---------------------------------------------------- ChinaResourceNews No.16 (4 Feb 2003) http://listserv.uni-heidelberg.de/archives/chinaresource-l.html ---------------------------------------------------- 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" _______________________________________________________ With kind regards, Hanno Lecher ([log in to unmask]) ChinaResource.org -- Content manager http://chinaresource.org/ _______________________________________________________ An archive of this list as well as an subscribe/unsubscribe facility is available at: http://listserv.uni-heidelberg.de/archives/chinaresource-l.html