A Historical Review of Zhang Wojun's Chinese Translation of Sōseki Natsume's Bungaku-ron: A Tentative Restoration of Its Manuscript through Textual Comparison

Abstract

The aim of this article is to tentatively restore the lost manuscript of Zhang Wojun's Chinese translation of Sōseki Natsume's Bungaku-ron which was published by a Shanghai publisher Shenzhou-guoguang-she in 1931. Since there is no authorized edition of Bungaku-ron, it is very difficult to know what the author's real intention is. This is why Zhang had to turn to the two different texts for translation; the abridged edition posthumously issued and the version reprinted in The Complete Works of Sōseki Natsume. Moreover his work of translation was subtly inflected by historical and cultural factors during the 1930s in China. The reconstructed manuscript will reveal a complicated trajectory through which it was both textually and contextually overdetermined.