This book is about translation, Chinese literature, and comparative poetics--yet these three rubrics are aspects of but one concern: how our observations of others reflect back on ourselves and the way we see. The explorations do not fit easily into any existing category of inquiry, although they may be subsumed in that wide-ranging discipline called comparative literature. In studies of translation, the case of Chinese (and other East Asian languages) has traditionally been relegated to the periphery of concern, occasionally with a note of apology about one's ignorance of this important culture. Studies of Chinese literature, on the other hand, tend to assume the hermetic, self-sufficient nature of that subject and scarcely address the problems of translation, even when the exposition uses a language other than Chinese. It is this "no-man's-land" that the author seems to have inhabited for some years, and it is this "twilight zone"--situated in the margins of two fields-- he finds suggestive.