Translating the Gay Homographesis into Chinese: The Gay Intertextuality of San Clemente Syndrome

The award-winning gay fiction Call Me by Your Name (2007, hereafter Call) has been translated into four Chinese editions; two editions in simplified Chinese published by two mainland Chinese publishing houses and two in traditional Chinese issued by a Taiwanese publisher. This paper explores how the Chinese translations render the gay intertextuality embodied in the “San Clemente Syndrome,” a key feature underpinning Call Me by Your Name as a novel of becoming. I will first discuss the notion of intertextuality, particularly as applied in Roland Barthes’s post-structuralist approach to text analysis. Specifically, I will draw on Barthes’s analysis of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine, paying special attention to the five codes of reading: hermeneutic code, proairetic code, semantic code, symbolic code, and cultural code. These codes combine to create a complex “weaving of voices” and a multiplicity of meanings and connotations, contributing to the “multivalence of the text” (Barthes 1974, p. 20), wherein multiple layers of meaning and references intertwine. Based on this foundation, I will develop a theoretical framework to explore gay intertextuality. This concept refers to “the appropriation of certain literary texts that may subsequently be quoted in other gay texts” (Mira 1999, p. 114). Given the cultural asymmetries between the source and target texts, translating gay intertextuality involves possible gains and losses in the performativity of gay signification. Following Barthes’s use of lexia as a unit of analysis, I will focus on the San Clemente Syndrome and examine its renditions in the TTs. Here, lexia encompasses how signs function in language, involving denotation (literal meaning), lexia identification (specific meanings within the text), and connotation (implied meanings or associations). I will first delineate the interwoven intertextual codes, then examine how these codes are reworked in the TTs, and finally explore the ideological implications of these shifts.