In this paper I describe the work of a Chinese female writer who tackles the subject of reproductive freedom in a rather bold and unconventional way, by questioning traditional and political Chinese views on reproduction and motherhood and narrating both physical and psychological abuses perpetrated on women from a strong female perspective. In her latest trilogy The Womb (Zigong 子宫, 2019), Sheng Keyi (b. 1973) describes the life and marriage of three generations of women in contemporary China, touching upon all kinds of issues such as sexual abstinence, contraception, birth control surgery and pregnancy. Their whole existence is regulated by the use and abuse of their body and the way both family tradition and state policy on reproduction affect their lives, with different consequences and problems depending on whether they live in an urban or rural context. The Womb has been defined an "investigation novel on women's reproduction" (Lu 2019), a novel which "reveals the physical and spiritual injuries inflicted on women by birth control surgery" (Ma 2019, 121). What is most interesting in this novel is the way the author unfolds a counter-history of female reproduction within the macro-history of the country. As I will show in my paper, Sheng Keyi's cold and graphic descriptions reveal an uncommon sensitivity and a compelling use of literature as a tool for empowering women – in particular voiceless peasants –, fostering their agency in reproductive matters.
Xiao Hong (1911-1942) il cui vero nome era Zhang Naiying, attraversa il primo novecento cinese lasciando inizialmente le tracce riconosciute di scrittrice impegnata, sensibile ai temi della guerra e della patria e alla descrizione della sua terra (Manciuria) devastata dell'invasione giapponese. In seguito la critica cinese la ignora durante tutto il periodo maoista, perché il suo apporto letterario non appare abbastanza concreto e convinto, le sue povere creature finzionali – soprattutto contadine, vittime della miseria e della violenza sia essa naturale o umana, politica o di genere – non contribuiscono alla costruzione di una visione positiva del radioso futuro che attende la Cina. Viene riscoperta solo alla metà degli anni '80 del secolo scorso, quando la critica sia cinese sia occidentale rilegge le sua opera, anche in chiave femminista, superando il pregiudizio ideologico e riconoscendo la grandezza di Xiao Hong nel panorama della letteratura cinese moderna. Esilio, fuga, insicurezza sono parole che descrivono adeguatamente lo stato esistenziale e letterario di Xiao Hong: nella vita quanto nella sua scrittura troviamo le coordinate di una provocatoria instabilità, che Yan Haiping (2006, 136) definisce "mobile violence", dovuta alle sue scelte anticonformiste come donna e scrittrice, alla tragica precarietà dei tempi, ma anche a una ricerca instancabile di testimonianza che la spinge a non fermarsi (fisicamente e intellettualmente) sulla soglia delle apparenze e all'ombra delle idee. Per questo non solo i suoi personaggi femminili, frammentari ma intensi, sono venati di un realismo lirico anche quando sfregiati dalla condizione di umana sofferenza che li affratella agli animali e a tutte le creature viventi, ma anche la sua stessa figura, nei riflessi autobiografici presenti nelle sue opere, emerge come fonte di costante memoria e mimetico verismo. La pratica espressiva che più caratterizza la fuga di Xiao Hong da stereotipi e ignoranza è la rappresentazione del corpo femminile dislocato e rivelato in tutta la sua oscena verità: gravidanza, malattia, abusi, invecchiamento, i suoi "placeless bodies" (Yan Haiping, 2006, 146) sono segni tangibili di sottomissione ma anche di resilienza a un destino di genere. ; Xiao Hong (1911-1942), original name Zhang Naiying, lived through the first half of the twentieth century, leaving behind the image of a socially engaged writer, sensitive to the issues connected to the people of her troubled homeland, in the North East of China. After an initial enthusiastic reception of her most representative novel, The Field of Life and Death (1935) in the literary arena, she was later neglected by Chinese critics, and excluded from the Maoist literary canon, as her fictional creatures and her works did not fit the optimistic spirit and the class consciousness requested to the intellectuals of the time. She was then re-discovered only in the 1980s, when both in China and the West her works have been re-read with a feminist or cultural studies approach. In this paper I explore the personal and literary forms of escape underpinning her figure and literary production. Exile, escape, uncertainty are the key words which can adequately describe Xiao Hong's life and writing, in which, as Yan Haiping (2006, 136) states, one can find the sense of a 'mobile violence', due to her choices both as a woman (who revolted against her traditionally bound clan) and as a writer, who adopted a quite innovative, fragmented style combining personal memories and a crude and yet poetic realism. The literary practice which mainly expresses her constant escape from stereotypes, ignorance and conventional fetters is the representation of a dislocated female body subject to any kind of violence and humiliation: Xiao Hong's 'placeless bodies' (Yan Haiping 2006, 146) are tangible marks of subjugation but also of resilience against a gendered destiny, which let her construct her literary and personal identity on a popular standpoint.
This papers deals with Zhang Ailing's (1920-1995) posthumous novel, Xiao tuanyuan 小团圆 (Little reunions), written in the 70s of last century but completed just before her death, and finally published only in 2009, which is an example of the continuous manipulation of the same narrative materials used in previous works, and re-presented here through a politics of self-translation and self-intertextuality. In translating this novel one is confronted with a complex "mosaic of quotations" as Kristeva says, and self-quotations, and is dragged into a forest of meanings derived from the juxtaposition of a variety of external "voices" that mix up with the internal voice of the author. This Bachtinian or babelian quality of the novel, in other words its pluri- and interdiscursivity, challenges the translator, who is called not only to reconstruct the original sources of the allusions, but is also caught between the need of disambiguation and the respect of the intertextual connections implied by the text, he/she has also to cope with the deliberate narrative fragmentation adopted by Zhang.
Abstract This paper aims to explore the power exerted by the translator to form cultural identities and to build literary images that often overlap or blur national borders. The sinophone writer Ma Jian's identity is challenged both in terms of authorship and readership, as his public is a culturally undistinguished "western reader", and the translator de facto becomes the author. As a representative of the Chinese diaspora, he not only lives in a "deterritorialized" literary space, his novels also share a similar textual instability. Due to his bitter criticism of Chinese government and his internationally recognised role as a dissident writer, his works do not circulate in the People's Republic of China, and are mainly distributed thanks to the English renditions by Flora Drew.
