A study of Chinese reception of Russian literature from the late Qing to the 1930s, Xiaolu Ma’s book is a remarkable investigation of “relay translations” (27)—or translations of translations—that navigates three cultural spheres: Russian, Japanese, and Chinese. Analyzing texts in these languages, Ma shows Japanese and Chinese writers to be active recipients of Russian works, and underscores the critical place of Japanese translators as intermediaries in the “transcultural triangulation” (4) that transmitted ideas adumbrating new ways of being from Russia to China. These ideas’ concatenated trajectory constituted what the author calls “transpatial modernity.”

In the initial phase of this “relay,” Japanese and Chinese translators freely modified the texts on which their translations were based. Tracking the migration of “sentiment” in Russian Romantic literature, Ma examines early Japanese translations of Aleksandr Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter (1883) and “Bela,” an episode in Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1904), as well as the Chinese translations (in 1903 and 1907, respectively) of these translations. Ma finds that the Japanese publications of these Russian works assimilated the Russian storyline and its characters to familiar literary genres to appeal to their readers, and that the Chinese versions did the same, further “distorting or omitting key features” of the original (119).

Tracing Chinese “mimetic desire for revolution” (124) and Chinese intellectuals’ embrace of Russian “nihilists”—Russian revolutionaries of the late 1870s onward who became a frequent subject of west European writings—Ma shows that radical modifications of the literary sources on these Russians abounded in Chinese retellings of “Russian nihilist stories” (126). Liang Qichao (1873–1929) had it right depicting, in a 1903 essay, Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done? Tales of New People as a novel that “awed the whole [Russian] nation” (124). But many Chinese authors improvised on their sources and “emphatically Sinicized” (131) the “nihilists.” Creating models of “new people” and promoting “social transformation via political violence,” Ma observes (165), these authors endowed male revolutionaries with filial piety and female ones—such as Sofia Perovskaia of The People’s Will and the fictional Vera in Chernyshevskii—with both Confucian virtues and striking beauty.

Used neither by the revolutionaries it referred to nor by Chernyshevskii, Ma acknowledges, the term “nihilist” nevertheless became the label that gave the Russian revolutionary movement global notoriety. Japanese translators rendered “nihilism” both as nihirizumu, a transliteration written in katakana, and as kyomushugi, in kanji. The Chinese characters for kyomu (xuwu in Chinese) evoked Buddhist and Taoist teachings (153). As Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) reiterated in 1879, “‘Nihilism’ means nothingness” (150). Legible to Chinese readers, kyomushugi became the term’s Chinese translation, xuwuzhuyi.

How to translate “nihilism” exemplified the conundrum translators faced choosing between familiarity and faithfulness to the original. The final chapter of this book deals with translation and language reform, a project that generally subverts the familiar. It turns to Lu Xun (1881–1936) as he grappled in the 1920s and 1930s with translating Nikolai Gogolʹ and Anatolii Lunarcharskii from Japanese and German texts. Perhaps reacting against tendencies toward “domestication,” Lu upheld what he called “hard translation” (237), a literal translation insisting on “foreignizing,” as opposed to “domesticating” new concepts by way of colloquial renditions (217–18). Lu’s method tied into his efforts to vernacularize written Chinese, Ma asserts, just as Japanese translations of Russian works, by contributing new syntax and new stylistic forms, had earlier become instrumental to the Japanese genbun itchi movement that called for writing to follow speech (60).

Transpatial Modernity offers an impressive compendium of “relay translations” whose authors comprise a Who’s Who list of Chinese and Japanese intellectuals. Yet, by considering these authors primarily as translators, the book at times leaves their overall outlook somewhat obscure. For instance, when Zhou Zouren (1885–1967), Lu Xun’s brother and literary colleague, admitted in 1921 his inability to make sense of Lev Tolstoi’s “humanism” as a slew of -isms and new ideas entered China, his admission that “the vacillation and chaos in my mind is reaching an extreme level” (212) comes as a surprise. Zhou’s reaction suggests a note of confusion and disorientation proper to the predicament of modernity that many Chinese intellectuals no doubt experienced. But Ma does not dwell on this moment, as she takes “modernity” largely to mean movements in the realm of ideas rather than a condition of reality fostered by and fostering change. Nonetheless, her approach in pinning down “relay translations” serves well to lay the groundwork for understanding the disarray—alongside visions of possibility—that modernity in China presented.