In ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound asserts, “A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.” The reason for that, Pound explains, is because “the sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is CAPABLE of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.”Footnote ¹ Pound's adage and accompanying explanation sound reasonable enough: translation brings to the target language new ideas, new expressions, and new ways in which we learn, to borrow a phrase from J. L. Austin, “how to do things with words.”Footnote ² Thus, we hear A. L. Becker, in Beyond Translation, echoing the Spanish philosopher and philologist Jose Ortega y Gasset by suggesting, “Translation is a matter of saying in a language precisely what that language tends to pass over in silence.”Footnote ³

Translation as Citation by Haun Saussy, however, casts most of these familiar notions in doubt. A great comparatist known for his shrewd and profound critique of what he once called “the workshop of comparison,” a breeding ground for poor parallels and expedient equations in cross-cultural transactions, Saussy in his new book turns to translation and looks at the field, as he puts it, “askance” (p. 2). Admittedly, what Saussy examines is not “translation proper,” but the edge or Other of translation. “The Other I have in mind,” he writes, “is vanishingly close to translation, so much so that it is often mistaken for translation” (p. 2). Using loan words and transliterations as examples, Saussy tackles translation as “one of the favorite metaphors of our times” (p. 1), suggesting that the definition of this prodigious metaphor for cultural exchange needs modification, especially in light of the textual maneuver that constitutes the focus of his study: citation.

Saussy takes as examples three pivotal moments in the annals of translation in China, and these moments correspond roughly to what scholars have deemed the “Three Great Ages of Translation in China”—the periods from the East Han to the Tang and Song dynasties, from the late Ming to the early Qing dynasties, and from the Opium Wars to the New Culture Movement in the early twentieth century. In each instance, when something new came into Chinese culture from the outside, it did so, as Saussy discovers, through translation as citation. Remarkably, in each case, whether it is Buddhist doctrine, Jesuit teachings, or Baudelairean poetic modernism, “the translations pilfered from a single book, the Daoist philosophical text Zhuangzi” (p. 5).

Largely attributed to the philosopher Zhuang Zhou (circa 369–286 BCE), the book Zhuangzi, which exerted enormous influence upon traditional Chinese culture throughout the centuries, became, in Saussy's erudite study, the gateway text through which new, exotic ideas could be entertained in Chinese. In his 1924 translation of Charles Baudelaire, for instance, the prominent modern Chinese poet Xu Zhimo made nineteenth-century French Parnassianism palatable in Chinese by “cooking it together with a piece of fourth-century-BCE Chinese primitivism,” by rendering “etrange musique” as yiye (strange music), and backfilling the phrase with terms taken from the Zhuangzi, “tianlai, dilai, and renlai” (the piping of heaven, earth, and man). Or, when Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) tried to gain a foothold in the pagan world of Chinese letters, the ingenious Jesuit missionary chose a label for himself as “jiren” (odd man), an oddball character canonized in the Zhuangzi. Wishing to venture into Daoism no further than the titles of his books, Ricci, by means of such intercultural role-playing, a la Captain Cook's apotheosis, endowed himself with “a native kind of foreignness” (p. 60). Or, in the early Chinese translations of Buddhist sutras, the strategy of geyi (matching ideas) was adopted by some of the trailblazing go-betweens. Navigating a linguistic territory without known landmarks, translators such as Zhu Faya and Shi Huiyuan frequently cited anecdotes, terms, and whatnot from the Zhuangzi, thereby adapting “not only Buddhist ideas to Chinese audience, but the Chinese language to new uses” (p. 69).

Brushing aside such alternatives as “domesticating vs. foreignizing translation,” critical concepts that have long dominated the discussion in translation studies, Saussy suggests a new way to understand the porous borders between languages and cultures. He proposes that we look at an ur-text like the Zhuangzi—which provided a hospitable milieu for foreign, exotic newcomers—as a textual sponsor. As in the Christian ritual of baptism, a sponsor is a person who answers for another. “The naturalization of new texts and types of writing in China regularly occurred with the Zhuangzi as sponsor,” says Saussy (p. 96). But what makes the Zhuangzi such a highly sought-after sponsor, a guarantor of value and an anchor of meaning for imported goods such as French modernism, Counter-Reformation Christianity, and Mahayana Buddhism? It was the fact that, as Saussy puts it, “[f]ar from expressing the core values of the Chinese tradition, the Zhuangzi expresses a persistent form of marginality within it.… It is the outside of the inside of the Chinese tradition, the work best placed … to serve as intermediary between the outside and the inside of the tradition” (pp. 98–99). With such a brilliant insight, Saussy turns the fields of translation studies and comparative literature upside down, and the Zhuangzi and the Chinese tradition, as the subtitle of his book indicates, inside out.