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ChinaResourceNews No.16 (4 Feb 2003)
http://listserv.uni-heidelberg.de/archives/chinaresource-l.html
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Secret translations of the Cultural Revolution

by Thomas Kampen

The Cultural Revolution is often regarded as an anti-foreign movement with
very few cultural and academic activities. Ironically, this period also
brought many new ideas from the west, first secretly, and - in the 1970s -
more openly. This was partly due to growing doubts about the Soviet Union
and its ideology and was also related to the growing interest in Western
Europe and North America, the establishment of diplomatic relations with
some Western states (France) and the entry into the United Nations.

During the Cultural revolution the number of openly published translations
of foreign books was very small and most of these translations were not very
interesting. But there were also other books: translations for internal
circulation. The famous Bibliography of Internal Publications 1949-1986
(QUANGUO NEIBU FAXING TUSHU ZONGMU, Beijing, 1988) lists about 18,000
titles, including many translations.

More recently, a short list of some forty important internal translations
appeared in the book CHENLUNDE DE SHENGDIAN, edited by Liao Yiwu (Urumqi,
1999, p. 7-10). The forty titles cover a great variety of authors, topics
and styles. The authors are mainly - dissident - Russians (Ehrenburg,
Solshenitsyn, Trotsky), French (Camus, Sartre), British (Osborne, Toynbee),
Austrian (Hayek) and Americans (Kerouac, Salinger, Snow, Strong). The books
include historical and political texts (Djilas: New Class; Kissinger: The
Necessity for Choice; Shirer: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Toynbee:
A Study of History; Trotsky: Stalin), novels (Camus: The Stranger;
Ehrenburg: Thaw; Kerouac: On the road; Salinger: Catcher in the Rye) and
plays (Beckett: Godot; Osborne: Look back in Anger), as well as Che
Guevara's Diary.

The Chinese translations were printed in Beijing and Shanghai between 1962
and 1973. Even though access was restricted, the copies available circulated
widely and were read by numerous people. These texts were particularly
popular among students and intellectuals. They had a great impact on the
activists of the democracy movements of the 1970s and 1980s and thus deserve
our attention.

[This list is a useful sequel to Zou Zhenhuan's book "100 Chinese
translations of foreign publications which had strong influence in China"
(http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/library/100transl.htm) which did not
include translations published after 1949.]

Unfortunately, many of the translations, particularly the East European
titles, are nowadays more or less forgotten and are rarely read by
sinologists. Some of them were never translated into German or English and
some are out of print.

The library has already bought several of these titles and plans to get most
of the Western originals and Chinese translations in the near future. A list
of these (and similar) works available in Heidelberg can be viewed at:
http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/library/#collections -> Special
collections -> Special topics -> "Foreign books with strong influence in
China"

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With kind regards,

Hanno Lecher ([log in to unmask])

ChinaResource.org -- Content manager
http://chinaresource.org/

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