EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Section 13 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 143 Chan Roy (University of Oregon) Intelligentsia in Translation: History, Memory, and Style in Ba Jin’s Encounter with Alexander Herzen Key words: modern Chinese literature, Russian literature, aesthetics, experience Having survived persecution during the Cultural Revolution, Ba Jin (1904–2005) emerged back on the Chinese literary scene in 1979 with a translation of the first part of 19th-century Russian writer Alexander Herzen’s memoirs, Byloe i dumy (My Past and Thoughts; in Chinese, Wangshi yu suixiang). Herzen had long been a considerable influence on Ba Jin, and for decades Ba Jin had endeavored to translate his memoirs.After completing the first volume of translation, Ba Jin traveled to France where he met with Alexander Herzen’s heirs, and even visited his grave in Nice. Ba Jin recorded these experiences in an additional postface to his translation. Moreover, he included the episode in a series of memoiristic vignettes he published serially as Suixiang lu (Record of Occasional Thoughts), in an apparent nod to Herzen’s own memoirs. My paper aims to understand how Ba Jin’s engagement with Herzen attempted to transplant a certain conception of intel- ligentsia identity through his own aesthetic and ethical activity; like the Russian intelligentsia that so inspired Ba Jin, he also sought to meld life, literature, and history. Historic events and personal dramas transmute into aesthetic expression, which spurs new actions and events in an infinite loop. The genre in question, the memoir, is unique in its blurring of the lines between the intimate and the public, literature and history. While inspired by Russian models, Ba Jin’s memoiristic work also bears affinities with such Chinese genres as suibi and muzhiming. Ilya Budraitskis has recently suggested adopting sociologist Karl Mannheim’s concept of “thought style” to characterize Russian intelligentsia behavior. I ponder as to whether an expanded notion of “style” that encapsulates both behavior and aesthetics can best express the totality of what the intelligentsia embodied in thought, action, and expression. It is this sense of intelligentsia style that Ba Jin sought to simul- taneously emulate and translate. Di Toro Anna (Università per Stranieri in Siena) A Lexical Analysis of I. Bičurin's Version of Sanzi jing (Troeslovie, 1829) against the Background of Russian Sinology of the Early 19th Century Key words: Russian-Chinese cultural relations, Russian sinology, Sanzi jing in Europe The first Russian Orthodox missionaries in China attached a great importance to Sanzi jing, the Three-Character Classic which together with the Four Books was used as an essential means to teach both the Chinese characters and the foundations of traditional ethics to the Russian students of Chinese. The first translation of the Sanzi jing into Russian was accomplished by I. Rossokhin (before 1741), but remained unpublished, and a version by A. Leont’ev became the first to be published in 1779. I. Bičurin is the author of the third translation, published in 1829 in a bilingual Chinese-Russian edition. The aim of this paper is to detect Bičurin’s approach in translating the classical primer, which in his opinion rep- resented a short encyclopaedia of Chinese culture. The translation was intended not only for academic circles, but also for the Russian general public, who showed a keen interest in China, as demonstrated by the amount of publications on the subject in the 18th and early 19th centuries. This production mir- rored the complex context, in which Russian sinology evolved. While the members of the Orthodox spiritual mission in Beijing were offering first-hand studies and translations to the Russian readers, two other contrasting images of China reached Russia: the positive and utopian image promoted by French philosophes and the hypercritical one deriving from the English world. Through a comparative analysis of the Russian versions of Sanzi jing by Leont’ev and Bičurin, and the English version by R. Morrison (1812), I shall try to answer several questions. Why did Bičurin feel the need to offer a new version of the Three-Character Classic? In translating the primer, was Bičurin already faithful to the principle, later upheld in his Kitajskaja Grammatika (1835), of not forcing the Chinese language and concepts into Western categories? And can we notice a substantial difference between the translating approaches of the Russian and British sinologists?