In the throes of the New Culture Movement, “progressive” intellectuals attacked the scholar and translator Lin Shu (1852–1924) as a living fossil, an anachronism, a diehard Qing loyalist who desperately held on to an antiquated prose style and to a Confucian ethical system they deemed an impediment to cultural and political modernity. The image of Lin Shu weeping before the grave of Emperor Guangxu became an emblem of his nostalgia for the imperial past. Lu Xun went so far as to label Lin Shu a “butcher” of the present for his promotion of a “moribund Confucian morality and a dead language.”
The May Fourth attack on Lin Shu was a critical episode in the larger invention of tradition in China as a foil of cultural modernity. In Lin Shu, Inc., Michael Hill excavates beneath this cardboard representation and unearths a vastly more complex and interesting Lin Shu, one whose career as a translator, editor, and writer transcended neat binaries of traditional and modern. The May Fourth objection to Lin's translations was twofold: they were not professional—Lin knew no foreign languages and worked with collaborators who “orally related” the text to him—and they were rendered in “ancient-style prose” (guwen), a particular form of classical Chinese that favored a pared-down style, the better to “convey the Way.” They were thus suspect both in terms of their accuracy and in terms of their ideology.
But Hill proposes to dispense with issues of accuracy and authenticity and instead to read Lin's translations as “original literary works” (p. 154). In so doing, he reveals that Lin's style is far from the “pure” ancient-style prose his detractors ridiculed. Instead, Hill finds a hybrid language rife with the discourse of Western learning that entered the late Qing cultural field via Japanese neologisms—terms such as “race,” “nation,” “community,” and “universal principles.” Herein lies Lin's creative and active engagement with the social and political problems of his day.
Following an introduction and a chapter that surveys Lin's translation method and style, chapters 3, 4, and 5 present highly original analyses of Lin's translations. Through his nearly sixty translations of works of Western fiction and prose—works by Aesop, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas (both père and fils), Rider Haggard, Washington Irving, Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Leo Tolstoy, etc.—Lin not only offered a window onto the exotic West and its social and cultural values, he also critiqued those values, related the texts to the Chinese situation, and commented on the role of translation and writing in social and cultural transformation. For example, Lin Shu and Wei Yi's translation of Uncle Tom's Cabin encourages its Chinese readers to identify with “the suffering black slaves of North America” which “gave [them] a powerful tool to understand the position of China in the world economy, to contemplate the nature of the Chinese ‘race,’ and to reflect critically on the translators’ sources of knowledge” (p. 52). Lin's Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop perform what Hill calls a “double exposure” that “brings China and England into the same frame” and “places them within a narrative of global industrial modernization” (p. 97). Lin's translations also sometimes critique the failure of the West to live up to the promise of the discourses of enlightenment and civilization advocated in Western novels. Even his later translations, which tend toward a more nostalgic view of the past, embody “self-reflexive meditations on the cultural significance of translation as a site of literary experimentation” (p. 127).
As the above quotations suggest, Hill's readings stress the translations’ “meta” character: the translations not only comment on political issues, but also simultaneously offer self-reflexive commentary on writing and the role of translation. Hill thus draws attention to the multilayered structure of the translations and the meta-critical apparati that guided their readers to read the text in a certain way and that, more broadly speaking, shaped a new kind of reading public.
In the remaining chapters, Hill presents a fascinating description of Lin Shu's career as an editor, publisher, and media star (chapter 6) and his treatment at the hands of May Fourth iconoclasts (chapter 7). Hill's analysis of Lin Shu's conflicts with the New Culturalists beautifully elucidates the process by which a “tradition” takes shape as the foil of the modern. This process was of course critical to the formation and development of modern Chinese literature, but it is also embedded in the field of modern Chinese literary studies, which has until very recently accepted this division uncritically. In Lin Shu, however, Hill shows us a figure who complicates the binaries of tradition and modernity, China and the West; who sought “universal principles” and sometimes turned those principles against the West itself; whose “traditionalism” was not empty nostalgia but a form of engagement with the modern world; and whose translations were a critical facet of the late Qing intellectual world. When one steps back from May Fourth polemics, one actually finds many areas of commonality between Lin and his early Republican detractors. One of those areas, as Hill brilliantly shows, is the centrality of translation to the formation of cultural modernity in China and to the continuous process of reinventing the figure of the intellectual as the cultural vanguard.
