Literature, painting, and Chinese garden: intertextuality in the translation of “footnotes to yu mountain”

Yu Garden (寓園) in Shanyin (山陰) (present-day Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province), is one of the few private gardens of the Ming Dynasty to be situated far from a city. It was constructed on a piece of family-owned land on Yu Mountain developed by the garden owner Qi Biaojia (祁彪佳1603–1645) in 1635. Although the physical dimension of this garden has long since disappeared, Qi Biaojia left behind a large quantity of related textual resources, including the garden record, related poems, verses, letters, and diaries, providing a fairly complete non-physical dimension of the garden. The garden record (Yuan ji 園記) is vital evidence in the study of Chinese classical gardens, especially for those gardens that disappeared in their physical dimension. This paper takes Duncan Campbell’s two translations of the garden record named “Footnotes to Yu Mountain” (Yushan zhu 寓山注) as an example, exploring the interdisciplinary study of Chinese gardens through spatial experience, literature, and image. Campbell proposes that the character Yu (寓) should be translated into the term “allegory”, but this paper argues that this translation doesn’t fully capture the concept expressed by Yu. This discussion is closely linked with the essential understanding of this garden and the integrity of Chinese terms in cross-culture comparisons.