Mediating Language, Trauma and Nature: the Translation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song into Chinese

Sunset Song is the first volume in the trilogy of A Scots Quair by the Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell). First published in 1932, Sunset Song is a lyrical evocation of harsh circumstances: the impact and aftermath of the First World War, and the transition from a rural to an urban way of life, seen from the perspective of Chris Guthrie. In a narrative that employs a stylised representation of the Scots language, Gibbon forcefully portrays Chris as a victim of circumstances beyond her control, torn between tradition and modernity, and afflicted by the struggles in the period leading up to and including the First World War. As she struggles for agency and independence, her recourse is always to the land, to nature. Sunset Song thus sets numerous cultural and linguistic challenges to translators who wish to mediate this highly localised story for international readerships. This chapter focuses on the Chinese version of Sunset Song, jointly translated by Cao Yong (曹庸) and his son Sun Yu (孙予), and published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in 1993. Both Sunset Song and its Chinese version can be understood in part through the theoretical frameworks of Post-colonial Studies and Ecocriticism. From the former perspective, the experiences of the characters in Sunset Song can be apprehended from the perspective of trauma: the sociopolitical trauma of language loss, as well as the traumas attending sexual violence and war. The first section of this chapter highlights the ways in which the Chinese translation mediates the traumas that characterise the narrative, in particular the trauma consequent on language loss. Furthermore, by comparing landscapes and the nature-human relationships depicted in both stylised Scots and Chinese, the second section of this chapter focuses on the healing powers of nature. In short, the chapter considers how both the source text and its translation address the themes of trauma and nature and compares the ways in which these themes are presented to Western and Chinese readers.