The Translatability of Revolution by Pu Wang argues that the interrelated, constructive practices of translation and historiography are essential to understanding the “long” Chinese revolution from the May Fourth movement (1915–1925) to the end of the Cultural Revolution (1976). Guo Moruo's work uniquely encompasses the politics of both the translation of literature and the interpretation of the past during this critical historical juncture. No book in English has attempted to account for all of Guo's work before, for several reasons: the great variety and breadth of Guo's writing far exceeds contemporary disciplinary boundaries; Guo as a historical figure has a marginal place in current academic discourses in both Chinese and English; and perhaps there is something potentially embarrassing about focusing one's scholarly attention on the writing of Guo Moruo, given all its effusive sentimentality and ideological pedantry. The author addresses these problems directly in the introduction, stating, “I undertake the challenge to reclaim [Guo's works] – not to redeem Guo's image but to rekindle a critical debate on the cultural legacy of the Chinese Revolution. Both the iconic halo previously surrounding Guo and the postsocialist pejorative depiction of him represent a tendency to reduce the social, intellectual, and cultural complexities of the Chinese Revolution to a level of teleological narratives and self-closed judgements” (p. 20). In taking on the full scope of Guo's writing with a broadly comparative methodology, Wang offers a novel image of the revolutionary era.

The material is loosely organized along chronological and generic lines, with each chapter focusing on more or less one time period and one or two modes of writing. The analysis consists mainly of close readings that make use of various structural and post-structural approaches. Part one, “The translingual making of Chinese zeitgeist,” first applies Jonathan Culler's theory of apostrophe to Guo's early lyrics in chapter one; chapter two traces intertextual and translingual negotiations in Guo's literary-political writing of 1927–1928; chapter three concerns Guo's translation of Faust during the years between May Fourth and the People's Republic. Part two, “Translating Antiquity into Revolution,” covers, in chapter four, the close relationship between Guo's autobiographical and historiographical writings; in chapter five, his historical-allegorical dramas; and in chapter six, his vernacular translations of classical Chinese poetry. The book concludes with a brief discussion of the persistence of historical imagination in Mao Zedong's final poetic exchange. The bibliography is broad, while the analysis focuses on a small but representative selection of primary materials, including poetry, fiction, autobiography, historiography, drama, criticism and, of course, translation. There are only two points in the book where I feel that Wang has left out something really important. One is when he surprisingly asserts that “it is beyond the scope of my study to inquire into Guo's foreign influences in the making of this allegorical mode of dramatization [used in his poetic and historical dramas]” (p. 200). The second is in the discussion of Qu Yuan, which presents some of Guo Moruo's biographical claims as facts without discussing how those claims attained the status of facts (pp. 204–205). Even brief discussions of these issues would have significantly deepened the argument of the chapter. Besides these relatively minor omissions, the main shortcoming of the book is that dense terminology sometimes clouds the argument.

This book makes an important contribution to the field of Chinese studies. I fully agree with the author that there is no need to “redeem” Guo himself, but Guo's importance to the era can't be overstated, and so this book is a welcome addition. Like Lydia Liu's work, on which it builds, it demonstrates the critical importance of translation to the study of modern China, whether that study be situated in the humanities or in the social sciences. I believe it makes less of a contribution to translation studies than it could. It mainly uses translation studies as a source of frameworks and concepts to apply to the primary materials, and doesn't deeply interrogate translation studies in return. There are moments when the analysis begins to demonstrate the inadequacy of Lawrence Venuti's popular “domestication” versus “foreignization” model of translation criticism for Guo's work and, potentially, for the post-imperial, Chinese and revolutionary contexts; I would like to see this strand of the argument taken much further in the future.

The Translatability of Revolution is for specialists in modern Chinese culture. It will be necessary reading for anyone studying Guo Moruo or the historiography of the revolutionary era. The writing style contains too much jargon for general classroom use, although it may be considered for graduate seminars. Chapter six, on the use of modernizing translations of ancient poetry, is the most approachable, and in my opinion, the most broadly applicable part of the book, and I would encourage anyone planning a graduate seminar on translation studies or Chinese literary history to include it in the syllabus.