The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture

The first comprehensive study of the lifework of Guo Moruo (18921978) in English, this book explores the dynamics of translation, revolution, and historical imagination in twentieth-century Chinese culture. Guo was a romantic writer who eventually became Mao Zedongs last poetic interlocutor; a Marxist historian who evolved into the inaugural president of Chinas Academy of Sciences; and a leftist politician who devoted almost three decades to translating Goethes Faust. His career, embedded in Chinas revolutionary century, has generated more controversy than admiration. Recent scholarship has scarcely treated his oeuvre as a whole, much less touched upon his role as a translator.

Leaping between different genres of Guos works, and engaging many other writers texts, The Translatability of Revolution confronts two issues of revolutionary cultural politics: translation and historical interpretation. Part 1 focuses on the translingual making of Chinas revolutionary culture, especially Guos translation of Faust as a development of Zeitgeist. Part 2 deals with Guos rewritings of antiquity in lyrical, dramatic, and historiographical-paleographical forms, including his vernacular translation of classical Chinese poetry. Interrogating the relationship between translation and historical imaginationwithin revolutionary cultural practicethis book finds a transcoding of different historical conjunctures into now-time, saturated with possibilities and tensions.