Constructing the modern self in translation (ii): Zhou zuoren

Abstract

In the previous chapter, we examined how Hu Shi’s literary translation promoted the “wholesome individual” as a key aspect of China’s New Culture. This idea was closely tied to the types of humanism advanced in Zhou Zuoren’s and Lu Xun’s literary translations. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, Zhou Zuoren translated from a wide selection of texts. His translations during this time were calculated to reveal social injustice, encourage faith in humanity and present an ideal humanity in aesthetic form. Whereas the adherence of many of his peers in the New Culture camp to political fundamentalism inclined them to identify translation with the realist and revolutionary literary project, which led to their political radicalization, the way Zhou Zuoren viewed and translated literature during this period presented to the May Fourth literary scene a mode of cognition and relationship to the world with both socio-political and aesthetic potential. As Susan Daruvala (2000) puts it, his was an “alternative response to modernity.”