Language and discourse in the formation of late Ming and early Qing vernacular short story
Résumé
Because the developement of premodern Chinese fictional literature took place in a context of diglossia, it was marked by narrative procedures which encompassed not only discursive, but also strongly linguistic aspects. A key-feature in the strategies of Chinese authors of fiction from the Yuan to early-Qing has long been the recycling of classical sources, recasted and by the same way resemantized. This enduring performative endeavor coordinated a subtle mix of rewriting, quotation, amplification, commentary, and plain translation, with a constant shift between the two linguistic domains of classical and vernacular, the differentiation of which the authors showed a keen awareness.
The consequence of this creative environment was twofold. First it had a strongly transformative effect on the source texts that were submitted to such a process of refundation, in a way very much akin to what has been described in the context of interlingual translation. Depending on similar processes of dis-location and re-location, it postulated the creation of new readerships and contributed to the updating of whole corpuses of stories, oftentimes achieving unprecedented literary fame and cultural significance. And second it had important consequences in the field of narratology, as, through it, authors of fiction transformed to a great extent the identity of who was speaking. The expert/layman relationship subsumed under the wen 文言 vs./ tongsu 通俗 differenciation implied a very different narrative contract, affecting this time not only the reader, but the fictional identity of the narrator. The consequences of this were manifold, and strikingly akin, this time, to what has been described in the context of intralingual translation — in its effect on the transmission of knowledge, to cite but one example.
Relying on the corpus of the late-Ming to early-Qing huaben 話本 short stories and critical material such as prefaces, my paper will focus on a careful examination of the various creative techniques governing the recasting of classical material into vernacular narratives, with a particular attention to its linguistic aspects. On this basis I shall examine how the qualification of intralingual translation can apply to these creations, implying phenomena by no means alien to interlingual translation.