Category: Past Events

何以還魂：將張愛玲譯歸中文的經驗反思

分享嘉賓 Speaker: 鄭遠濤 先生 Mr. Silvano ZHENG

主持人 Moderator: 黃心村 教授 Prof. Nicole HUANG (HKU) 

日期時間 Date & Time: May 13, 2024 (Mon) 16:30-18:00pm
語言 Language: 普通話 Putonghua
地點 Venue: CBA, Chow Yei Ching Building, Main Campus, HKU

摘要 Abstract:
一個男性譯者如何完成「回譯」英文張著的棘手任務，並以趨近張作趣味的文字，來呈現這位巨匠的風貌？這次講座從譯者獨特的親身經驗，切入雙語作家張愛玲的文學存在。講者將回顧自己歷年來的張著譯作，包括中篇小說《少帥》、演說稿與散文各一及書信若干，用文字舉例和逸聞趣事來講述甘苦自知的工作歷程，揭示出譯者雖有「隱形」的本分，某些個人面向依然可能滲入譯稿，往往有賴眼光犀利的合作者提點，方能適時訂正調校，以求準確反映作者當時的心緒。如果中文是張愛玲最後的家園，她那極富魅力的聲音，就彷彿無時不在呼喚並誘惑譯者：帶我歸航。也許在張愛玲的文學疆域中，如此航向的譯本始終只能抵達一個幻像島嶼，但即使這樣，這空間裡亦充滿喬治·斯坦納所稱的「詞語的解放之力」。

This seminar intersects key areas of Eileen Chang’s existence as a bilingual writer from a unique empirical perspective by trying to answer the question:  How did a male translator tackle the complicated mission of rendering her English works in a Chinese style that would possibly be seen as approximating her own, with at least some hallmarks of the unmatchable master? Reflecting on his translations of Chang over the years, including the novella “The Young Marshal,” a speech, an essay and letters, the speaker will cite examples and tell anecdotes that occurred in the process of his bittersweet job, revealing how despite a translator’s ideally “invisible” role, certain elements of his person could seep into the drafts before the occasion arose for rectification and fine-tuning, often with insight from collaborators, to precisely mirror probable authorial intentions. If Chinese is Chang’s ultimate homeland, her siren call for homeward translation will never cease. Perhaps a translation voyage thus directed is only bound for a phantom isle in Chang’s literary terrain but even so, it is a space full of what George Steiner named “the liberating power of the word.”

講者簡介 About the Speaker:
鄭遠濤  譯書寫作的人，英文系畢業，曾獲兩屆梁實秋文學獎翻譯類獎項。生於廣州，現居三藩市灣區。少年時癡迷張愛玲作品，30歲左右得到將英文張著翻譯為中文的機緣，譯出《少帥》，後來參與兩卷本《張愛玲往來書信集》所涉譯事。其他譯著有西洋歷史小說亞歷山大三部曲、《奧古斯都》，約翰·伯格的《到婚禮去》等。近年因戀上巴西音樂而學習葡萄牙語。

Silvano Zheng is a literary translator and writer with a degree in English. Two-time winner of the prestigious Liang Shih-chiu Translation Award from Taiwan. Born in Guangzhou, he lives in Berkeley, California. Aficionado of Eileen Chang’s oeuvre since his adolescence, at 30 he undertook an assignment to translate the late master’s English works into Chinese, a project that resulted in The Young Marshal and other volumes. Zheng’s translations also include Mary Renault’s Alexander trilogy, John Williams’ novel Augustus, and John Berger’s To the Wedding.  He is now learning Portuguese for the love of Brazilian music.

This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series |
張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 
Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty
& Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)

紀曉嵐在烏魯木齊

講者 Speaker: 羅新 教授 Professor Luo Xin (Peking U)

主持人 Moderator: 徐國琦 教授 Professor Xu Guoqi (HKU)

日期時間 Date & Time: May 6, 2014 (Mon) 16:30-18:00pm
語言 Language: 普通話 Putonghua
地點 Venue: Room 328, 3/F, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

摘要 Abstract:
紀曉嵐一生仕途最大的挫折在乾隆三十三年 (1768)，因向捲入兩淮鹽政虧空案的姻親盧見曾通風報信，被貶戍烏魯木齊，乾隆三十六年夏才回北京，滯留烏魯木齊兩年多，可能是近千年間中原頂級文人最早有長期西域生活經驗的。這出乎意料的經驗對他的學問有不小的影響，他晚年所著《閱微草堂筆記》有多條涉及西域，我們可藉以了解他在烏魯木齊的經歷和感想聞見。

The Qing writer, official, and intellectual Ji Yun (Ji Xiaolan, 1724-1805) was demoted and exiled to Urumqi in 1768 and lived there for over two years. Though a major setback in Ji’s illustrious political career, the experience shaped his scholarship. This talk will focus on many accounts of the Western Regions included in Ji’s influential collection of notes and sketches titled Perceptions from a Thatched Hut, which he completed in his later years.

講者簡介 About the Speaker:
羅新，北京大學中國古代史研究中心暨歷史學系教授，主要研究領域為中國中古史與北方民族史，學術代表作《內亞淵源》、《黑氈上的北魏皇帝》與《王化與山險 》，近年出版旅行文學《從大都到上都》《月亮照在阿姆河上》和學術隨筆《有所不為的反叛者》，以及歷史非虛構作品《漫長的餘生》。

Luo Xin is Professor of History at Peking University. He has published extensively on Chinese medieval history and the history of northern ethnicities. Major scholarly monographs include The Origins of Inner Asia, The Northern Wei Emperor on the Black Felt, and Within or Beyond: An Anthology on Medieval Marches. Luo’s recent books have worked to bridge the boundaries between scholarship and travelogue, and between history and non-fiction.

Speaker: Tani Barlow, George & Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities, Department of History, Rice University

Moderators:
Su Yun Kim, Associate Professor, Korean Studies, SMLC, The University of Hong Kong
Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong

Date: 2 MAY 2024 (THU)
Time: 4:30–6:00 pm
Venue: Room 436, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

This talk explores my difficulties writing an intellectual history of society. Society and 社會 are categories that became, over the last century, our primary way of illuminating the past, and explaining what we currently experience. Yet – this is my starting point – society/社會 are anachronous; they were never a part of thought or experience before the early 20^th century. Previously, in The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (2004) and In the Event of Women (2021) I sought evidence of a subject, and conditions for thinking that made it possible for that subject, women, to act to emancipate itself. In this project I seek to understand how social theorists, including feminists, forged a universal explanation of human experience, society, and how they ontologized its foundational elements as the universal historical experiences of social class, social sex, and social self.

Tani Barlow is George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University and the founding senior editor of positions: asia critique. She is the author of In the Event of Women (Duke University Press, 2021), The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Duke University Press, 2004), and Inter/National Feminism and China, Ito Ruri and Kobayashi Eri, trans., (Tokyo: Ochanomizu Press, 2003).

The series is coordinated by Prof. Su Yun Kim (suyunkim@hku.hk), Prof. Pei-yin Lin (pylin@hku.hk), and Prof. Alvin Wong (akhwong@hku.hk), and is supported by the School of Chinese, School of Humanities, and School of Modern Languages and Cultures. This event is organized with the support of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. For details, go to www.meal.hku.hk.

《異鄉記》中的多維風景

分享嘉賓 Speaker: 吳曉東 教授 Prof. WU Xiaodong (Peking U) 
主持人 Moderator: 林姵吟 教授 Prof. LIN Pei-yin (HKU) 
日期時間 Date & Time: April 25, 2024 (Thu) 16:30-18:00pm
語言 Language: 普通話 Putonghua
地點 Venue: KK102, K.K. Leung Building, Main Campus, HKU

摘要 Abstract:
廿一世紀才得以面世的《異鄉記》雖是張愛玲的一部殘稿，卻也是爐火純青之作，既呈現出遊記散文的樣貌，也涵容了豐沛的小說性。 而其文體前所未有的雜糅性和不定性，則寓意著文本的未完成性，產生了多維度的闡釋空間。本次講座從釐析《異鄉記》的文體特徵入手，透視張愛玲在異鄉書寫過程中所內涵的風景認知裝置，以及對人情世態的犀利而冷峻的審視目光，進而探討《異鄉記》所傳達 的「中國」感受，勾勒張愛玲「中國體驗」的嬗變歷程。 最後嘗試整合文本敘事、隱喻修辭、詩性語言等諸種詩學向度，彰顯《異鄉記》在張愛玲創作生涯中的獨特性。 

Eileen Chang’s incomplete manuscript Chronicle of a Strange Land was posthumously published in 2010. Originally written in 1946, Chronicle is structured like a travelogue but unfolds like a fiction narrative. Its incompleteness and stylistic hybridity lead to multiple readings. This lecture begins with a stylistic analysis of the narrative, followed by a discussion of how an internal landscape is materialized as the narrative progresses. In a land of strangeness, a particular “Chineseness” comes into shape, observed through a sharp and stern gaze, and realized in a metaphorical and, at times, poetic language. This lecture defines the uniqueness of Chronicle in the context of Eileen Chang’s entire writing career. 

講者簡介 About the Speaker:
吳曉東 北京大學中文系教授，主要研究領域為中國現代文學，大量的專著和編著中的代表作品有：《陽光與苦難》、《象徵主義與中國現代文學》、《從卡夫卡到昆德拉》、《二十世紀外國小說專題》、《鏡花水月的世界》、《二十世紀的詩心》、《一九三〇年代的滬上文學風景》、《臨水的納蕤思：中國現代派詩歌的藝術母題》、《記憶的神話》、《文學性的命運》等等。

WU Xiaodong is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature at Peking University. He is the prolific author and editor of dozens of monographs and editions including the following: Sunlight and Suffering, Symbolism in Modern Chinese Literature, From Kafka to Kundela, Case Studies of Twentieth-Century Novels, The World Through the Looking Glass, The Zeitgeist of Twentieth-Century Poetry, The Literary Landscape in 1930s Shanghai, Narcissus at the Water: A Study of Motifs in Modern Chinese Poetry, The Myth of Memories, The Destiny of Literariness, and many more.

This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series |
張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 
Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty
& Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)

“輕微的騷動”: 張愛玲小說裡的細節與女性

分享嘉賓 Speaker: Prof. Jiwei XIAO (Fairfield University) 
主持人 Moderator: Prof. LIN Pei-yin (HKU) 

日期時間 Date & Time: April 18, 2024 (Thu) 16:30-18:00pm
語言 Language: English
地點 Venue: CPD-7.30, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

摘要 Abstract:
In xijie xiaoshuo 細節小說, or the fiction of details, a telling detail does not “exist” as a static object but tends to “emerge” dynamically as a perception, a recognition, or a recollection. Eileen Chang’s innovative use of such details, combined with her heightened awareness of the female perspective, allows her to transform the ancient xijie xiaoshuo into a distinctive modern fictional form. The concepts of xijie and xiwei 細微take on new significance as Chang employs details to evoke subtle but stirring moments of psychological-ethical crisis that her female characters must grapple with. Drawing on my Telling Details: Chinese Fiction, World Literature (2022), this presentation examines the multi-faceted meanings of the detail as the miniscule, the subtle, and the humble, exploring the intertwined ethical-aesthetic implications of deploying such details. Chang’s complex depiction of women as xiwei can be seen in both her reinterpretation of female characters in traditional xijie xiaoshuo and her engagement with new female experience and consciousness in modern times. 

講者簡介 About the Speaker:
Jiwei XIAO is Professor of Chinese and Cinema Studies at Fairfield University. She is the author of Telling Details: Chinese Fiction, World Literature (Routledge, 2022). Her work has appeared in academic journals and intellectual magazines including New Left Review, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Cineaste, and Film Quarterly. She has also written for the New York Review of Books and The Atlantic as a freelance contributor.

This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series |
張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 
Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty
& Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)

Speaker: Chris Cowell, London South Bank University

Introduction: John Carroll, Department of History, HKU

Respondents:
Jenny Chak, MPhil Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU
Lory Wong, PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU

Moderator: Daniel Elam, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, April 15, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time (10:00 am London)
Venue: On Zoom

Form Follows Fever: Malaria and the Construction of Hong Kong, 1841–1849 is the first in-depth account of the turbulent years of initial urban settlement and growth of colonial Hong Kong across the 1840s. During this period, the island gained a terrible reputation as a diseased and deadly location. Malaria, then perceived as a mysterious vapor or miasma, intermittently carried off settlers by the hundreds. Various attempts to arrest its effects acted as a catalyst, reconfiguring both the city’s physical and political landscape, though not necessarily for the better. However, Hong Kong’s ‘construction’ was not just physical but also imagined. By drawing upon many unpublished textual sources, Form Follows Fever sheds new light on a period often considered the colonial Dark Ages in the territory’s history.

Christopher Cowell received a PhD in architecture (history and theory) from Columbia University. He teaches architectural history and theory at London South Bank University. His longstanding historical research focuses on both southern China and northern India, exploring the entanglement of modernity within European imperialism and its participation in architecture and urbanism.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press is offering a 20% discount for online orders of the book up to March 31, 2024. For details, visit https://cup.cuhk.edu.hk/FormFollowsFever

Speaker: Angie Chau, Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature and Film, University of Victoria
Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, April 8, 2024
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time
Venue: On Zoom

A brief stay in France was a vital stepping stone for many Chinese political leaders during the cultural and political push to modernize China after World War I. For Chinese students who went abroad to study Western art and literature however, these trips meant something else entirely. Set against the backdrop of interwar Paris, Paris and the Art of Transposition (University of Michigan Press, 2023) uncovers previously marginalized archives to reveal the artistic strategies employed by Chinese artists and writers in the early twentieth-century transnational imaginary and to explain why Paris played such a central role in the global reception of modern Chinese literature and art.

Angie Chau is assistant professor of Chinese literature and film at the University of Victoria. She has published articles on modern Chinese literature, art, film and internet culture, and her research interests include contemporary Chinese literature, popular culture, visual art, and translation. Her work has appeared in journals such as Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Concentric, and Chinese Literature Today, and various edited volumes.

Speaker:
Chika Kinoshita, Professor of Film Studies, Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University

Moderator:
Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Tuesday, April 2, 2024
Time: 4:45 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: CBC, Chow Yei Ching Building, Main Campus, HKU

Hara Kazuo’s Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974) has been justly singled out as one of the ground-breaking works in the history of Japanese documentary cinema. In Japanese language film criticism, this film that captured the male director’s former and current partners’ respective childbirths has been widely considered a precursor to a paradigm shift in documentary filmmaking, a shift from oppositional political movements in the public sphere to reflections on the self and family in the private sphere that started in earnest in the 1990s.

This talk presents a feminist corrective to this established assessment of the film, demonstrating how those private affairs – sex, pregnancy, abortion, childbirth, and childrearing – were thoroughly political and therefore public by augmenting the threads of existing scholarship that have highlighted the film’s radical performativity and the strong agency and creative contribution of the two female “partners,” Takeda Miyuki and Kobayashi Sachiko.

Based on research on Ribu zines and contemporary media discourse, this talk contextualizes Extreme Private Eros within two specific historical contexts. First, I discuss the film’s main character and driving force Takeda’s feminist activism within the history of the Women’s Liberation “Ribu” movement in the early 1970s. As Nakane Wakae has shown, even though Takeda was a central actor in the Ribu movement, a majority of the previous studies on the film focused on Hara’s authorship and thereby underestimated her historical significance. I demonstrate how strongly Takeda’s onscreen actions were linked to Ribu’s activism, particularly their 1971–1973 battle against the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s attempts to revise the Eugenic Protection Law for tighter restrictions on abortion. Second, I trace Extreme Private Eros’ exhibition history at a variety of Ribu organizations and their meetings where the film was screened, hotly debated, and written about with general sympathy and strong interest and thereby argue that considering its exhibition and reception, the film, with a man’s directorial signature, can be called a Ribu film.

In conclusion, I shed new light on Extreme Private Eros as a media event in which Takeda produces a child with an African-American GI in Okinawa to have her giving birth filmed on 16mm and circulate it through a non-theatrical network of oppositional movements, drawing on Paul B. Preciado’s concept of the pharmacopornographic regime.

Chika Kinoshita is a professor of Film Studies at the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies at Kyoto University, Japan. Her research interests are in Japanese film history, with a focus on gender and sexuality. She is the author of the award-winning book, Mizoguchi Kenji: Aesthetics and Politics of the Film Medium (Hosei University Press, 2016). Her essays have appeared in numerous journals and collections in both English and Japanese.

不可能三角與不現身的說書人：張愛玲《傳奇》的讀寫攻略

分享嘉賓 Speaker:  邵棟 博士 Dr. Shawn SHAO (HKMU)
主持人 Moderator: 黃心村 教授 Prof. Nicole HUANG (HKU)
日期時間 Date & Time: March 26, 2024 (Tue) 16:30-18:00pm
語言 Language: 普通話 Putonghua
地點 Venue: KK101, K.K. Leung Building, Main Campus, HKU

摘要 Abstract:
《傳奇》作為張愛玲成名之作，為讀者研討品味久矣。而張愛玲其中的寫作策略，也成為學者與小說家們關心的文化政治與敘述技巧的表徵。《傳奇》是否完美無缺？張愛玲有哪些常用的寫作手段？模仿張愛玲如何可能？將成為本次講演會嘗試解答的部分問題。本次演講《傳奇》這本書的寫作策略和閱讀策略，內容會分為以下幾個部分：其一對張愛玲《傳奇》中的名篇（《封鎖》、《第一爐香》等作品）做創意寫作的拆解分析，詮釋其中的連環畫式的分場與剪輯技巧，以及其它常用敘事手段；其二，以《金鎖記》《傾城之戀》等為例，分析張愛玲女性書寫中慾望、道德、金錢的不可能三角；其三，敘事者的在場不在場，和張愛玲寫作的信心問題。 

As the work that brought Eileen Chang fame, Romances has long been a subject of discussion and admiration among readers. Chang’s writing strategies in this work have also become emblematic of cultural politics and narrative techniques, captivating the attention of scholars and novelists. Is Romances flawless? What are Chang’s frequently employed writing techniques? And how can one emulate her style? These questions will be addressed in this talk, which will be divided into the following sections: firstly, a creative writing approach will be adopted to analyse the masterpieces in Chang’s Romances (such as “Blockade” and “The First Brazier”), deciphering the techniques of sequential storytelling and editing reminiscent of a comic strip, as well as other commonly used narrative devices; secondly, an exploration of the impossible triangle of desire, morality, and money in Chang’s female writing will be presented, using “The Golden Cangue” and “Love in a Fallen City” as examples; and finally, the presence and absence of the narrator, as well as the issue of self-confidence in Chang’s literary craftsmanship, will be discussed.

講者簡介 About the Speaker:
邵棟 香港大學中文學院博士。現為香港都會大學人文社會科學院創意藝術系署理系主任、助理教授。主要研究範圍是現代小說與南社，華語系文學與電影。有學術專著《紙上銀幕：民初的影戲小說》(2017 年)。業餘從事小說創作，2022年推出首部短篇小說集《空氣吉他》，入選第六屆寶珀理想國文學獎決名單。 

Shawn SHAO received his PhD from the School of Chinese, University of Hong Kong. His research interests lie in modern and contemporary Chinese literature, Sinophone literature, film studies, and Nanshe studies. He is the author of the scholarly monograph The Silver Screen among Pages: A Study of Yingxi Fiction in Early Republican China (2017). He is also a fiction writer. His first collection of short stories, Air Guitar, published in 2022, has been selected as a finalist for the 6th Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize.

This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series |
張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 
Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty
& Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)

Speaker:
Anthony Ossa-Richardson, Lecturer in English Literature, UCL

Moderator:
Beth Harper, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, March 11, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time (9:00 am London)
Venue: On Zoom

Last year Anthony Ossa-Richardson published (with his colleague Richard Oosterhoff) a translation of the 1526 Cosmography and Geography of Africa by the Moroccan diplomat al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, commonly known as Johannes Leo Africanus. This was the first book about Africa published in Europe and the main written source of knowledge about the continent until the eighteenth century. The translation is the first (in any language) to be based on the only known manuscript of the work, which was rediscovered in 1931. In this talk, Ossa-Richardson will discuss some of the circumstances of the manuscript discovery and its seismic implications, not only for the nature of the work itself, but for our understanding of intercultural communication in the Renaissance more generally. He will argue that, understood in its full context, the manuscript offers a powerful challenge to our notion of ‘decolonisation’. 

Anthony Ossa-Richardson is a lecturer in English literature at UCL. He has written two monographs, the more recent of which is A History of Ambiguity, an account of the way readers posited, denied, conceptualised and argued over the presence of multiple meanings in texts from antiquity to the twentieth century. In addition he has authored around thirty essays on various aspects of literary and intellectual history, including recent pieces on Proust, George Eliot, and the seventeenth-century pamphleteer John Taylor. He is currently completing a monograph on postwar British architectural thought.