When Nanshan Becomes “Southern Hills”: Cultural Memory in Four English Translations of the Shijing

Cultural memory in classical poetry is carried not by isolated words but through textual relations, interpretive traditions, and paratextual frames. Taking “Nanshan” (南山) in the Shijing (詩經) as a mnemonic node, this study examines how its cultural memory is reconstructed in four English translations by James Legge, Arthur Waley, Bernhard Karlgren, and Xu Yuanchong. A small corpus of eleven Shijing poems containing these mountain expressions was compiled, yielding forty-four poem–translator records. The analysis combines manual coding, checked through independent second coding of a subset of records, with descriptive statistics and close case studies across five dimensions: naming strategy, spatial function, cultural memory strategy, poetic reconstruction, and paratextual mediation. The results show that geographical renderings such as “southern hill(s)” and “Southern Mountain” predominate, but they do not necessarily erase cultural memory; conversely, phonetic or proper-name retention does not automatically preserve it. More specifically, the visibility of Nanshan’s affective, political-ritual, auspicious, and agrarian associations depends on the interaction of translated names with poetic context, titles, notes, classification, selection, and verse form. Translating classical poetic imagery, the study argues, involves not merely retaining culture-specific names but rebuilding the interpretive conditions under which cultural memory can be recognized in the target language.