Western Theory in East Asian Contexts

Book excerpt: Literatures, Cultures, Translation presents a new line of books that engage central issues in translation studies such as history, politics, and gender in and of literary translation. This is a culturally situated study of the interface between three forms of transtextual rewriting: translation, adaptation and imitation. Two questions are raised: first, how a broader rubric can be formulated for the inclusion of the latter two forms within Translation Studies research, and second, how this enlarged definition of translation enables us to understand the incompatibilities between contemporary Western theories of translation and East Asian realities, past and present. Recent decades have seen a surge of scholarly interest in adaptations and imitations, due to the flourishing of cinema and fandom studies, and to the impact of a poststructuralist turn that sheds new light on derivative literature. Against this backdrop, a plethora of examples from the East Asian cultural sphere are analyzed to show how rewriters have freely appropriated, transcreated and recontextualized their source texts. In particular, Sino-Japanese case studies are contrasted with Sino-English ones, with both groups read against evolving traditions of thinking about free forms of translation, East and West.