Lin Shu's Translation of Tales from Shakespeare

Shakespeare's work was first introduced to China by Lin Zexu 林則徐 (1785–1850), governor-general of the Hubei and Hunan provinces and a key figure in halting the opium war. Shakespeare was first cited in Lin's translation of the Encyclopedia of Geography (1843).Footnote ⁴ However, he became widely known in China when Lin Shu published the Yinbian Yanyu (吟邊燕語; 1904), his translation of Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare (1807), a collection of prose adaptations of Shakespeare's plays written primarily for children. Although Lin did not speak English and did not read the original plays, he worked in collaboration with his interpreter Wei Yi (魏易) who provided an oral account of the stories. When published, Lin's translations were set out as prose texts.

Lin Shu's lack of English did not hinder him from translating Western literature; he was a prolific translator and one of the first to make many of these texts available in China.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, Lin has been acclaimed as the most influential twentieth-century Chinese translator, completing 184 works in total.Footnote ⁶ In Shakespeare's case, however, Lin did not translate directly from the original plays but from Charles and Mary Lamb's adaptations. This may be because Lin was less concerned with the original texts than with incorporating Shakespeare's heritage into the existing Confucian tradition, thus giving Shakespeare a contemporary and cross-cultural touch.

As well as being a Confucian literatus, Lin Shu was a political reformer who campaigned for change in China. During the Qing Dynasty, China faced a significant influx of Western ideologies. Reformers accused the Chinese of ‘sharing a narrow world view, obstinately opposed to change, allowing her past to dominate her present, and being over-enthusiastic about gods, fairies, ghosts and demons’ (局, 思想舊, 古駭今, 好言神怪).Footnote ⁷ Lin Shu, however, did not share this opinion. In his preface to the Yinbian Yanyu (吟邊燕語), he tried to bridge the gap between Western and Chinese literature by emphasizing that both made use of the ‘supernatural’, introducing the ‘supernatural’ aspects of Shakespeare to the Chinese audience as a way of highlighting the importance of Chinese traditions, and stressing that these traditions should not be eradicated in the midst of the ‘wholesale importation of Western values (全盤西化)’ that was taking place. Lin wrote:

Here Lin offered a sociological sketch that situated the translator in the early twentieth century. While the West was regarded by some as engulfing much of the Chinese cultural scene, Confucian literati such as Lin Shu were reasserting the values of time-honoured Chinese heritage.Footnote ⁹ Lin's translations have been seen by scholars as a way of defending Confucian tradition and Chinese values. Robert Compton asserts that these principles were ‘vibrant and alive in Lin's mind and spirit’, and that Lin believed himself to bear the responsibility of ‘preserving the best of what had been created in the past’.Footnote ¹⁰ In her close textual analysis of Lin's translations in the Yinbian Yanyu, Jean Tsui takes a similar view, arguing that Yinbian Yanyu is ‘an expression of Lin's reformist enthusiasm in the midst of a swiftly changing political scene torn by diverse opinions and heated debates’.Footnote ¹¹ Lin presented Shakespeare's tales as something familiar to Chinese culture, domesticating or naturalizing them as works expressing a world view recognizable to Chinese readers, containing stories of spirits, gods and monsters.Footnote ¹² On the book's cover, he categorized these tales as stories of gods and spirits, a category which was familiar and appealing to the Chinese audience. The title of each story reflected the main plot rather than representing a literal translation of the title: thus The Merchant of Venice became the Rou Quan 肉券 (Contract of the Flesh), and was included as the first story in the collection.

Although Lin's translation of The Merchant of Venice was not his earliest, its popularity surpassed all his other translations. A. Ying (阿英) noted that although Lin's translation was not the first, it was to be preferred to others because ‘it attracted the attention of many readers at the time’.Footnote ¹³ The popularity of Lin's translation of The Merchant of Venice resulted in its being reprinted as a separate text eleven times between 1905 and 1935, in addition to the three editions of the Yinbian Yanyu.Footnote ¹⁴ A new project launched in 2001 to render all Shakespearean plays in prose recognized Lin Shu's significant achievement.Footnote ¹⁵ In 1999, the former Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji (朱鎔基) even referred to The Merchant of Venice in his response to a question regarding the bankruptcy of Guangdong International Trust and Investment Company when, after the Second Plenary Session of the Ninth National People's Congress, he recalled the story of ‘A Pound of Flesh’ – Lin's version – which he had read in high school, and related it to the bankruptcy case.

Lin's translation was also popular with dramatists. In July 1913, the National Renewal Society (Xin min she; 新民社) staged Rou Quan (Contract of the Flesh), a version of Merchant of Venice dramatized from Lin's Yanbian Yanyu. The production, the first professional performance of Shakespeare in Chinese, was well received and became an immediate box office success.Footnote ¹⁶ It was followed by other productions such as Othello, Hamlet and The Taming of the Shrew, which were staged in 1914 and 1915, also using Lin's translations.Footnote ¹⁷ The popularity of Lin's translations both in print and on stage was due to his creation of a ‘fantasy world’, as Cao Yu(曹禺; 1910–96) described it, or else to their exotic plots, which were just like ‘fairy tales’, according to Guo Moruo (郭沫若; 1892–1978).Footnote ¹⁸ A synopsis of Lin's translation of The Merchant of Venice, also under the title Contract of the Flesh, was included in an anthology of plays edited by the acclaimed director Zheng Zhenqiu (鄭振秋).Footnote ¹⁹ In the 1930s, Lin Shu's translation was exported to colonial Hong Kong and adopted by the acclaimed Cantonese opera master Ma Shizeng (馬師曾), who directed the Yi Bang Rou (一磅肉; A Pound of Flesh) as a Cantonese opera adaptation. The story was staged again as A Pound of Flesh in 1953, starring the Cantonese opera diva Hong Xiannu (紅線女).Footnote ²⁰

Lin either omitted or adapted the religious language in Shakespeare's plays, as has been noted sporadically by contemporary scholars. However, such discussions have been limited to comparing the source and target texts. Thus Alexander Huang noted the omission of Christian references from Lin Shu's translations of the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare but did not elaborate further.Footnote ²¹ Tsui compares Lin's translations of the Christian connotations in Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest, and notes the extent of Daoist interpretation in his translations.Footnote ²² For instance, Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet becomes a Daoist priest, residing in a monastery, who is interested in thaumaturgy. Prospero in The Tempest, in Lin's rendition, studies Daoist scriptures and practices such as ‘Shaman's steps’, a type of ritual walk or dance performed during the Daoist liturgy. This ‘conventionalization’ strategy of translating Christian concepts rendered Shakespeare's works familiar to Chinese readers.Footnote ²³ It also helped to reinforce traditional Chinese culture and values, since Shakespeare was seen employing supernatural forces in the narratives. Tsui pointed out that ‘[Lin's] conventionalization is more than just a cultural shift: by using Daoism to replace Christianity, still a dominant religion in the West at the time, the translator had ventured to find the native religion a place in modernity’.Footnote ²⁴

Lin's Domestication of Christian Content

Lin's domestication strategy aimed to make Shakespeare a familiar voice for a Chinese audience rather than a foreign ‘other’. How did this affect the translation of the religious aspects of the plays? Lin produced a paragraph-by-paragraph translation of the Lambs’ texts (which were themselves simplified versions of the plays), preserving plot and characterization but omitting what he deemed to be less important details. In the resulting translation of The Merchant of Venice, the complexity of the play, including the relationship between Jews and Christians and the conflicts between them, was downplayed.Footnote ²⁵ Shylock was depicted as a cruel moneylender, while Antonio was described as ‘generous’. Almost all the direct speech in the Lambs' text was translated by Lin, but the Lambs’ version of the narrative removed the story line relating to Jessica's running away and the casket scenes, and Lin did so too. Some additions can be seen to conform to Chinese values and customs. Antonio was addressed as an ‘elder’ – a title of respect in Chinese – by his friends, including Portia. In the court scene, Portia's beauty was emphasized by Lin even more strongly than by Shakespeare, in accordance with common expectations of a beautiful female protagonist in Chinese novels: when Portia is disguised as the apprentice lawyer Balthazar, ‘people at the court saw the lawyer's beauty and were stunned’.Footnote ²⁶

In the Lambs’ version, Shylock's attack on Christians in his infamous speech had been reduced to an attack addressed to Antonio. In Lin's translation Shylock addressed Antonio as ‘Roman’ rather than using the pronoun ‘he’, as the Lambs had done.

The hatred is here felt between Romans (personified by Antonio) and Jews. That Lin could use ‘Roman’ to stand in for Christian suggests that Christians were considered to be not much different from Romans, both being a foreign – potentially imperialist – ‘other’ to the Chinese audience. It also suggests an exotic character to Shakespeare's tales, which facilitated their reception during the early twentieth century, when the spread of Western ideologies in China prompted an interest in European and American culture. Adaptations of Antonio's identity occur not only in Lin's work, but also in the translation by Bao Tianxiao, a contemporary of Lin, who changed Antonio's nationality to British.Footnote ²⁷ In these versions of the play, the Christian-Jewish conflicts in The Merchant of Venice became conflicts between Romans or Britons and Jews. Religious conflicts no longer took centre stage in the play.

Similarly, Portia's ‘mercy’ speech in the trial scene was reduced in Lin's translation. In Lamb's version the speech closely resembled that of the full text. The five uses of the term ‘mercy’ in the original play are all retained in the Lambs’ text. The Christian principle of ‘mercy triumphing over justice’ is evident from the modified speech:

The Christian concept of ‘mercy over justice’, an important theme of this play, has been reduced to a simple utilitarian emphasis on economic terms. Mercy has important Christian overtones, where divine mercy refers to the forgiveness of one's sins through Christ's sacrifice (e.g. Eph. 2: 4–5). This is a reciprocal concept: just as God is merciful to people, so believers should exercise mercy towards others: ‘Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful’ (Luke 6: 36 NRSV). Mercy is used to temper justice:

Portia, alluding to the Lord's Prayer, asked Shylock to show mercy regarding Antonio's trespasses, in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount: ‘for if you others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you’ (Matt. 6: 14 NRSV). In its secularized meaning, mercy is ‘the quality of care for another, willingness to make an effort, even at great sacrifice, to ease another's pain, readiness to forgive, eagerness to help’.Footnote ²⁸ This quality of mercy was translated as ci ai (慈愛) by Lin, meaning kindness and benevolence. As such, mercy was not mentioned as an attribute of God, neither was the idea of justice translated. The biblical concept of ‘mercy over justice’ suffered from a shift to an emphasis on kindness and a utilitarian application.

Lin's translation contains just two references to ‘Christian’, compared with the six times the term appears in the Lambs’ version of the play. The lines where ‘Christian’ is still mentioned in the Chinese translation have negative connotations. It is the Christians who are suspicious, and it is a Christian whom Shylock's daughter, Jessica has married against her father's will.

Apart from making fewer references to ‘Christian’, there is also a notable change in the plot. In Shakespeare's play and in the Lambs’ adaptation, Antonio required Shylock to become a Christian as a condition of reducing his financial penalty. Lin removed this requirement, and left Shylock only having to surrender his wealth, giving half to the state and entrusting Antonio with the other half, to be passed to Jessica on her father's death. As will be discussed below, the requirement that Shylock must convert was also edited out of later Chinese productions, including the immensely popular Beijing production staged between 1980 and 1986 by director Zhang Qihong.

The sanitizing of the Christian content, however, can be contrasted with the retention of the Jewish heritage in Lin's text. The foreignness of this Shakespearean tale is introduced occasionally through transliteration or change of narrative style. Lin transliterated Daniel, the Old Testament prophet, as Dan Nier (但尼而) but with an addition, which reads: ‘Daniel, a good Jewish judge’ (但尼而者, 猶太良有司也). The introduction of foreign concepts through supplementation is also seen in an earlier example, where a parenthesis is added after the translation of Shylock's expression ‘O Father Abraham’ which reads: ‘this is a Jewish ancestor, an expression frequently used by Jews’. This addition serves to remind the Chinese audience of Abraham's – and with him Shylock's – Jewishness. Jews had a long history of settlement and acclimatization in China,Footnote ²⁹ and Shylock's Jewish identity would make him a more familiar ‘other’ to the Chinese audience, closer to Chinese traditions than the unfamiliar British or Roman ‘other’ with their negative, imperialistic connotations.

The popular reception of Lin's version and the impression of Shakespeare as recounting fantasy stories of spirits can be attributed to his narrative style. Lin was the first to introduce changes in the narrative structure of Chinese literary works to suit a revised poetics. Before him, Chinese literary narratives began each chapter with a couplet relating to the chapter content. Lin changed this style by introducing the foreign custom of prose chapter headings, which was then followed by his contemporaries. He also had a distinctive elegant literary style known as wenyan (文言). This was a classical style used before the vernacular movement; it was peppered with colloquial terms, which may explain its popular reception. Wenyan was the predominant style among literati but, when punctuated with colloquial terms, Lin's semi-classical literary style appealed to both the intellectuals and the masses, who found the pure wenyan form difficult to understand. His style was commended by the renowned scholar Qian Zhongshu (錢鍾書; 1910–98) as a form of ‘wenyan that is more [for the] layman, casual and flexible’.Footnote ³⁰ A number of well-known literati and dramatists were heavily influenced by Lin's works, such as Cao Yu, who hailed him as the Shakespeare of the Orient:

Similarly, Guo Moruo, a prominent dramatist and literary figure in the twentieth century, commented: ‘I was unconsciously influenced by this book [Tales]. I read The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet in the original when I grew up, but it seems that Lin's way of telling these stories as fairy tales was more appealing’.Footnote ³² As noted above, Lin described the Tales as ‘shenguaixiaoshuo (神怪小說)’, stories of spirits and gods, a genre familiar to Chinese readers. The titles of the plays are translated neatly into polysyllabic terms that render them poetic. For instance, Merchant of Venice was translated as Rou Quan (Contract of the Flesh); Hamlet was rendered as Guizhao (The Ghost's Command); Macbeth as Guzheng (Witchy Omens). All these Chinese titles highlight the supernatural aspect of the plays.

By using a narrative that emphasized spirits and gods, and a classical literary style, Lin successfully introduced Shakespeare, the foreign ‘other’, under a familiar Chinese guise. In this respect Lin was reflecting the approach to translation later identified by Lefevere. According to Lefevere, one of the three factors in determining the acceptance of texts is the dominant poetics, which may include genres and the relationship between literature and the social system. As such, some literature, in this case tales of spirits and gods, will be more readily accepted because these tales are operating within a system that recognizes it.Footnote ³³

Omissions and modifications are not infrequent in Lin's other translations. He was criticized by contemporaries for distorting the text. Qian Zhongshu, for instance, judged that Lin's ‘misrepresentations’ were the result of a ‘willful act’.Footnote ³⁴ However, Lin was not the only literatus in that period who transformed religious themes in literary works. Translators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were often seen as agents for social change, and rewriting of the original text was not uncommon among them. Yan Fu (嚴復; 1853–1921), who translated T. H. Huxley's Evolution and Ethics in 1898, added extensive commentaries on the notions of ‘natural selection’ and ‘survival of the fittest’. His translation exerted significant influence among reformists such as Liang Qichao (梁啟超; 1873–1929) who were advocating social progress and change. Liang used classical Chinese even in the midst of the vernacular movement in China in order to address an elite audience with the aim of persuading them of the quality of Western literature.Footnote ³⁵

Translation as a form of rewriting was a typical approach in early twentieth-century China, where remaining faithful to the source text was not considered the most important criterion. Rather, translation was used to introduce ideas from the West in order to enrich Chinese culture. The range of literary genres was broadened as a result to include political novels, educational novels, science fiction and detective stories, all of which had hitherto been unknown. In order to facilitate reception among Chinese readers, the text was sanitized or domesticated: place names and people's names were often ‘sinicized’. Lawrence Wong suggested that this was done from necessity rather than choice: owing to the lack of knowledge about the West amongst readers, the translator often could not bridge the gap between the two cultures, even when they themselves fully understood the meaning of the source text.Footnote ³⁶