This is a study of the first peak of literary translation occurring in Hong Kong’s literary magazines from the late 1920s to the mid 1930s, in particular the magazine Red Beans 紅豆, which was published between 1933-1936 and produced 118 out of a total of 137 pieces of translation during its three years publication. This study concerns itself with literary translation in the magazine, exploring this special form of cultural production from a social, political and cultural point of view....[ Read more ]

This is a study of the first peak of literary translation occurring in Hong Kong’s literary magazines from the late 1920s to the mid 1930s, in particular the magazine Red Beans 紅豆, which was published between 1933-1936 and produced 118 out of a total of 137 pieces of translation during its three years publication. This study concerns itself with literary translation in the magazine, exploring this special form of cultural production from a social, political and cultural point of view.

The body of this study is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is a preliminary reconstruction of the history of early Hong Kong’s literary translation, with a brief outline of translation activities in different literary magazines and the socio-cultural background of Hong Kong society at that period, which helped result in and spur on an unprecedented translation period in Red Beans. This chapter contains an account of the evolution of literary translation, starting from the mid 19^th century and ending with Red Beans in 1936. Chapter 2 investigates how translation in Red Beans, in response to the pressing national crisis of military intimidation from Japan, was employed to disseminate political ideology, namely, nationalism and patriotism, which, unavoidably, entails the effort of the construction of national identity for local readers. Chapter 3 discusses the interrelationship between the patronage of the initiator of the translations and the academic authority, and explores the implications derived from this special alliance. Chapter 4 examines how the translations attempted to affect the poetics of the literary system of Hong Kong by introducing new aesthetic values, the modernist psychological short stories and the romantic spirit, to the local literary sphere. This research ends with a micro-study of translated texts, the reproductions of foreign material. The final chapter analyses the rewritten works and how and why they were produced in such a way by exploring different translation strategies used by translators.

The results of this study suggest that the vibrant translation activity and the translators themselves in the production of translation always incorporate the discourse of ideology, power and existing literary poetics of a society, and correlate with the social, political, and ideological history of the early period of Hong Kong. I argue that the production of translation in Red Beans intended to disseminate the ideology of nationalism, to cultivate a more sophisticated reader and literary environment, to make the literary sphere innovative, and to put up resistance to the dominant literary convention.