【Theme】: The Literary Amber: Reading translation histories in Yang Shuangzi’s writing
【Speaker】: Dr. Aoife Cantrill
【Date】: 2022/12/2 (Friday) 9:10-12:10
【Venue】: Room 505, 5th Floor, Boai Building
【About Speaker】
Dr Aoife Cantrill is currently a research fellow at the Centre for Chinese Studies, National Central Taiwan Library. In January 2023 she will begin a postdoctoral position at theManchester China Institute, University of Manchester. Her PhD (University of Oxford, 2022) looked at Taiwanese women’s writing published during the Japanese colonial period, exploring how that writing has been translated and adapted post-1975. This research received fundingfrom the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UKRI) and Taiwan National Central Library. Her other research interests include the use of paratext in contemporary Chinese fiction, and the cultural politics of textile production in the Japanese empire.
https://orinst.web.ox.ac.uk/people/aoife-cantrill
【About Lecture】
Yang Shuangzi(楊雙子) is a contemporary Taiwanese writer who has gained recognition for her works of historical fiction set during the period of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan, including Flower Blooming Season (《花開時節》, 2017) and Records of a Pleasure Trip in Taiwan (《臺灣漫遊錄》, 2020). This talk will discuss Yang’s work from a translational perspective, highlighting not only the translation politics that underlie her writing but also the translation history that she draws upon directly in her fiction.
Yang Shuangzi has talked about colonial era texts as a form of literary amber that preserve the historical reality of that period in their pages. This talk argues that through her fiction, Yang Shuangzi sets a resin of her own, with translation’s capacity to shape literary and national histories caught in its core. More broadly, this discussion will touch upon the contribution of Taiwan’s historic Japanese-language fiction and its translation to contemporary Taiwanese fiction.
