Trans-cultural and Trans-temporal Translations: A new theory of world literature – a brief introduction

This paper reads a group of contemporary poems in English and their
precursor-poems, written in either Chinese or English, and charts the metamorphoses that occur between the two versions. The newer poems may follow the
language patterns and ideas of the ‘originals’ but transpose and translate the earlier texts into different temporal, cultural, political and social contexts as a means
of addressing contemporary concerns. Such multi-layered crossover translations,
I argue, epitomize the notion of globalized literature and the ways in which form
and content can be recycled across cultures, historical periods and languages. In
this sense, the new works simultaneously draw attention to the cultural specificities of the ‘originals’ and engender new meanings in new target languages or
cultures. The paper presents the possibility of considering trans-temporal and
trans-cultural translation as one mode of reading, identifying, understanding
and teaching World Literature. It also argues that texts that have undergone
the treatment of trans-temporal and trans-cultural translation (such as Auden’s
“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” and Li Bai’s “Changgan Xin”), regardless of
their original language, exhibit qualities that other texts that have been translated straightforwardly into different languages may lack and can be viewed as
‘exemplary World Literature texts.’