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Part of
Humour in Self-Translation
Edited by Margherita Dore
[Topics in Humor Research 11] 2022
► pp. 63–86

Chapter 4
From traduttore, traditore to traduttore, creatore

Creative subversion in the self-translations of Ha Jin and Pai Hsien-yung

ORCID logo | University of California, Santa Barbara

This paper presents cases of un-translation, substitution, and creative augmentation in the self-translated English-Mandarin short stories of Ha Jin and Pai Hsien-yung, ultimately problematizing the un-translatability of humour in literary (self-)translation. Ha Jin (1956–) augments the Chinese language translated text of his short stories “In the Crossfire/Liang Mian Jia Gong 两面夹攻” and “A Good Fall”/落地 Luo di from his 2010 anthology A Good Fall by adding wordplay, aphorisms, and other splashes of creative humour not present in the English language source text. In the English translation of his short story “A Sky Full of Bright, Twinkling Stars/Man tian li liang jingjing de xingxing 满天里亮晶晶的星星” from his self-translated anthology Taipei People/Taibei Ren (1971), Pai Hsien-yung (1937–) translates character names phonetically to preserve the source text puns, and domesticates the source text for the English-speaking readership by dividing long, cascading sentences into short staccato phrases. Through these case studies of creative subversion in self-translation, I argue that self-translators destabilise their source texts and invite the possibility for innumerable possible translated iterations.

Keywords: self-translation, Ha Jin, Pai Hsien-yung, Taipei People, A Good Fall, creative subversion
Article outline
  • 1.Preliminary remarks
  • 2.Conceptualising self-translation
  • 3.Ha Jin’s “In the Crossfire” and “A Good Fall”
    • 3.1“In the Crossfire”
    • 3.2“A Good Fall”
  • 4.Pai Hsien-yung’s “A sky full of bright, twinkling stars” Man tian li liang jingjing de xingxing (满天里亮晶晶的星星)
  • 5.Recapitulation and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 October 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/thr.11.04fri
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