames, Edges, Escape Codes
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Series List
• Index