Xin Zhang
Journal of Translation Studies. 2023, 7(1): 45-66.
As Cold War narratives swept across the world of letters in 1960s China, American literature was translated into Chinese for political rather than poetic reasons. One of the most prominent translated pieces was Jerome David Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951). This regimented Chinese version was circulated internally among high- class Chinese officials and scholars. By renarrating this novel into a “degenerate work” of the Beat Generation, Dong Hengxun 董衡巽 , along with other spokespersons for Chinese authorities, demonized the United States as an amoral nation, challenged the metanarrative of capitalist modernity, and legitimized its socialist counterpart. However, the translator Shi Xianrong 施咸榮 selectively appropriated clashing voices in his postscript to create a narrative battleground and thus implicitly renarrated The Catcher in the Rye from a degenerate work into a controversial one by highlighting its literary merit. The conflicting renarrations of the novel in question essentially epitomized a motley variety of contrasts: politics vs. poetics, the East vs. the West, domestic identity vs. foreign otherness, and, ultimately, socialist modernity vs. capitalist modernity. By weaving together various historical materials and drawing heavily on Social Narrative Theory, this case study contextualizes the translation, circulation, and criticism of The Catcher in the Rye in 1960s China and positions relevant renarrators within the stories that informed their discursive behaviors, thereby revealing the variable distance between said transcultural mediators and the dominant narratives of politics and poetics at that time.
