Mary Barton and the Politics of Translation in Maoist China

Mary Barton occupies a special place in the history of English author Elizabeth Gaskell’s Chinese reception. It was the only Gaskell work to be translated into Chinese in Maoist China, and one of the most valued pieces of British literature at that time because of its direct engagement with sociopolitical themes of class conflict and labor struggles. The Chinese translation of Mary Barton was printed three times by different publishing houses during the Mao years and was included in the Party-sponsored “Masterpieces of Foreign Classical Literature” series.[1] However, after the adoption of the market economy policy in 1992, the relevance of labor conflict as a subject matter to China diminished dramatically. As a result, Mary Barton has now lost the cultural status it once enjoyed in China. Due to the novel’s declining popularity in China, its reception in the Mao era has attracted little scholarly attention. Nevertheless, Mary Barton’s Maoist incarnation is worth examining, in part because it provides valuable insights into the cultural politics of translation in this period. In my article, I have focused on the socio-political motivations underlying Mary Barton’s encounter with Maoist China. In this note, I will provide more details about Mary Barton’s cross-cultural encounter to show how a comparatively lesser-known Victorian text could take on heightened significance in a foreign context in the twentieth century.

Mary Barton was co-translated by Xunmei Shao (邵洵美, 1906–1968) and Guitang She (佘贵棠),[2] but the success of the translation is primarily attributed to Shao. Xunmei Shao was not only a renowned poet and publisher but also a distinguished translator. He displayed an early interest in literature and the arts. When he went to the University of Cambridge to study economics in 1924, he delved into Western literature instead. This passion for literature later became the driving force behind his translating endeavours. Shao was primarily engaged in the publishing industry in the Republican era (1912-1949), running many bookstores and magazines. After the Communist takeover of China in 1949, Shao was invited by leading publishing houses, such as the People’s Literature Publishing House, to translate foreign literature, due to his proficiency in both English and Chinese. His contribution to socialist China’s literary translation enterprise cannot be underestimated. Not only did he provide valuable guidance to young translators, but he himself produced many high-quality translations of Anglophone literature, including Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Queen Mab, Byron’s The Age of Bronze, and Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Detective.

Xunmei Shao’s translation of Mary Barton was not motivated by his personal aesthetic tastes but rather was the result of state organisation and planning. A poet deeply influenced by Western aestheticism, Shao undertook the translation of the social realist novel Mary Barton primarily out of professional obligation. In the Mao period, the selection of titles and translators was predominantly determined by the publishers and relevant authorities. In January 1950, the Translation Bureau of the General Publication Administration (出版总署翻译局) was established, which regularly formulated publication plans and assigned titles to various publishers. The 1954 National Conference on Literary Translation significantly promoted the systematic and organised translation of foreign literature. Mao Dun (茅盾), then Minister of Culture, proposed at this conference that “Literary translation must be planned and organised under the leadership of the Party and the government”.[3] In the same year, Xunmei Shao was invited by the Shanghai Literature and Art Joint Publishing House to proofread Guitang She’s translation of Mary Barton. According to the memoir of Shao’s daughter Xiaohong Shao (邵绡红), the quality of Guitang She’s translation was “so poor” that Xunmei Shao undertook “substantial reworkings”.[4] Xunmei Shao maintained rigorous standards concerning the quality of his translations, especially since the Times Book Company (时代书局) he ran had previously been slammed by the People’s Daily—the organ of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—for publishing shoddy translations of Soviet literature.[5] Shao’s expertise significantly enhanced the quality of Mary Barton’s Chinese translation. His translation remains, to this day, the most classic Chinese version of the novel.

It seems likely that Mary Barton’s release in 1955 was designed to coincide with the “socialist transformation” (社会主义改造, 1953-1956) campaign. Starting in 1953, the CCP began to reform capitalist enterprises in order to eliminate private ownership in industry and commerce and to establish a state-controlled, centrally planned economy. To ensure the smooth implementation of the new economic policies, the CCP launched ideological campaigns to foster support for socialism and diminish the influence of capitalist ideas. These campaigns portrayed private business owners as exploiters and emphasised the benefits of collective ownership. For example, in November 1955, an editorial in the People’s Daily wrote that socialist transformation, “for capitalists, means giving up capitalist ownership and the exploitation of workers”.[6] Mary Barton’s detailed depiction of the miserable conditions of the working class under capitalism could be used to justify the work of socialist transformation in China. Shao and She wrote approvingly in the preface to the translation of the novel: “This successful political and social novel realistically portrays the living conditions of typical working-class people who suffered from cold and hunger”.[7] Mary Barton’s 1955 edition can be seen as part of a propagandistic effort to support socialist transformation.

Guitang She and Xun Mei, Mary Barton (1955), title page. Source: Duxiu Database

Shao and She produced a relatively faithful translation of Mary Barton. Shao’s rendition of the poems and folk songs in this novel best demonstrates his linguistic talents as a prominent poet. Particularly remarkable is his ability to faithfully render the content of the verses while perfectly reproducing their forms. Shao himself considered these translated verses to be his “finest translations”.[8] Nevertheless, Shao and She may have tended to align their translation with the dominant anti-capitalist discourse by using language that exaggerated the suffering of the working class depicted in Gaskell’s original text. For instance, describing the poverty of John Barton’s family, Gaskell writes, “His parents had suffered; his mother had died from absolute want of the necessaries of life”.[9] In Shao and She’s translation, the suffering endured by John Barton’s parents and the horror of his mother’s death are portrayed with greater intensity than in the original text:

他的父母都忍受过一切生活的煎熬,母亲便是为了衣食无着而活生生的给糟蹋死的。[10]

Back Translation: Both of his parents had endured all the hardships of life, and his mother had died a horrible death due to absolute want of the necessaries of life.

The foregrounding of proletarian suffering in such translations reinforces the hatred towards the capitalist system that may have been inspired in the Chinese reader.

A pivotal moment in Mary Barton’s canonisation in Maoist China came in 1963, when it was republished in the officially approved “Masterpieces of Foreign Classical Literature” series. As an important cultural project of socialist China, this series was initiated at the behest of the Party. In 1958, the top leaders of the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department instructed the Institute of Literature of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to form an editorial board to compile a series of masterpieces of foreign literature of the pre-20th century.[11] The state-owned People’s Literature Publishing House and the Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House shared the publication of the series. The primary criterion for including a work in this series was its potential to serve proletarian politics. After extensive deliberation among literary experts, it was decided that the series would produce 120 masterpieces of world literature by 1963. However, in line with the anti-revisionist struggle waged by the CCP against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the focus of publication shifted from 1960 onwards to the writings of revisionists and opportunists. As a result, only twenty-four foreign works were published in the series in the Mao era, of which five were British titles. Mary Barton’s inclusion in this Party-sanctioned literary series secured its canonical status in the decade preceding the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). That Xunmei Shao’s translation was selected indicates expert recognition of the quality of his translation, as the publishers of this series were careful to ensure that translations were of the highest quality.

Xun Mei and Guitang She, Mary Barton (1963), title page, Source: Duxiu Database

The very fact that Mary Barton was reprinted during a period of tightened political control speaks volumes about the high cultural status it enjoyed in Maoist China. From 1962 onwards, China’s political climate accelerated towards the extreme left, which had a profound impact on the translation and publication of foreign literature. At the 10th Plenum of the 8th Central Committee in September 1962, Zedong Mao proposed the slogan “Never forget class struggle”, urging the nation to talk about class struggle every year, every month, and every day. In this radical milieu, only a handful of Western literature titles were translated or reprinted thereafter. The primary reason for Mary Barton’s 1963 reprint, I argue, is that it conformed to Maoist literary doctrine in both subject matter and theme. The 1963 edition was accompanied by a 26-page preface by Hong Zhu (朱虹) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Zhu remarked that “it was, at the time, practically the only work that depicted the life and struggles of the working class in a fairly realistic manner”.[12] Leftist political dynamics had a visible impact on Hong Zhu’s assessment of Mary Barton, primarily with regard to its ideological limitations. Hong Zhu dwells at some length on the flaws in Gaskell’s political view, which she argues lie in “her opposition to all forms of violent struggle”.[13] This new argumentative pattern may have been engendered by the new political circumstances of the 1960s.

For more, read Kui Zeng’s full article, ‘Gaskell in China: A History of Translation and Critical Reception’ in Volume 29, Issue 2 of the Journal of Victorian Culture

Kui Zeng is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Xiamen University, where he specialises in English country-house novels and Sino-British literary relations. His recent publications include an article on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Chinese reception (Journal of Victorian Culture, 2024), and another on the country house and Englishness in McEwan’s Atonement (Critique, 2023). He is also the author of a few reviews for international journals such as the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Literature and History, Renaissance Studies, and The Wordsworth Circle.

Notes & references

[i] See Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, trans. by Guitang She and Xun Mei (Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Joint Publishing House, 1955); Mary Barton, trans. by Guitang She and Xun Mei (Shanghai: New Literature and Art Publishing House, 1963); Mary Barton, trans. by Xun Mei and Guitang She (Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 1963).

[ii] The translation was published under Xunmei Shao’s pseudonym Xun Mei(荀枚).

[iii] Mao Dun, “Efforts Towards the Development of Literary Translation and Improvement of the Quality of Translation”, in Translation Research Papers (1949-1983) (Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1984), pp. 1-16 (p. 7). The English translations of Chinese sources contained in this essay are mine unless otherwise indicated.

[iv] Xiaohong Shao, My Father Xunmei Shao (Shanghai: Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House, 2005), p. 297.

[v] See Xiaohong Shao, My Father Xunmei Shao, pp. 329-30.

[vi] “Achieving Consensus, Comprehensive Planning, and Effectively Implementing Reforms in Capitalist Industry and Commerce”, People’s Daily, November 22, 1955.

[vii] Guitang She and Xun Mei, “Preface by the Translators”, in Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, trans. by Guitang She and Xun Mei (Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Joint Publishing House, 1955), pp. 1-6 (p. 4).

[8] Xiaohong Shao, My Father Xunmei Shao, p. 298.

[9] Gaskell, Mary Barton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 24.

[10] Gaskell, Mary Barton, trans. by Guitang She and Xun Mei, 1955, p. 30.

[11] For detailed information on this, see Xunlian Liu, ‘The Whole Story of the “Foreign Literary Masterpieces Series”’, New Perspectives on World Literature, 3 (2023), 5-29.

[12] Hong Zhu, “Preface to the Translated Version”, in Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, trans. by Xun Mei and Guitang She (Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 1963), pp. I–XXVI (p. V).

[13] Hong Zhu, “Preface to the Translated Version”, p. XVII.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *