The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature and Multilingual Asia

Traditional comparative literature has formed a bipolar worldview of self and other. For modern China, the so-called East-West comparative study has not been a fruitful way to understand the diverse traditions of world literature but rather an approach to promoting the globalization of Chinese literature and to shaping and strengthening the characteristics of Chinese literature. The traditional concept of the “West” arguably has served to maintain the cultural authority of Europe and North America. There is an urgent need to break away from this traditional approach, the bipolar framework of self and other, in order to conduct comparative studies in a more comprehensive manner. In this vein, Haun Saussy's The Making of Barbarians discusses the cultural differences that often come from within the Self, as documented in the study of China's neighboring regions and ancient minority cultures. The author summarizes the purpose of this book as the investigation of “how the wai [outside] defines the zhong [center] for one of those practices deemed to be closest to the civilization's core: writing, the effort to shape the world through and as a system of enduring traces. In other words, it is about the outside seen from the inside, as reconstructed by an outsider” (1).The Making of Barbarians is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 discusses the tradition of translation in the Chinese cultural context, focusing on the direction, struggles, and impact of translation, as well as the inevitable conflicts and bilingual stratification that occur in translation. In the modern era, the preponderance of translation has been conducted between European and Asian languages. Before 1850, Chinese literati considered China the center of the world. As China's status changed, translation became an unfortunate necessity in their eyes. In developing translation strategies, translators often resorted to “cooperative” measures that conformed to the dominant culture, but in fact, conflict was inevitable. Saussy explores how different cases responded to such conflicts. For example, in the debate between Huan Xuan 桓玄 (369–404) and Master Huiyuan 慧遠 (334–416), the imperial power attempted to suppress religion, but Huiyuan responded to this imperial suppression with a strategy of “translation as citation” (17).Saussy discusses not only translation strategies but also the direction of translation, which he divides into “translation inward” and “translation outward” (22). The former is the translation of a foreign language into Chinese, while the latter is the translation of Chinese into the local language of the surrounding areas. Many factors facilitate the negotiation within translation between different language domains, including translators, institutions, and technologies. The process of “translation outward” must overcome many problems of alienation, difference, and lack of understanding that stem from linguistic and cultural differences between central and peripheral areas, as well as differences in understanding between male and female recipients. With respect to the role that the Chinese writing system plays in translation, Saussy highlights the problem of bilingual stratification. As the Chinese writing system spreads internationally, a script diglossia emerges in which Chinese is the language of high culture and international exchange, while the indigenous language is used for local communication. For example, when Japanese ambassadors communicated with their Korean counterparts in Chinese, they included allusions to Shijing 詩經 (Book of Songs) in their poems. In addition, envoys to Korea composed poems in Japanese for native consumption but used Chinese prose (Kanbun) in their annotations.To explore the differences and interaction between central and peripheral culture, chapter 2 attempts to capture the characteristics of “barbarian” (yi 夷) culture through accounts of its rituals and music. While we understand China today as a multicultural, multilingual civilization, ancient Chinese literati did not understand China in this way. The ritual culture of the barbarians was distinguished from that of the center. The term yi refers to those who were considered outsiders to the central Chinese culture.1 It is a hierarchical concept that excludes people from orthodox views of ritual, morality, music, and culture. In reading the Later Han text Baihu tongyi 白虎通義 (Collected Discussions in the White Tiger Hall), Saussy identifies the attitude toward yi as the product of “the sort of guardians of cultural identity who are always on the defensive, always fearful of any invasion of otherness and unwilling to acknowledge the debts their culture owes to others that it has chewed up and digested in the course of its development” (43).Despite their “barbaric” nature, yi people also possessed gentle and elegant qualities, though these qualities were carefully managed and processed by the translator. For example, Liu Xiang 劉向 (ca. 77–6 BCE), in his Shuo yuan 說苑 (Garden of Persuasions), recalls an anecdote in which Zixi 子皙 (fl. 545 BCE), a nobleman of the Chu state, was enthralled by the song of a boatman and asked a translator to translate it from the Yue language into the Chu language. Liu's Shuo yuan brought the yi language into a context that was recognized as Chinese. Other accounts of yi culture can be found in the sections devoted to ethnic groups in official history books. One such story includes a song by Gao Huan 高歡 (496–547) of the Eastern Wei, written in response to a song by the Xianbei general Hulü Jin 斛律金 (488–567). Unlike the yi poetry usually cited in such stories, which conforms to the norms of the central empire, Gao's poetry evokes the vast natural landscape of the yi grasslands. Because they have not been fully assimilated into the Han aesthetic, these songs retain some of the authentic musical heritage of the yi lands.Saussy argues that translation plays an important role in establishing cultural influence. Chapter 3 centers on the formation and features of the Chinese cultural sphere and the importance of cultural transmission to this process. Chinese scripts have exerted an enormous influence on neighboring regions and cultures as these cultures have developed their own corresponding writing systems. In East Asia, Chinese characters have been translated using semantic, graphic, and rhetorical mechanisms, and the resulting localized transformations have created a cultural circle of Chinese characters. The monocultural exclusivity of China's central culture reflects the power of its cultural products. Although it is easier for written culture to flow out of China than into it, there are still obstacles to the spread of Chinese written culture out from the center. As an example, Saussy cites an episode in the relationship between the Tang dynasty and Tibet when the Tibetan Princess Jincheng 金城公主 (d. 739) requested a copy of classical Chinese texts from the imperial court but was refused. He points out that “keeping those crucial books within the borders was a matter of information supremacy. Possessing wen, in this account, is not a vague mystical or ethical thing. It is having the books that support a certain way of life” (72).The diffusion of foreign culture across China proper enhances the prestige of the central culture, but this does not mean that the central government always favors such diffusion; sometimes monocultural exclusivity instead demonstrates cultural authority. In the process of cultural transmission, the long-standing distinctions between hua and yi are shifted to allow each side to take on the qualities associated with the other. In this chapter, the “Eighteen Songs to a Nomad Flute” (Hujia shiba pai 胡笳十八拍) and the various versions of the legend of Wang Zhaojun 王昭君 (ca. 54–19 BCE) are cited as examples to illustrate the diversity of distinctions between Han and Hu. With the increasing integration of the northwest, Saussy notes, “the makers of folksongs and the authors of courtly verse were performing a kind of cultural transfer, bringing news from the border regions back to the center” (76).To understand the dynamics of cultural exchange between the center and the periphery, it is essential to grasp how conceptions of China have changed over the course of its long and complex history. In chapter 4, Saussy turns to Chinese historiography, highlighting its asymmetries and the relationship between the written culture of the center and the culture of the periphery. He critically engages with Ge Zhaoguang's 葛兆光 and Kahar Barat's 卡哈爾·巴拉提 scholarship on the concept of China. Ge focuses on China's continuity in history, using Ernest Renan's model of the “ideal nation,” in which “a nation is, first, a matter of shared memory” and later a “moral community” (88). On the same topic, Uyghur historian Barat writes that the development of Han language and culture contributed to the loss of local ethnic languages. Some local cultures have been preserved in the form of Chinese characters, and the script has become an emblem of group identity (94–95). Saussy thus suggests, “A script is never just marks on paper. What letters you write define who you can communicate with (at a distance at least), and your communicative networks define who you are” (97). The different views held respectively by Ge and Barat on the development of Chinese civilization reflect “asymmetries in the writing of history” (85).Saussy argues that mainstream cultures tend to absorb peripheral cultures, as part of a long-term project of civilizational indoctrination: “National literary traditions are carefully developed expressions of a teleology. Behind them is a narrative of expansion and harmonization” (102). Furthermore, a contrast is drawn between the written culture of the center and that of the periphery. In examining the uprising of An Lushan 安祿山 (703–757), Saussy points out the difference between the seriousness with which Du Fu writes about the uprising and its aftermath and the much simpler accounts in Tibetan records. To understand this difference, Saussy asserts, “the Tibetan chroniclers and Du Fu may be parsing the same history, but they bring to it vastly different grammars of action, obligation, role, and causality” (106). The two narrative modes, therefore, form an asymmetrical contrast.There were various contacts between central and peripheral cultures, and chapter 5 discusses the major role that one such form of contact, exile, played in Sinicization and cultural assimilation. Exile was a way for a refined Chinese culture to encounter the culture of neighboring peoples. For instance, during his exile, Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101) formed a deep friendship with the Li 黎 people. At the same time, Su's role model during his exile was the prototypical Chinese recluse Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 (ca. 365–427), who “is one of the best-known and most-studied pre-Tang Chinese poets.”2 Su composed many poems that imitated Tao's manner and spirit. Su had a strong urge to integrate into local life, and he expressed a high degree of sympathy and tolerance for the “uncivilized” land of Hainan, which may have helped to drive the process of Sinicization. Saussy continues to say that, given the performative effects of language, it may have been the case that locals were not as inclined to assimilation as Su's poetry suggests, but his language itself demonstrates the force driving assimilation.On the other hand, Saussy maintains that it is possible to understand ethnic peoples in a neighboring region without conquering or assimilating them. The Qing dynasty scholar Ji Yun 紀昀 (1724–1805) kept relatively accurate records of the local landscape, customs, and culture when he was exiled to the northwest. Ji witnessed many ways of life that deviated from the norms of the center. People in the center tend to understand and describe the expansion of Chinese culture with a monocultural approach, while people in the border regions often have different memories of the process. Given the differences between cultures, however, it is understandable that those who participate in the Chinese script culture are inclined to use the Chinese system to attempt to overcome these differences. Saussy concludes the book by delineating the essential function of translation: “Translations permit the assimilation of what will become imperial cultural heritage and leave on the other side of the border what will be considered ‘barbarian’” (136). Understood in this way, translation is both ideological and pragmatic.While previous studies have focused on translation from Europe and North America to China, Saussy seeks to understand Chinese culture from its interaction with the culture of neighboring regions. The Making of Barbarians uses texts from a diverse set of genres—literature, history, philosophy, religions—as case studies, and Saussy skillfully draws evidence from these various materials to support his arguments. While it is beautifully written, it is not free of error. For example, the note 11 on page 144 includes the Chinese word 戲劇 (xiju), but the pinyin shows xiqu. Another example is that note 55 on page 162 includes the Chinese word 十三居 with the pronunciation shisanju. However, it should be 十三屆 shisanjie. These minor problems do not diminish the great value of the book. It is highly recommended for scholars and students interested in translation studies, Chinese literature, and comparative cultural studies. Saussy's exploration of the boundaries between China's central and peripheral cultures breaks down barriers from within. In so doing, this book presents a more open world that deserves further exploration. This worldview will hopefully inspire new directions in the study of cultural translation in the context of world literature and the closely connected field of translation studies.This review is part of the University of Macau's MYRG projects (MYRG2022-00058-FAH; MYRG-GRG2023-00028-FAH).