Translating Early Modern China

Translating Early Modern China by Carla Nappi

The history of China, as any history, is a story of and in translation. Translating Early Modern China tells the story of translation in China to and from non-European languages and Latin between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and primarily in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Each chapter finds a particular translator resurrected from the past to tell the story of a text that helped shape the history of translation in China. In Chinese, Mongolian, Manchu, Latin, and more, these texts helped to make the Chinese language what it was at different points in its history. This volume explores what the form of an academic history book might look like by playing with fictioning as part of the historian's craft. The book's many stories--of glossaries and official Ming translation bureaus, of bilingual Ming Chinese-Mongolian language primers, of the first Latin grammar of Manchu, of a Qing Manchu conversation manual, of a collection of Manchu poems by a Qing translator--serve as case studies that open out into questions of language and translation in China's past, of the use of fiction as a historian's tool, and of the ways that translation creates language.

Illegible Cities is an important work of history, arguing against the temptation in Sinology to reduce pre-twentieth-century China to what occurred in one language alone * Lucas Klein, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture *
This reading exemplifies the most admirable characteristics of Nappi's book: its richness, interdisciplinarity, and postmodern spiritTranslating Early Modern China is not a strictly academic book that only scholars could read and appreciate. * Elisa Frei, Catholic Theology and Church History, Goethe-Universität Frankfurtam Main, Comitatus *
This book highlights the strategic linguistic tactics Chinese rulers continue to employ to control a nation of diverse religions and cultures. Unique but difficult to categorize, this book is a welcome addition to scholarship on not only Chinese history but also the art of linguistics and translation theory. * K. Liu, CHOICE *

Carla Nappi is a historical pataphysician whose research tends to focus on Chinese and Manchu texts in early modernity, and who holds the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in History at the University of Pittsburgh. From undergraduate training in paleobiology, Professor Nappi pursued an M.A. in History of Science and then a Ph.D. in Chinese history. Her first book, The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and its Transformations in Early Modern China (Harvard, 2009), looked at problems of evidence and belief in Chinese natural history. Her two most recent books Metagestures (with Dominic Pettman, Punctum, 2019) and Uninvited (with Carrie Jenkins, McGill-Queens University Press, 2020) reflect a growing emphasis on collaborative work and on integrating short fiction and poetry into her practice. Her current work is preoccupied with insomniac temporality; with the relationship between DJ'ing, history, and translation; and with housekeeping as a magical practice.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780198888154
ISBN 10	0198888155
Titel	Translating Early Modern China
Autor	Carla Nappi
Serie	Global Asias
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	Oxford University Press
Erscheinungsjahr	2023-06-08
Seitenanzahl	256
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.