Spenser Studies in Twentieth-First-Century China

Spenser study in China is young and underdeveloped, though Chinese scholars’ interest in Spenser may be traced back more than one hundred years. As early as 1908, some episodes of The Faerie Queene were translated into Chinese prose versions,[1] but academic studies of Spenser appear only about a century later. The dawn of the new century has witnessed the dawn of Spenser study in China. The following is a brief introduction.

Translations

After Shakespeare and Milton, Spenser finally drew the attention of some Chinese translators in the 1990s. The ambition and innovation of their unfinished attempts to translate Spenser’s poems, especially The Faerie Queene into Chinese, highlights the challenges in that area. What follows is a survey of the major recent publications.

Spenser, Edmund. 《小爱神》(Amoretti). Trans. Minglun Cao. Hefei: Anhui Literature and Art Publishing House, 1992.

This version, in Chinese verse, is the first and only complete Chinese translation of Amoretti, including all the 89 sonnets in the cycle. In rendering Spenser’s verse, Cao pursues maximal “形似” (xing si, similarity in form to the original) on the basis of “神似” (shen si, similarity in spirit to the original). Thus, his rendering of Amoretti closely reflects its Petrarchan themes on the one hand and generally agrees with its rhyme scheme on the other. Therefore, Cao’s translation, for the first time, gives the Chinese readers a good and full view of the spirit and style of Spenser’s sonnets. The merits of Cao’s translation lie in his musical and picturesque language and witty choice of words. For example, “her titles true” (Sonnet III, line 11) is translated as “她的芳名.” A Chinese lover, especially with high literacy, usually refers to his love’s name not as “名字” (name), but as “芳名” (literarily means “fragrant name”) in an admiring or intimate way. The particular character of his translation is shown by his frequent deviation from a word for word rendering;[2] in some places, his translation is far from being accurate. For instance, in Sonnet V, “close implide” (line 5) is translated into “分明显出” (which means “obviously shown”), contrary to the meaning of the original. And the word “tride” (line 13) is not translated at all. But in Sonnet VI, Cao’s rendering “虽说从未接受过雷电的洗礼” (which means “though never struck and tested by lightning”) is completely his own invention.

Spenser, Edmund. 《斯宾塞诗选》(Edmund Spenser: Selected Poems). Trans. Jialuan Hu. Guilin: Li Jiang Publishing House, 1997.

This book, in Chinese verse, is based on The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser edited by J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt in 1912. It includes The Shepheardes Calender’s Januarye, Aprill, October, and November, forty-four sonnets of Amoretti,[3] a complete version of Epithalamion and Prothalamion, and five cantos of The Faerie Queene (I.i, ii and xi; II.vii and xii) with a detailed introduction. This book, with abundant annotations, presents to the Chinese readers a more comprehensive view of Spenser. Hu’s rendering is, in a word, quite Spenserian. It agrees almost exactly with the original in both rhythm and rhyme. The special rhyme schemes of the Spenserian sonnet and stanza are strictly followed. So are the rhyme schemes of The Shepheardes Calender, and of both the Epithalamion and Prothalamion. A foot in English meter is correlated to a “sound group” or a natural pause in Chinese metrical language. Thus, Hu’s translation approximates the original to the fullest extent in form. Since Hu is a scholar of the English Renaissance, he is able to reveal something of the special character of Spenser’s poetry in his rendering. Hu planned to translate the whole Faerie Queene into Chinese, and indeed finished the first two books, but his poor health prevented him from improving the draft and publishing the Chinese version. Indeed, Hu’s rendering is so brilliant and at the same time so correct and illuminating that it is a pity he has not translated more of Spenser’s works.  

Jialuan Hu. “Spenser in Chinese Translation.” Spenser Studies 16 (2002): 139-150.

In this article, Hu explores the way to approximate Spenser’s metrical pattern more closely in Chinese translation according to his personal experience in translating Spenser’s poems. It is shown that the rhythm in Chinese comes from “the four tones” rather than the stressed and unstressed syllables in English. Chinese characters are all monosyllabic and thus have no distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables. “The four tones” are: (a) the first, or the high and level tone, called “yinping” (b); the second, or the rising tone, called “yangping”; (c) the third, or the falling-rising tone, called “shangsheng”; and (d) the fourth, or the falling tone, called “qusheng.” In classical Chinese poetry, the four tones are termed as “pingze,” or level and oblique tones. “Yinping” and “yangping” belong to “ping”; “shangsheng” and “qusheng” belong to “ze.” Classical Chinese poetry strictly follows certain fixed “pingze” patterns. Thus, Hu concludes that the foot in English verse can only be evoked through correspondence rather than given a direct equivalent in Chinese prosody. And Hu suggests that it should be reasonable to make a “sound group” in Chinese correspond to a foot in English. In Chinese poetry, sound groups are formed by the necessary pauses in the natural flow of the language and a sound group usually consists of two or more Chinese characters. Thus, a line of iambic pentameter in a Spenserian stanza can be translated into a Chinese line with five sound groups, and the Alexandrine with six. Such a suggestion is quite original, valid and feasible, for the combination of two-character and three-character groups is a common practice in classical Chinese poetry and is also pleasing to the Chinese ear.[4] As to the rhyme, Professor Hu admits that it is only possible to follow the rhyme scheme rather than the exact rhymes of the English original because some sounds in English have no counterparts in Chinese. Hu also discusses how to deal with other untranslatable challenges such as eye-rhymes, alliteration and so on.

Spenser, Edmund. 《仙后》(The Faerie Queene). Rewritten by Dong Zhao. Beijing: Posts & Telecom Press, 2011.

This book, in Chinese prose version and with cartoon paintings, is written for children and cannot be counted as a translation of The Faerie Queene in the strict sense. To cater to children’s taste, Zhao uses very simple and clear language but still manages to include all the major adventurous stories of the six titular knights. Thus, the book is fascinating for children to read and may have had some impact on popularizing The Faerie Queene in China.

Literary Criticism

Spenser studies have attracted more and more scholarly attention in China since the beginning of the new century. According to a rough estimate, 2 books and over 50 journal articles were published during the period from 2000 to 2014. The journal articles cover such wide topics as fantasy epic in The Faerie Queene, Redcrosse’s story of initiation, multiple layers of interpretation of Redcrosse, and Spenser’s influence upon John Keats. And this does not take into account those works or projects that include Spenser study as part of a larger critical plan.  In addition, twelve M. A. theses have been published online since 2005. The increasing participation of younger scholars in Spenser studies brings both hope and momentum to Spenser studies in twenty-first-century China.

Books in English

Lihui Liu. Harmony of Life: A Study of the Underlying Argument in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2004.

This is the first full-fledged academic study of The Faerie Queene in China. In this book, Professor Liu discusses the relationship between harmony and virtue in the first place. Harmony, as he points out, originated from Pythagorean cosmology, and came to represent an ideal state of life, the life of the Golden Age or the Garden of Eden, which the poets of Renaissance England were trying to restore in their poems. He further observes that the prerequisite for such harmonious life is virtue, Spenser’s primary concern in The Faerie Queene. Therefore, harmony of life constitutes the underlying statement of the epic. Then, Liu explores in detail the theme of harmony in threefold relationship between man and God, man and nature, and man and man. And he concludes that Spenser’s conceit of harmony of life runs through all the books of The Faerie Queene and unites the poem into an organic whole, thus serving as the unifying principle of the poem.

Dong Zhao. The Scripture and The Faerie Queene. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2008.

In this book, Zhao examines The Faerie Queene, especially the first two books, within the context of the Bible and the Elizabethan biblical exegesis. It concretely examines and exemplifies the great influence of the Bible on The Faerie Queene in style, structure and theme. Zhao holds that Spenser’s religious ideas are more derived from the Bible than the specifics of later theologies. Thus, he challenges the traditional approach to pinpoint Spenser to any religious faction such as Puritan, Anglican or Catholic, calling it weak if not fallacious. He also disagrees with some critics who think that Spenser’s religious attitudes in The Faerie Queene are either ambiguous or self-contradictory. As he points out, Spenser’s religious orientation is clear only when it is interpreted according to the Bible and the way it was read in Spenser’s time.

Articles in Chinese

Jiuluan Hu. “金链：万物的奇妙联结(Golden Chain: ‘the Wonderful Linkage of Beings’).” Foreign Literatures 1 (1999): 29-37.

—-. “斯宾塞《仙后》中的玻璃球镜(The Glass-Globe Mirror in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene).” English and American Literature Studies 1 (2000): 1-23.

In these two articles, Professor Hu shows that the cosmos is a potent presence in the works of Spenser and other English poets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And he probes into their concepts of the universe via a discussion of some cosmic symbols such as the golden chain and the magic glass-globe mirror in The Faerie Queen and other poems. The golden chain, or the chain of being, as he observes, represents symbolically the poets’ basic notion of the cosmos: all in one and the unity of the opposites. The glass-globe mirror embodies the belief that the cosmos is perfect and is a reflection of the Creator’s grace, wisdom and power. Hu further observes that it also reveals the poets’ attempt to know God and the human beings by knowing the cosmos.

Lihui Liu. “宇宙时间和斯宾塞《仙后》的叙事时间(Cosmological Time and the Narrative Time of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene).” Foreign Literature Review 3 (2006): 120-128.

According to many critics, the narrative time of The Faerie Queene, is either problematic or insignificant. But in this article, Professor Liu holds that the narrative time of The Faerie Queene can be reasonably explained when it is put into the larger context of cosmology. Liu points out that the cosmos is usually divided into sundry spheres according to classical cosmology. In correspondence, time is multifarious: angelic time, humane time, evil time and physical time. Different figures in The Faerie Queene experience different types of time. The ideal figure Arthur, for example, experiences angelic time which is eternal. In this sense, it is reasonable for Arthur, like Venus and Diana, to appear in the faerie land that symbolizes the sixteenth-century England. Liu further observes that such synchronicity of different figures and events is mainly due to the strong eschatological sense that permeated Elizabethan society. On the day of the Last Judgment, different times synchronize. Thus, Spenser creates an eschatological spectacle in The Faerie Queen by juxtaposing separate time concepts in one narrative time scheme.

Yunfu Xiong. “斯宾塞《仙后》第一卷与英国中古文学传统 (Book I of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and the Medieval English Literary Tradition).” Foreign Literature Review 1 (2009): 76-85.

In this article, Xiong explores the connection between the first book of The Faerie Queene and medieval English literature in three aspects. First, the story of Arthur, Gloriana and St. George are all subject matters that had been repeatedly dealt with in medieval English Literature such as Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. Second, the allegorical form of The Faerie Queene was widely used in medieval English literature such as The Vision of Piers Plowman and The House of Fame. Third, the archaic language and the accentual-syllabic verse that Spenser employs in The Faerie Queene shows that he is closely following the English medieval poets, especially Chaucer. Thus, Xiong concludes that The Faerie Queene is deeply rooted in and abundantly nourished by medieval English literature.

Li, Chengjian. “斯宾塞眼中的爱尔兰：论《爱尔兰之现状》中的民族意识(Spenser’s View of Ireland: on the National Consciousness in A View of the Present State of Ireland).” Foreign Literature Review 2 (2011): 58-68.

This article discusses Spenser’s view of Ireland based on his treatise A View of the Present State of Ireland. As Li observes, Spenser tries to demonize Ireland in the treatise and shows great anxiety for the dire state of English colonial enterprise in Ireland. Li points out that such anxiety is a reflection of the England-centered consciousness which thrived during Elizabeth’s reign. She further analyzes the causes of such national consciousness’s prevalence and its strong presence in literature.

Lihui Liu (Professor)
College of International Studies, Southwest University
Chongqing, P. R. China

Xinhua Yang (Assistant Professor)
School of Foreign Languages, Southwest University of Political Science and Law
Chongqing, P. R. China

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