Univerzita Karlova | Charles University
Universidade do Porto | University of Porto
Filozofická fakulta | Faculty of Arts (Prague)
Faculdade de Letras | Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Porto)
Ú stav anglofonních literatur a kultur | Department of Anglophone Literatures
and Cultures (Prague)
Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies (Porto)
TEXT AND EVENT IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE (TEEME)
An Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate
PHD DISSERTATION
Utopia Refracted through Mandarin Lenses:
Translations, Paratexts, Afterlives
Yi-Chun Liu
Supervisors:
Professor Martin Procházka (Charles University)
Professor Fátima Vieira (University of Porto)
2020
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Declaration of Academic Integrity
I declare to have written this thesis completely by myself and to have used only sources
declared and referenced in the text. The thesis was not used to achieve the same or
different academic title at academic institutions other than Charles University and
University of Porto.
Prohlašuji, že jsem dizertační práci napsala samostatně s využitím pouze uvedených a řádně
citovaných pramenů a literatury a že práce nebyla využita v rámci jiného vysokoškolského
studia či k získání jiného nebo stejného titulu.
Yi-Chun Liu
2 Feburary 2020
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract …………………………………………………………………………… 6
Abstrakt …………………………………………………………………………… 8
Resumo ……………………………………………………………………………… 9
Notes on Terminology ……………………………………………………………. 11
Introduction ………………………………………………………………………. 12
1. Commemoration of Utopia: Textual Afterlives and Beyond …………. 16
2. Definitions of Utopia …………………………………………………… 20
3. Readings of Utopia …………………………………………………...…. 25
4. Chinese and Taiwanese Receptions of Utopia ………………………...…. 27
5. Methodologies ………………………………………………………... 32
5.1 Conceptualising Paratext ……………………………………...… 32
5.2 Refraction via Cultural Translation and Paratranslation ……. 36
6. Dissertation Structure …………………………………………….……. 38
Chapter One. Contextualising Utopia: Publication History and Rhetoric ……. 41
1. Publication History of the Early Editions ………………………………. 41
1.1 Early Modern Latin Editions, 1516-1519 ………………………. 42
1.2 Ralph Robinson’s English Translations, 1551 and 1556 …………. 45
2. Renaissance Rhetoric ……………………………………………………. 47
3. Modes of Narrative ……………………………………………………. 50
3.1 Fiction in Utopia …………………………………………………. 52
3.2 Dialogue in Utopia ………………………………………………. 56
4. More’s Self-Fashioning in Utopia ………………………………………… 58
5. Concluding Remarks ……………………………………………………. 61
Chapter Two. Articulating Utopia in Chinese: Introduction and Archetypes …. 63
1. The Introduction of the Concept of “Utopia” …………………………. 63
2. Chinese Counterparts: Political and Pastoral ……………………………. 71
2.1 Da Tong: A Political Utopia ……………………………………… 71
2.2 Peach Blossom Spring: A Pastoral Utopia ………………………. 75
3. Concluding Remarks ……………………………………………………. 78
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Chapter Three. Translating Utopia: Towards a Mandarin Ethos ………………. 81
1. Introduction to the Mandarin Editions: Styles and Material Presentation … 81
1.1 Liu Linsheng’s Utopia (1935) ……………………………………. 83
1.2 Dai Liuling’s Utopia (1956, 1982, 1997) ………………………. 88
1.3 Liu Chengshao’s Utopia (1957) …………………………………… 92
1.4 Guo Xiangzhang’s Utopia (1966) …………………………………. 97
1.5 Liu Lihua’s Utopia (1978) ………………………………………… 100
1.6 Song Meihua’s Utopia (2003) …………………………………… 102
1.7 Wu Lei’s Utopia (2005) ………………………………………… 103
1.8 Wang Jin’s Utopia (2007) …………………………………………. 105
1.9 Hu Fengfei’s Utopia (2007 & 2012) ………………………………. 107
1.10 Tang Yi’s Utopia (2011) ………………………………………… 109
1.11 Sun Pinghua and He Shan’s Utopia (2013) ……………………… 110
1.12 Li Lingyan’s Utopia (2016) ……………………………………… 112
2. Decoding More’s Nomenclature: Lost in Transliteration …………………. 115
2.1 Raphael Hythloday ………………………………………………. 117
2.2 Princeps Utopus ……………………………………………………. 123
2.3 Official Titles: Syphogrant, Tranibor, Phylarch, Protophylarch …… 127
2.4 Ethnological Names ……………………………………………… 131
3. Peroration: “Rather Wish Than Hope” ………………………………… 135
4. Concluding Remarks …………………………………………………… 140
Chapter Four. Framing Utopia: More’s Paratexts in Mandarin …………………. 144
1. Authorial Paratexts of the March 1518 Edition ……………………… 145
2. Serio Ludere ………………………………………………………………. 146
3. Notes on Authorial Paratexts ……………………………………………. 152
3.1 A Note on Erasmus’s Epistle to Froben………………………. 152
3.2 A Note on Budé’s Epistle to Lupset ……………………………. 153
3.3 A Note on Utopia’s Epigrams ……………………………………. 161
3.4 A Note on Giles’s Epistle to Busleyden ………………………. 165
3.5 A Note on Busleyden’s Epistle to More ………………………… 167
3.6 A Note on More’s First Prefatory Epistle to Giles ……………… 168
3.7 A Note on More’s Second Epistle to Giles ……………………… 172
4. Paratextual Afterlives: Allographic Prefaces ……………………………… 175
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5. Visual Afterlives: Iconic Paratexts ………………………………………. 179
5.1 Book Covers ……………………………………………………. 179
5.2 Illustrations ……………………………………………………… 182
6. Concluding Remarks ……………………………………………………. 185
Conclusion: Utopia’s Recent Afterlives ………………………………………… 188
1. Textual Afterlives ……………………………………………………… 189
2. Academic Afterlives …………………………………………………… 192
3. Artistic Afterlives ……………………………………………………… 194
4. Conceptual Afterlives ……………………………………………………. 195
References …………………………………………………………………………. 199
English Primary Texts ………………………………………………………. 199
Mandarin Primary Texts …………………………………………………. 199
English Secondary Sources ………………………………………………… 200
Mandarin Secondary Sources ………………………………………………… 210
PhD Dissertations: China …………………………………………………… 213
PhD Dissertations: Taiwan ………………………………………………. 213
MA Theses: China …………………………………………………………. 214
MA Theses: Taiwan …………………………………………………………. 215
Works Published in China, 2016-2018 ………………………………………. 217
Works Published in Taiwan, 2016-2018 ……………………………………. 219
Online Sources ……………………………………………………………… 220
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ABSTRACT
This dissertation, entitled Utopia Refracted through Mandarin Lenses, examines the legacy of
Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) in three aspects: translations, paratexts, and afterlives. It
explores how Utopia – as a book and as a construct – has been appropriated into the
Mandarin context during the process of linguistic and cultural transfer in the acts of
translation. Employing close reading, instrumental case study, and the concept of paratexts
to survey fourteen standalone Mandarin translations of Utopia, this study aims to fill in the
gap of a previously neglected aspect of utopian studies, especially its paratextual apparatus,
which has been almost entirely overlooked (with only one exception in 2003) since its first
translation in 1935.
This dissertation is structured into four chapters: the first chapter contextualises
Utopia in the original Renaissance context by providing its early publication history (Latin
and English) and by analysing the modes of narrative – fiction and dialogue – in which
More’s self-fashioning is manifest and where his hypothetical heterocosm is materialised.
All this substantiates how fiction, dialogue, and paratexts are integral to the shaping of
Utopia, without which a holistic reading is not feasible. The second chapter examines the
introduction of the concept of “utopia”, the first rendering of the title as wu tu bang, and
the two Chinese counterparts, a political Great Unity and a pastoral Peach Blossom Spring, with
the aim of uncovering the initial refraction through which Utopia was exposed to the
Mandarin-speaking readership.
Chapter Three considers the fourteen standalone Mandarin translations. It discusses
their stylistic features, material presentations, and translational peculiarities. By singling out
certain noted variances from the original, it is suggested that the Mandarin readers of those
specific editions have read an adapted Utopia that has created its own version of wu tuo bang
than More had intended. A further comparison also shows that translations as well as
publications touching upon Utopia that have been produced in China and Taiwan have, to a
certain degree, reflected upon the respective political tolerance of these two nations.
Acknowledging the bifocal significance of serio-jocularity that runs throughout
More’s Utopia, Chapter Four investigates the framing of Utopia, namely, the authorial
paratexts (1516-18) and the contemporary Mandarin paratexts. While identifying them as
part of Utopia’s afterlives, this chapter argues that the lost, reproduced, and added
paratextual components have packaged Utopia in a creatively semi-novel fashion, evincing
that fidelity should no longer be the sole criterion to be factored in when examining a work
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as transcendental as Utopia. Delving into Utopia’s recent afterlives, the concluding chapter
can be read as an independent survey. It perceives those afterlives in four facets: textual,
academic, artistic, and conceptual, while making evident that the utopian impulse goes
beyond the groves of academe and is the catalyst that raises people’s awareness to
challenge the unjust and to drive them forward.
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ABSTRAKT
Doktorská disertace s názvem Utopie prizmaty čínské kultury (Utopia Refracted through
Mandarin Lenses) se zabývá třemi aspekty čínské recepce Utopie Thomase Mora (1516) –
překlady, paratexty a díly, které Moreova kniha inspirovala. Zkoumá, jak byla Utopie jako
dílo i pojem v čínském kulturním kontextu přijímána prostřednictvím jazykových i
kulturních překladů. K osvětlení tohoto procesu používá interpretace textů a případových
studií. Ke 14 samostatným čínským překladům Utopie přistupuje jako ke specifickým
paratextům a soustřeďuje se také na další paratexty, které byly od prvního čínského
překladu Utopie v roce 1935 až na jednu výjimku (ve vydání z roku 2003) přehlíženy.
Disertace má 4 kapitoly. První zasazuje Utopii do renesančního kontextu a zachycuje
historii jejích jednotlivých vydání v latině i angličtině. Analyzuje dialogickou formu
Moreova vyprávění i jeho pojetí fikce, které dokumentuje utváření Moreovy subjektivity i
jeho hypotetického heterokosmu. Vše to dokazuje, jak se na utváření Utopie podílejí fikce,
dialog a jednotlivé paratexty, bez jejichž znalosti nelze dílo celistvě interpretovat.
Druhá kapitola zkoumá uvedení pojmu „utopie“ do čínské kultury překladem názvu
Moreovy knihy jako Wu tuo bang. Zabývá se také dvěma protějšky utopie v čínské kultuře –
politickým spisem Velká jednota a pastorálou Jaro broskvových květů, aby ukázala na odlišnosti
kulturního kontextu, v němž bylo Moreovo dílo přijímáno.
Třetí kapitola se zaměřuje na styl, překladové zvláštnosti a knižní prezentace 14
samostatných čínských překladů Utopie. Soustřeďuje se na jejich zjevné odlišnosti od
originálu a ukazuje, že tato vydání byla adaptacemi, které vytvořily vlastní wu tuo bang,
odlišnou od Moreovy utopie. Další srovnávání pak ukazuje, že překlady a publikace týkající
se Moreovy Utopie, které vznikly v Číně a na Taiwanu, odrážejí do jisté míry i politickou
atmosféru v těchto státech.
Čtvrtá kapitola potvrzuje, že rámcem Moreovy Utopie je směs vážnosti a komiky, která
je typická pro autorské paratexty z let 1516-18, ale také některé čínské paratexty. Některé
z naposledy zmíněných se dají označit za díla, která na Utopii navazují. Ztracené, znovu
vytvořené a přidané paratexty dávají Utopii částečně nový vzhled a ukazují, že věrnost
originálu nemůže být jediným hlediskem při zkoumání recepce tohoto nadčasového díla.
Závěrečná kapitola je pak samostatným přehledem zkoumajícím čtyři druhy nedávných děl,
která na Utopii navazují – informativní texty, vědecká, umělecká a konceptuální díla.
Ukazuje se, že utopický impuls překročil hranice univerzitního prostředí a začal probouzet
lidi k tomu, aby se postavili bezpráví a postupovali vpřed.
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RESUMO
Esta dissertação, intitulada Utopia refractada através das lentes do mandarim, analisa o legado da
Utopia de Thomas More (1516) em três aspectos: traduções, paratextos e "vidas
posteriores". Explora a forma como a Utopia – enquanto livro e enquanto constructo – foi
apropriada e adaptada ao contexto do mandarim durante o processo de transferência
linguística e cultural no processo de tradução. Recorrendo a estratégias de close reading e de
estudo de caso instrumental, bem como ao conceito de paratexto, para analisar catorze
traduções da utopia em mandarim, este estudo visa preencher a lacuna de um aspecto
anteriormente negligenciado na área Estudos sobre a Utopia, o do aparato paratextual,
quase totalmente negligenciado (com apenas uma exceção, em 2003) desde a primeira
tradução para mandarim, em 1935.
Esta dissertação encontra-se estruturada em quatro capítulos: o primeiro capítulo
contextualiza a Utopia no contexto original do Renascimento, oferecendo a sua história de
publicação inicial (em latim e em inglês) e analisando os modos da narrativa – ficção e
diálogo – através dos quais More se apresenta e onde o seu hipotético heterocosmo se
materializa. Tudo isso confirma a ficção, o diálogo e os paratextos como parte integrante
da formação da utopia, sem os quais uma leitura holística não é viável. O segundo capítulo
versa sobre a introdução do conceito de "utopia", a primeira tradução do título como wu tu
bang, e os dois contrapontos chineses, o texto político Grande Unidade e o texto pastoril A
Fonte de Flores de Pêssego, procurando deste modo desvelar a refração inicial através da qual a
Utopia foi exposta aos leitores falantes de mandarim.
O terceiro capítulo concentra-se nas quatorze traduções de Utopia para mandarim.
Discute as suas características estilísticas, apresentação de materiais e peculiaridades de
tradução. Pelo destaque de algumas variações observadas em relação ao original, sugere-se
que os leitores de mandarim dessas edições específicas leram uma utopia adaptada, que
criou uma versão do wu tuo bang distinta da Utopia inicialmente apresentada por More. Uma
comparação adicional mostra ainda que as traduções e publicações sobre o tema da utopia,
produzidas na China e em Taiwan, têm vindo a refletir, até certo ponto, a respectiva
tolerância política dessas duas nações.
Reconhecendo o significado bifocal da sério-jocosidade que perpassa a utopia de
More, o quarto capítulo investiga o enquadramento da Utopia, a saber, os paratextos
autorais (1516-18) e os paratextos mandarins contemporâneos. Ao identificá-los como
parte das "vidas posteriores" da Utopia, este capítulo argumenta que os elementos
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paratextuais perdidos, reproduzidos e adicionados conferiram à Utopia, de forma criativa, as
roupagens de um quase-romance, evidenciando que a fidelidade não deverá ser o único
critério a ser levado em consideração quando se estuda um trabalho tão transcendental
quanto a Utopia. Investigando as "vidas posteriores" da Utopia mais recentes, o capítulo
final pode ser lido como um estudo independente. Analisa essas vidas posteriores em
quatro facetas – textual, académica, artística e conceptual –, ao mesmo tempo que
evidencia que o impulso utópico vai para além do campo académico e é o catalisador que
sensibiliza os indivíduos para a necessidade de desafiarem o que é injusto, incentivando-os
a avançar.
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NOTES ON THE TEXT
The convention of spelling out the Mandarin names I adopt in this research is
pinyin. I do not insert the intonation marks for ease of reading and for consistency with
other sources such as news articles. The presentation of the names will be displayed in the
order as they are spoken in Mandarin: surname comes first, followed by given name,
without a comma in between, as standardised in Anglophone spelling.
The English text of Utopia I adopt in this thesis is from the Cambridge 1995
edition.1 For analysis or commentary from this edition, “Cambridge Utopia (1995)” will be
indicated in footnotes; whereas if words or passages from Utopia are quoted, the page
number will be given in parenthesis after the quotation in the main text.
All translations from Mandarin to English are mine, unless otherwise specified.
1 Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, eds George M. Logan, Robert M. Adams, and Clarence H. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
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INTRODUCTION
In 2013, Nan Fangshuo, a Taiwanese poet, published a magazine article entitled “Utopia
Teaches You How to Rule a Country”.2 Nan proposed what the Taiwanese president was in
dire need of in terms of ruling a country: disregarding self-interest and leading with virtue.
In Nan’s view, Utopia would teach the president selflessness and the necessity to be guided
by virtue. Nan did not mention the communal gist or the abolition of private property,
though, which are the most patent features of the political system described in Utopia; in
fact, the closest thing he brought up was that Utopians shared a high level of equality. In
the same year, Chinese scholar Gao Fang published “Also on Utopia” in one of the
Communist Party’s newspapers, Enlightenment Daily. 3 The article, which was widely
disseminated through a variety of platforms, chronicled the inclusion of More’s Utopia in
the history of socialist thought written in Mandarin. The last two lines in the article
deserve to be quoted in full: “Let me reiterate here: Utopia was published in late October,
1516. Our nation [the People’s Republic of China] has just recently begun to
commemorate the 500th anniversary of socialism, and the publication of Utopia marks the
formation of socialist thinking”4
These two articles appear to me as a fairly humorous comparison. On the one hand,
the Taiwan piece quotes Utopia to ridicule the then President Ma Ying-Jeou, who had been
in office since 2008.5 The second piece, in contrast, equates the history of Utopia with the
2 Nan, Fang Shuo 南方朔, “<wu tuo bang> jiao ni ru he zhi guo” <烏托邦>教你如何治國
[“Utopia” Teaches You How to Rule a Country]. Tianxia Zazhi 天下雜誌 16 Oct 2013
<https://www.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=5052998> 24 March 2017. Nan Fang Shuo is the pen name of Wang Xing-Qing. 3 Gao, Fang 高放, “ye shuo ‘wu tuo bang’” 也說“烏托邦” [Also on Utopia], Guangming Ribao光明
日 報 [Enlightenment Daily] 27 June 2013 <http://epaper.gmw.cn/gmrb/html/2013-
06/27/nw.D110000gmrb_20130627_3-12.htm> 10 Oct 2013. Hereafter “Also on Utopia”. The official English name for Guanming Ribao is Enlightenment Daily. It belongs to the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China. Gao Fang is Professor of International Relations at Renmin University, who has a column in News of the Communist Party of China, a branch of People Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. 4 The original reads: “我在这里再补充说明一点: <乌托邦>名著出版于 1516年 10 月下旬,
我国最近开始纪念社会主义 500 年,即以此书的出版作为社会主义思想形成的标志。”. 5 Ma finished his term of office in 2016. One of Ma’s policies was to maintain cross-strait peace with China, by keeping the status quo of “no unification, no independence, no martialism”. However, his overt favouritism has provoked criticism surrounding “dwarfing sovereignty” and the suspicion of the “selling of Taiwan”. One notable example was when Ma and the ruling party Nationalist Party, also known as KMT (Kuomintang), recklessly passed the Cross-Strait Service Trade
13
history of socialism, very much in the same way as the Russian Communist Party, following
Lenin’s suggestion, inscribed Thomas More’s name on the monument erected in 1918 in
the Aleksandrovsky Garden, near the Kremlin, to pay homage to the leading thinkers “who
promoted the liberation of humankind from oppression, arbitrariness, and exploitation”.6
In 2017, Gao Fang published another article in an academic journal about the
translation and publication history of Utopia in Chinese over the past one hundred years.7
Although Gao does provide an informative overview of the translation history, his
understanding of Utopia leans toward the ideological – and nationalistic – aspects,
especially in his three-page-long concluding remarks in which he praises China to be
leading the world to achieve “Worldutopia”.8 Gao does not conceal that he values Utopia
above all because of its political message. In his view, More was at the very beginning of a
process that, supplemented with Marx and Engels’s scientific socialism, opened up the way
to a socialism with “Chinese traits”, to be followed by a “World Socialism”.9 Once China
becomes “a prosperous, democratic, civilised, and harmonious socialist modern country”,
Gao writes, a “Chintopia” (China + utopia) will be created.10 With Gao, an Emeritus
Professor at the Renmin University of China (the first university established by the Chinese
Communist Party, in 1941), as well as a high-ranking member of the Party, we have a
superb example of how Utopia has been appropriated to serve the Chinese political agenda.
The articles mentioned previously, however, evince the fact that, five hundred years
after its publication, Utopia is still a workable reference for both the Taiwanese and the
Chinese, but to different ends. In the three cases brought up here, Utopia serves in Taiwan
as a vehicle of criticism of the former President and the ruling party for their acts
Agreement at the Legislative Yuan (parliament) within thirty seconds, unevenly favouring and allowing Chinese investments in Taiwanese service industries. In protest against this act of “selling Taiwan”, the Sunflower Student Movement in 2014 was formed. This student movement went viral, joined by Taiwanese abroad as an anti-black box movement. See, for instance, Keri Phillips, “Student Protests Over Free Trade Deal Shake Taiwan”, 29 April 2014 https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/taiwans-sunflower-student-movement/5418698> 19 September 2018. 6 For further information, see The Centre for Thomas More Studies at The University of Dallas, 2010 <https://thomasmorestudies.org/g-c1.html> 04 March 2018. 7 Gao, Fang 高放, “<Wu tuo bang> zai Zhongguo de bainian chuanbo—guanyu fanyishi ji qi
banben de xueshu kaocha” 《乌托邦》在中国的百年传播—关于翻译史及其版本的学术考察 [A Hundred Years of Utopia in China: A Scholarly Review of the History of Chinese Translators
and Translations of Utopia]. Zhongguo shehui kexue中国社会科学 (2017): 181-204. The English title
is the original. 8 Gao 204. 9 Gao 204. 10 The original reads: “富强、民主、文明、和谐的社会主义现代化大国”. Gao 204.
14
compromising democracy, while, in China, Utopia is an instrument for the dissemination of
communist ideology. The fact that Utopia remains a viable reference that is differently
applicable across the Taiwan Strait invites enquiry as to how Utopia has been translated and
received, as well as how the concept of utopia has been appropriated.
***
And yet, it took four centuries for Utopia to be translated into Mandarin. First published in
Louvain in 1516, More’s work, written in Latin, was translated into six European
vernaculars during the early modern period: German in 1524, Italian in 1548, French in
1550, English in 1551, Dutch in 1553, and Spanish in 1643.11 While the first English
translation saw the light in 1551 and enjoyed periodic cycles of reincarnation through
several retranslations in the centuries to come, a Mandarin edition was not attempted until
1935. Undeterred by its late arrival, the Mandarin Utopias12 blossomed in a relatively shorter
period of time compared to its English cousins: fourteen standalone editions can be
counted up to 2016, the quincentenary of Utopia’s first publication. Of the fourteen
editions, two are abridged,13 while one qualifies as an adaptation that reads almost like an
illustrative traveller’s tale;14 five were published in Taiwan (1957, 1966, 1978, 1997, and
2003),15 and the rest in China.
Telling the history of Utopia in Mandarin entails delving deep into the book and its
context. Although I acknowledge the importance of context (and I tackle it to a certain
extent in this dissertation), my main concern is with the book itself, in particular: 1) the
translations and mistranslations of Utopia (one can never forget how “Princeps Utopus”,
11 It should be noted that the first Italian edition was entitled Eutopia. See Gregory Claeys, Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011) 59. 12 I use “Mandarin Utopia” or “Mandarin Utopias” to refer to the target texts, firstly for ease of reading as well as for avoiding repetition throughout the dissertation. 13 The 1935 and 1957 editions are abridged. The 2005 edition is slightly abridged; yet because the content remains largely similar to the original, I exclude it from my consideration of abridged editions. 14 Hu Fengfei published two editions in 2007 and 2012; however, except for the change in book cover, variation was scant. I therefore consider Hu’s as one single edition, and I adopt the 2012 edition in this dissertation. 15 The 1997 edition was originally published in China, but this time it was entrusted to a different publisher and printed with different paratexts. The changes in ancillary items are the main grounds on which I consider it a separate edition.
15
the ruler who gave Utopia its current name, was rendered as King Utopus in half of the
Mandarin versions, effectively turning Utopia into a monarchy); 2) the appropriations (the
1957 edition, for example, forges the translator’s words as the original, articulating his view
on love and liberty); 3) the whole paratextual apparatus that was pivotal to the making of
Utopia (only one version [2003] includes a majority of the authorial paratexts, whereas the
most recent one [2016], surprisingly, excludes all).
By looking into each of these aspects, I aim at understanding the experience that
the Mandarin readers of Utopia have had for the past eighty years – that is to say, how
Utopia has been presented and re-packaged in its Mandarin afterlives, how these aspects
have influenced Utopia as a final translated product, and what kinds of Utopia have been
engendered through this appropriation. I borrow the phrase “afterlife” from Walter
Benjamin, who considers translation as the afterlife of the original: “For a translation
comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find
their chosen translators at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of
continued life.”16 I use the plural form “afterlives” deliberately, as Utopia’s legacy has gone
far beyond its translation: it is more than a textual reincarnation, having branched out into
multifaceted manifestations, including a commonly-used term, a graphic novel adaptation,
toponyms, the alias of a social media celebrity, and the naming of a recent large-scale
concert as well as a music festival, to name just a few.
My dissertation examines the textual legacy of More’s Utopia in Mandarin, primarily
via its translations and paratexts, as well as its appropriation in the modern context. Since
those documents constituting the paratextual apparatus take up a quarter of the whole of
Utopia as a printed volume as it first appeared, a holistic understanding of Utopia should be
approached in the light of them. 17 Similar works on Utopia’s paratexts in the major
European languages have been conducted in recent years,18 but such a project with regard
to Mandarin Chinese has not received the attention it deserves. My aim is to fill this gap.19
16 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens”, The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2000) 16. 17 This proportion is suggested by J. C. Davis. See Davis, “Thomas More’s Utopia: Sources, Legacy, and Interpretation”, The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 36. 18 See, for instance, Thomas More’s Utopia in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts, ed. Terence Cave (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2012). 19 One exception is the article published by Gao Fang in 2017, as discussed in passing at the outset of the Introduction. While he also tackles the translation history of Utopia in Mandarin, he does
16
The target areas of this study – China and Taiwan – share a spoken language but have
opposite ideologies. Taiwan prides itself on being one of the most democratic countries in
Asia, whereas with the Communist Party in power, the Chinese regime has in recent years
been trying to whitewash some of its human rights abuses,20 among others, and to advocate
its association with democracy on its own terms, as is shown in the previously quoted essay
from Gao Fang. The 2018 “Orwellian Nonsense” of China’s Civil Aviation Administration
ordering 36 airline companies to remove references to Taiwan as a country independent
from China has yet again escalated the tension in the region.21 It has not been easy to
explain the cross-strait tension in a few words; it is all the more difficult to tread on the ice
that is this cultural, historical, and national identity, without compromising the integrity of
my research. The similarities and (more evidently) differences led me to ponder what kinds
of Utopia would be translated and received on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
1 COMMEMORATION OF UTOPIA: TEXTUAL AFTERLIVES AND BEYOND
The quincentennial of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia was commemorated on a
global scale in 2016. As the impressive number of conferences, seminars, workshops, fairs,
festivals, cycles of music, concerts, book presentations, and a myriad of small, medium,
and large-scale events that were held in different countries attested, Utopia’s afterlives go far
beyond the book itself. 2016 and the year after saw two special issues of the Journal of the
Society for Utopian Studies, paying homage to the fifth centennial of Utopia’s first publication.
The first issue is divided into two parts, mapping the research activities in selected
countries in the hope of expanding transnational networking opportunities, and the
publication history of Utopia into these six languages. The second special issue, likewise,
presents two thematic discussions: the first half reconsiders fashion in the light of utopian
thinking that goes beyond academic discourse. The second half tackles the events taking
not analyse the texts via close reading, nor does he apply the concept of paratexts to his reading of Utopia, as I am proposing here. 20 For instance, see “China has Turned Xinjiang into a Police State Like No Other”, The Economist 31 May 2018 https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/31/china-has-turned-xinjiang-into-a-police-state-like-no-other> 10 Oct 2018. 21 See, for instance, David Shepardson’s “U.S. Condemns China for ‘Orwellian Nonsense’ Over Airline Websites”, Reuters, 5 May 2018 <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-airlines-china-exclusive/u-s-condemns-china-for-orwellian-nonsense-over-airline-websites-idUSKBN1I60NL> 12 June 2018.
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place in six selected European countries and titles related to utopia published in the said
countries as well as in China and Taiwan. I was fortunate enough to become aware of the
breadth and implications of utopian thinking while researching for my dissertation as a
member of CETAPS – the Centre for English, Translation, and Anglo-Portuguese Studies
– while the Utopia500 programme was being prepared.22 Not only was I invited to be part
of the Utopia500 team, but also to coordinate one outreach strand, Sounds of Utopia, which
I articulated with my work placement at Casa da Música. 23 I researched early modern
English and Continental composers and musical pieces that Thomas More might have
been exposed to or might have had contact with while he was writing Utopia, and located
the scores for my selection. This laid the groundwork for Sounds of Utopia,24 which was to
be made into a challenge for music enthusiasts to perform one of the selected pieces,
public or otherwise, in the manner in which it was initially played or in their own
22 Utopia500 engages in identifying activities pertinent to utopia taking place worldwide and making possible workshops, exhibitions, conferences, and performances to the public. The fact that Utopia500 benefited from trainees of the Erasmus+ internship from different countries is a telling reflection on the utopian spirit, in which boundaries are to be merged. 23 Another task during my stint there – observing two social inclusion projects – was in fact volunteer work that had, unexpectedly but gratifyingly, led to a concrete product pertinent to celebrating the themes of Utopia. A couple of personal life events prompted me to volunteer in the A Casa vai a Casa project that was being carried out by the Education Service of Casa da Música. It runs several sub-projects biannually, each of which is held once a week. I observed two workshops; one in a juvenile detention centre, and the other with patients from a psychiatric institution. The main objective was to stimulate artistic experience and to invigorate social inclusivity. An optional performance could be arranged during the last session of the workshop, and both groups opted for it. Observing this (and in a way being a participant) gave me some first-hand experience and reaffirmed how these are in fact the utopian manifestations that prioritise the involvement of underprivileged communities, with music as the essential ingredient. In this particular case, both the utopian spirit and music present possibilities and portray alternative realities – even just temporarily – that encourage inclusivity, harmony, and, for some, a sense of recognition and achievement. I suggested to the Education Service coordinator Jorge Prendas that the whole initiative, which was mainly but not limited to A Casa vai a Casa, was a de facto utopia (to appropriate this concept in a lay discourse) because it reached out and aimed to include everyone. Toward the end of my placement, Jorge came to thank me for giving them this idea and told me that there would be a concert named “Utopia” to be held on 22nd and23rd March 2016. Unlike the other ‘professional’ concerts performed by musicians, this concert was a collaborative effort between the workshop leaders and some of the underprivileged communities. It was gratifying to see that the relevance of utopia – in whichever form – was being further acknowledged and promoted, and that a concert was put together with a title that did not just celebrate utopia, but worked like a call to action. It was not a new thing for a social inclusion project to be developed into a formal performance, but it was the first time when the underlying utopian spirit of those projects was recognised, which saw the process of change taking place. 24 I selected pieces to be diverse both geographically (English or Franco-Flemish) and in genre (religious vs secular, a cappella vs accompanied), but the overarching selection criteria were based on representing the notion of musica reservata, the focus on lyrical expressiveness that often featured in early modern music.
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interpretation. 25 All this and more reflects that utopia has traversed far beyond the
common pejorative association of being a far-fetched abstraction.
While I was working within a European context, I kept asking myself how Utopia
was being celebrated in China and Taiwan. An invitation to contribute to the Utopian Studies
journal prompted me to research book titles relevant to Utopia published in China and
Taiwan from 2016 to the first half of 2017.26 Research for this article inspired my idea
(hence part of my dissertation title) of “textual afterlives”: how Utopia has been expanded
on in various versions of translations, as well as paratexts, and how this term and concept
has been appropriated to different ends, all contribute to its afterlives and the amplification
of Utopia’s legacy.
Entitling my dissertation “Utopia Refracted through Mandarin Lenses”, I read “lens” as
a metaphor at work with André Lefevere’s conceptualisation of refraction, or theory of
rewriting. Proposed by Lefevere, refraction is “the adaptation of a work of literature to a
different audience, with the intention of influencing the way in which that audience reads
the work”.27 In a general sense as how Lefevere defines refraction, adaptation can likewise
be taken within the realm of refraction, or a theory of rewriting. While Julie Sanders points
out that an adaptation is “an amplicatory procedure engaged in addition, expansion,
accretion, and interpolation”,28 I find Linda Hutcheon’s tripartite definition closer to the
discussion of adaptation in my project—especially the second point in which she
postulates that “the act of adaptation always involves both (re-)interpretation and (re-
)creation”.29 This brings up one crucial distinction between translation and adaptation, that
the latter shall not be bound to the traditional fidality criticism. Instead, adaptation is, as
Hutcheon suggests, “an act of appropriation or salvaging, and this is always a double
25 The trainees saw the rest of the preparation and its end result, which can be viewed here at Sounds of Utopia, 2016 <https://www.utopia500.net/sounds-of-utopia> 04 Feb 2017. 26 This is incorporated into Chapter Five of this thesis. In addition, an earlier (and much abridged) version of Chapter Two was to become the basis of the first article I contributed to the Utopian Studies journal. See Yi-Chun Liu, “Translating and Transforming Utopia into the Mandarin Context: Case Studies from China and Taiwan”, Journal of the Society for Utopian Studies 27.2 (2016): 333-45, and “The Textual Afterlives of Utopia: Titles Published in China and Taiwan since 2016”, Journal of the Society for Utopian Studies 28.3 (2017): 656-63. 27 André Lefevere, “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature”, The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2000) 35. 28 Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2005) 18. 29 Hutchen sees the phenomena of adaptation as three phases: as “a formal entity”, as “a process of creation”, and as “a form of intertextuality”. See Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006) 8.
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process of interpreting and then creating something new”.30 It is no longer a relaying of
words into different linguistic and semantic units; the source texts are filtered through and
coloured with the mediator’s interpretation and addition. Hutcheon offers a corrective to
viewing adaptation, that it is “a derivation that is not derivative – a work that is second
without being secondary. It is its own palimpsestic thing”.31 With an adaptation, there still
exists a reference point, namely the source text. They are comparative in nature, but they
shall not be taken hierarchically. It is not about whether an adaptation stays with or drifts
away from the source text, but how creatively it has sprung from it. Thus, whenever
adaptation is concerned, the focus goes beyond, in Douglas Lanier’s words, “an ethical
imperative of fidelity”. 32 Seeing adaptation from such a perspective deftly recognises
several of the Mandarin Utopias as an adaptive work. In particular, I refer to Liu
Chengshao’s (1957), Wu Lei’s (2005), Hu Fenghei’s (2007 & 2012) editions as such. Here I
understand adaptation not in terms of its commonly understood transposition, that of a
generic shift; rather, I consider the work whose translator’s voice overriding the original
narrative to be an adaptive work.
While both adaptation and refraction are about rewriting, what is also relevant to
my project is how Lefevere sees refraction at the service of influencing the target audience:
A writer’s work gains exposure and achieves influence mainly through “misunderstandings and misconceptions,” or, to use a more neutral term, refractions. Writers and their work are always understood and conceived against a certain background or, if you will, are refracted through a certain spectrum, just as their work itself can refract previous works through a certain spectrum.33
I use refraction as a phenomenon that covers both the act of translation and adaptation,
whose intention is to influence how a reader receives a work and whose end product is
filtered through the mediator’s interpretations. As if through a reading glass, we read a
translated work primarily through the mediation of the translator’s interpretation and
words. In the case of Utopia, “misunderstandings and misconceptions” are not infrequent.
Sometimes they appear as pure misunderstanding, sometimes as deliberate appropriation,
whereas there are times when they are the end-product of the translator’s obvious
30 Hutcheon 20. 31 Hutcheon 9. 32 Douglas Lanier, “Shakspearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value”, Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, eds. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) 21. 33 Lefevere (2000) 234.
20
negligence. More subtly, refraction in my project should be understood in a much larger
spectrum: Mandarin Utopias are primarily refracted through, but not limited to, its
translations; the Chinese archetypes delineating an ideal realm set the context for Utopia’s
initial refraction, which is further extended into its “stage of continued life” via means of
translations and texts appropriating the concept of utopia, ultimately amplifying its layers
of meaning and significance.
2 DEFINITIONS OF UTOPIA
The crucial first step in the modern study of utopia was […] the definitional one.34
The sixteenth-century neologism “utopia” consists of the prefix punning on eu and the
negation ou, and the suffix topos which stands for place. The negative etymology of utopia,
ou-topia, highlights its non-existence; in D. B. Fenlon’s phrase, it insinuates the futility of
attempting to reach utopia because any attempt is destined to “get nowhere”.35 The nature
of the non-existence of utopia is projected in the book’s original title, Nusquama, which
means nowhere in Latin.36 Paul Oskar Kristeller indicates that this coinage originates from
the ninth book of Plato’s Republic, where “the perfect republic [Socrates] and his friends
have been describing exists only in their discourse, but nowhere on earth (ges ge oudamou)”.37
Likewise, quoting Glaucon, Dominic Baker-Smith comments that the self-negating feature
of the invented names may serve as a homage to “Plato’s city of words in the Republic
which can be found nowhere on earth”.38 While Republic deals with the topic of an ideal
commonwealth in an argumentative way, and Utopia does so via a speculative approach,
34 Peter Fitting, “A Short History of Utopian Studies”, Science Fiction Studies 36.1 (2009): 125. 35 D. B. Fenlon, “England and Europe: Utopia and Its Aftermath”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25 (1975): 124. 36 Dominic Baker-Smith points out that as of September 1516, More still called this little golden book Nusquama, and that Erasmus, aiming for the same readership of his own Moriae Encomium (1511), was responsible for the final title Utopia. Baker-Smith, “On Translating More’s Utopia”, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 41.4 (2014): 492. See also Baker-Smith, More’s Utopia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000) 35. 37 Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Thomas More as a Renaissance Humanist”, Moreana 65-66 (June 1980): 10. 38 Baker-Smith (2014) 495. See also Baker-Smith, “The Location of Utopia: Narrative Devices in a Renaissance Fiction”, Addressing Frank Kermode: Essays in Criticism and Interpretation, eds Margaret Tudeau-Clayton and Martin Warner (London: Macmillan, 1991) 116-17.
21
Kristeller emphasises that they only “lived in [the author’s] discourse”, and that the
objective of creating such elaborate discourses was not for actual realisation (as their
authors were fully aware of the limitations) but to set up “exemplars worthy of imitation
and of approximation”.39 One crucial qualification of a literary utopia is reinforced here:
that it is meant for readers to challenge their current worldview. In other words, even if the
ideal world cannot be materially implemented, it is nevertheless a vision to work on, to
improve the status quo, and ultimately to transform and approximate the ideal.
In his elaborate volume Utopia and the Ideal Society (1981), J. C. Davis disputes the
two adjectives that are often adopted to describe utopia: “better” and “dream”. He
dismisses these two terms as not self-defining and too subjective: for him, “better” is not
precise enough, and a profound sense of impracticality is attached to “dream”. While
Davis avoids using the word “better”, he nonetheless proposes that the concept of
“betterness” does envisage a threefold taxonomy, all parts of which explicitly or implicitly
reject the status quo: a) an escapist dream; b) a satirical reflection; c) a blueprint for action.40
Even though the underlying connotations of “betterness” are commonly associated with
how one perceives utopia, Davis argues that it should be substituted with “perfection”,41 a
term that Lyman Sargent finds deeply problematic. “Perfection”, for Sargent, is a subjective
variant, dependent upon an individual’s preferred values and allowing no space for
improvement. Agreeing with Sargent but arguing from a theological standpoint, Gregory
Claeys contends that “‘perfection’ is essentially a theological concept which, while
historically linked to utopianism, defines a state that is impossible for mortals to attain in
this life”.42 Indeed, “perfection” is intrinsically excluded from this line of thought, which is
fundamentally about human beings in this life.
While “better” and “perfect” are often adopted to portray utopia, another
conventional way of defining utopia is to distinguish between utopianism, literary utopia,
and utopian theory. In his often-cited essay “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited”
(1994), Lyman Tower Sargent distinguishes utopianism, or what he calls “social dreaming”,
into three facets: communitarianism, 43 utopian social thought, and the literary utopia.
39 Kristeller (1980) 11. 40 J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 13-14. 41 Davis argues that the three cardinal features of the utopian form are totality, order, and perfection. See Davis (1981) 14. 42 Claeys (2011) 11-12. 43 Several labels have been adopted to refer to this subject—intentional community, collective settlement, alternative society, experimental community, among others—the first of which is the
22
Similar categorisation can be found in the work of Claeys (2011). In his lucid account of
the history of utopia, Claeys asserts that utopian studies are centred on three domains:
utopian thought, utopian literature, and improved communities – which shows the
development of an idea taking shape in textual form and/or being translated into action.
Whilst communitarianism is manifested in the form of intentional societies, utopian social
theory is understood, in Peter Fitting’s concise—though reductive—observation, “within
the history of the idea of progress”.44 The term “progress”, however, has been tainted with
a certain degree of ideological colour, depending on the context in which it is brought up.
Just as one man’s utopia is another’s dystopia, “progress” could mean massively different
objectives and agendas for varied groups, circumstances, and regimes. The Berlin Wall built
by the German Democratic Republic, Mao’s China where the Great Leap and the Cultural
Revolution took place, or the Bolshevik Revolution that created Soviet Russia – to name
just the obvious – all demonstrate how “progress” can be a very different construct for
different groups, and all this has regrettably rendered the idea of progress void of any
objective validity. Fred Polak puts it well that “once [a man] became conscious of creating
images of the future, he became a participant in the process of creating this future.”45
Adding to this, I suggest that our images of the future also help to shape the image of the
now, and that the actual future is built upon the here-and-now. This is why utopia ought to
be deemed a projective vision of our ideal, the pursuit of which has been the essence of
existence throughout human history. Literary utopias, such as Tommasco Campanella’s The
City of the Sun (1602) and Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), modelled on More’s
paradigm, indeed point to the projective and rationalistic nature of utopia, but the almost
instinctual reaction to transforming for the better should be understood as a basic human
need, without which humanity and human history would not have evolved as much. Such
projections necessarily involve progression toward the envisaged future, otherwise they end
most popular. While Sargent enumerates these variants, he suggests that the term “communitarian”—as “utopian” does in this context—connotes “an economic system without private property”, whereas the word “intentional” does not. See Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited”, Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 13-14. 44 Fitting 125. 45 Fred Polak, The Image of the Future, trans. Elise Boulding (Amsterdam: Elsevier Sdentific Publishing, 1973) 6.
23
up being empty talk, exactly like the pejorative undertone with which utopia or being
utopian has been often associated.46
In comparing the utopian visions of the East and the West, Zhang Longxi
proposes the following, which I find most suitable in understanding utopia on several
fronts:
Such a desire seems to be deeply ingrained in the very nature of the human condition, as no one in any society is unwilling, if not actively trying, to make life better and to achieve the optimum out of our limited resources and capabilities.47
This passage first explains the universality of the utopian impulse and then concludes with
the characteristic that distinguishes utopia from other forms of ideal societies – the human
capacity to achieve the optimum. Zhang opts for “better” over “perfect” here; he further
adds what I consider the most fitting phrase, trumping both better and perfect: “to achieve
the optimum out of our limited resources and capabilities.” The optimum is not just the
better, which is subject to the degree of goodness; it is also not perfection, which does not
make room for improvement and hence produces no sense of practicality. This urge to
achieve the optimum is grounded in the confidence that humans are capable of making
changes as well as in the awareness that what they have, in terms of resources and ability, is
not without limitation, thus demonstrating a kind of meliorism, a concept stressed by
Zhang in his analysis of Utopia, combined with a sense of humility. Or as Lucy Sargisson
comments on Ernst Bloch’s idea of “forward dawning”: “For Bloch, [the utopian] impulse
or propensity is grounded in our capacity to fantasize beyond our experience, and in our ability
to rearrange the world around us.”48
In an age of constant crises, I find Fátima Vieira’s article (2017) on political and
philosophical utopias opportune in portraying the contemporary utopian mentality.49 In
analysing how contemporary utopianism is primarily informed by a philosophical take,
Vieira discusses the distinction between the political utopia and the philosophical. She sees
46 For instance, in China, “utopian socialism” has been commonly rendered as “社會空想主義”,
literally “social empty-thought-ism”. An equation of “utopian” with “empty thought” is evident here. 47 Zhang Longxi, Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005) 165-66. 48 My emphasis. See Lucy Sargisson, Contemporary Feminist Utopianism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) 1. Sargisson uses the 1986 English translation of Bloch’s 1957 revised edition of The Principle of Hope. See Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, 1957) 3. 49 Vieira (2017) 63-75.
24
the fundamental difference in the attitude toward aiming to improve. That is, in the former,
the political project coincides with the utopian “dream”, whereas in the latter the dream
always exceeds the possibility of its realisation. Vieira resorts to Fernando de Mello Moser’s
proposal of seeing a dialectical structure in Utopia, i.e. that it is composed of Book One as
a thesis and Book Two as an antithesis, and solicits readers to produce a synthesis, “thus
escaping the circularity of the utopian discourse”, whose definitional tension is manifest
already from its etymological roots.50 That is, utopia, being a conflation of eu-topia and ou-
topia, is a good place that is a non-place, which means that while we know it is non-existent,
it is nevertheless a good place towards whose condition we should aspire. The constant
circularity rooted in the etymology of utopia was first proposed by Louis Marin, who
argues that this circularity makes utopia not achievable but at the same time provides a
space to express and to strive for the inexpressible.51 Vieira adopts Moser’s reasoning as the
grounds of her analysis, arguing that “[a]lthough […] utopia has lost the clear ideological
commitment it used to have at the time of the grand utopian narratives, contemporary
utopian thinking is still based on a dialectical strategy that the author expects the reader to
be involved with.”52 This call for readerly intervention, that the “reader is part of the
utopian equation”,53 is not a novel concept in reception theory; yet observing it from the
history of Utopia’s Mandarin translations (e.g. recent editions tend to present a flat
interpretation, thus evincing an insufficient understanding of the authorial paratexts that
are part of More’s utopian scheme) and how Utopia has been written about (i.e. recent
articles published in China demonstrate a significant rise in readerly intervention on the
level of the authors, most of whose intention involves disseminating socialist ideology),
Vieira’s postulation is instructive of how Utopia can be read afresh by situating readers on
the utopian equation and by exploring what syntheses are produced thereby.
50 Quoted in Vieira (2017) 64. The original is to be found in Fernando de Mello Moser, Tomás More e os Caminhos da Perfeição Humana (Lisbon: Vega, 1982) 19-35. 51 Eugene Hill, “The Place of the Future: Louis Marin and his Utopiques”, Science Fiction Studies 9 (1982): 167-79. Cf. Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (London: Macmillan, 1984). 52 Vieira (2017) 64. 53 Vieira (2017) 72.
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3 READINGS OF UTOPIA
The early reactions to Utopia, i.e. during More’s lifetime, either considered Utopia “vain
poetry” or attacked More for betraying the truth that he saw in order to climb up the
ladder of political influence. 54 Before the 1970s, interpretations of Utopia were a
straightforward “either-or” reading: a political treatise or a literary work representing
More’s fanciful aspirations. 55 While Elizabeth McCutcheon indicates a resurgence of
translations and editions of Utopia during the 1960s and 70s,56 Alistair Fox points out that
the 1970s witnessed a wave of modern critical theories that reshaped the reception of
Utopia.57
The two main conventional ways of approaching a text are firstly to see what the
author has in mind, as opposed to how and what audiences (readers, publishers, translators,
and editors) have done with the text. Fox defines it this way: to read a text either as how
the author negotiates his/her meaning, or to see how “part of the meaning of a text
resides in the responses that it elicits from readers”.58 The second approach, Fox indicates,
is fundamental to the new awareness, starting from the mid-1960s, that began to treat
Utopia “as an ironic representation rather than a straightforward narrative, in a long line of
such ironic works that appeared during the English Renaissance”.59 In discussing the critical
reception after the mid-60s, Fox pinpoints how the ambiguity throughout Utopia is due to
“its rhetorical structure and status as fiction”, thus making the existence of Utopia “less
final goal than a stance or state of mind”. 60 This ambiguity is the result of More’s
dividedness of mind which, I suggest, is manifest via the two narrative devices – fiction
and dialogue – to be delved into in Chapter One.
While earlier receptions tended to present an “either-or” dichotomic interpretation,
Fox indicates that recent scholarship, including postmodern theory, has reached a
54 Alistair Fox, Utopia: An Elusive Vision (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993) 17. 55 Fox suggests that the three major readings of Utopia before the 1970s were “that of the political theorists, the Protestant, and the Catholic”. See Fox 20. 56 Elizabeth McCutcheon, “Ten English Translations/Editions of Thomas More’s Utopia”, Utopian Studies 3.2 (1992): 108. This had a major reflection in the publication of the Yale edition in 1965, even though Fox maintains that the new awareness of seeing the ironic structure of Utopia did not appear in this authoritative volume. See Fox 21. 57 Fox 20-23. 58 Fox 21. 59 Fox 21. Cf. Harry Berger, “The Renaissance Imagination: Second World and Green World”, Centennial Review 9 (1965): 36-77; and W. J. Barnes, “Irony and the English Apprehension of Renewal”, Queen’s Quarterly 73 (1966): 357-76. 60 Fox 21.
26
consensus that a definitive reading of Utopia recognises its nebulousness.61 Almost three
decades have passed since Fox’s observation in the 1990s; this consensus has remained.
The grounds on which Utopia invites such profuse and vacillating readings, I believe, should
be traced primarily via its rhetoric, more precisely in its complexities, furthered by the
whole paratextual apparatus as well as the generic presentation of fiction and dialogue.
Richard J. Schoeck urges readers to “consider and accept the book as having a serious
purpose but [that it argues] through an ironic structure”.62 Schoeck’s argument is the result
of understanding the rhetoric of Utopia; indeed, we will discover the ironic function of
More’s paratexts that originally aimed at deluding readers into believing and simultaneously
challenging the island’s existential authenticity. For instance, A. R. Heiserman asserts that
the introductory apparatus was to ensure readers that Utopia “‘exists’ only in the manner
of all Platonic ideas – nowhere”. 63 Similarly, Alistair Fox acknowledges the mutually
contradictory readings that Utopia has generated, and postulates that the “breakthrough for
students of Utopia occurs when they recognize that the confused reaction they have to it is
the product of More’s rhetorical design”.64 Utopia’s rhetorical design is the main source of
perplexity and frustration of locking down a definite reading. David Bevington pinpoints
such dynamics in the opening of his essay, arguing that a critical reading of Utopia can be
approached from either a socialist or an anti-Communist perspective, thus leading to
Thomas More being revered by both Soviet Russia and the Papacy.65 Contrary to either
approach, one central theme in Utopia, communal property and whether or not More
believed in its feasibility, has likewise invited diverse interpretations. While the mention of
abolishing private ownership has been taken as the source of socialism, Stephen Greenblatt
offers a fresh outlook: “Like Marx’s early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, More’s work
propounds communism less as a coherent economic program than as a weapon against
certain tendencies in human nature: selfishness and pride.”66 Placing Utopia into the larger
context of delving into the root cause of its socio-economic injustice, Greenblatt’s
61 Fox 22. 62 Richard J. Schoeck, “‘A Nursery of Correct and Useful Institutions’: On Reading More’s Utopia as Dialogue”, Moreana 22 (1969): 19. 63 A. R. Heiserman, “Satire in the ‘Utopia,’” PMLA 78.3 (1963): 166. 64 Fox 27. 65 David Bevington, “The Dialogue in Utopia: Two Sides to the Question”, Studies in Philology 58.3 (1961): 496. Karl Kautsky also hailed More as the “prophet of modern communism.” See Fox 18. 66 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 36.
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approach is neither a communist nor conservative reading, but one that sheds light on
human nature.
Today Utopia has reached different nations and cultures, and readers of different
age groups, interests, and agendas. What are readers reading Utopia for? Readers choose
what they want to read. With a text that has been so versatile and liable to protean
interpretations, Lyman Sargent asks: “what does [Utopia] leave for those who do not know
how to read the text before they read it?”67 This is not just about those without a guide to
reading the work. More specifically, this enquiry is about those who have no prior
knowledge of the intricacies of Renaissance rhetoric, which had an immense impact on the
shaping of Utopia. I am analysing not how to reach a “correct” reading, but how
understanding the rhetoric of Utopia sheds light on the reading of it, especially for a target
group (for instance modern-day readers reading in Mandarin) whose prior knowledge of
Renaissance rhetoric is limited. What differences does it make to the reading experience to
have this rhetorical knowledge in mind? Or, to what extent do those differences hold sway
over the reading experiences, and how do they affect the lingual-cultural transfer of Utopia?
What kind of reading would be produced without being aware of paratexts, or without
recognising how fiction and dialogue are the founding stone of Utopia? “Does it matter?” –
that is the question.
4 CHINESE AND TAIWANESE RECEPTION OF UTOPIA
Published under the commemorative project of Utopia’s quincentenary, an essay by Pu
Guoliang, Professor of International Studies, Renmin University of China, discusses the
cultural and theoretical sources of More’s Utopia.68 The fictional nature of Utopia is not
stressed in the essay and by inference the inevitability of multiple readings of Utopia is
disregarded. When referring to the six-line verse written by the fictional Anemolius, in
which Republic is brought up in comparison to Utopia, Pu refers to this hexastichon as a
mere “序文” (a “prefatory article” in its literal sense) without further discussing the
67 Lyman Sargent, “Five Hundred Years of Thomas More’s Utopia and Utopianism”, Utopian Studies 27.2 (2016): 185. 68 Pu, Guoliang蒲国良, “Mo er wutuobang sixiang de wenhua he lilun yuanyuan” 莫尔乌托邦思
想的文化和理论渊源 [The Cultural and Theoretical Sources of Thomas More’s Utopia], Jiangxi
shifan daxue xuebao江西师范大学学报 49.5 (2016): 24-28.
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relevance of the paratextual apparatus contributed by More’s humanist coterie, evincing a
lack of knowledge about the concept of paratexts. An editorial note is appended prior to
the article, in which the editor Guo Ronhua outlines the “Chinese Dream”: that Utopia
infiltrated China with Liu Linsheng’s translation in 1935, and was to be rooted and
blossomed in Chinese soil, further combined with the ideal of Datong (the Great Unity),
and then the conflation was to become the primary source of the “Chinese Dream” for
which the Chinese strive.69 From highlighting Datong in the context of Utopia, readers get a
sense of how More’s Utopia is appropriated here as the Confucian concept of the Great
Unity, the same concept that was adopted by Dai Liuling in his 1956 edition as part of the
subheadings to books One and Two (though he curiously left it out in his subsequent re-
translation). More ideologically significant is how Guo says of Utopia that after it travelled
across the ocean, it was to be “deeply rooted in the fertile soil” that was China. That Guo
sees Utopia not just as a Western work and construct, but more crucially as a concept
assimilated into Chinese thought, speaks volume for how utopia is being received and
promoted at the higher educational level.
Pu Guoliang published another article in the same year, analysing the major
problems in studies of Utopia in China, the last of which is worth mentioning here: the
insufficient number of studies of Utopia in China.70 Pu places the reasons behind this
deficiency into four categories: that there has not yet been a detailed biography of More;71
that no critical and thorough studies of Utopia have been attempted; that knowledge of the
findings from international academe is wanting; and that the interdisciplinary exchange of
studies of Utopia is inadequate. To the latter, Pu attributes the fact that Utopia in China has
long been tinted with an intense ideological colour. In Pu’s original wording, this happened
“because of many reasons”, without specifying his precise rationale.72 Pu acknowledges
that Utopia is not just a work about socialism, but a classic that touches upon literature, art,
philosophy, and history. What is more, since the other disciplines are relatively free from
69 Pu (2016) 24. The relevant quotation from this passage reads: “莫尔的《乌托邦》飘洋过海来
到中国,深深地扎根于这片沃土,并与这片土地上悠远绵长的大同理想相结合,在这裡
生根、开花、结果,成为当下中国人为之奋斗的「中国梦」的一大思想源头。” 70 Pu Guoliang, “<Wu tuo bang> yanjiu zhong de jige wenti bianxi” <乌托邦>研究中的几个问
题辨析” [Analysis of Several Problems of the Study of Utopia], Fuzhou daxue xuebao福州大学学
报 134 (2016): 5-16. The other major problems include discrepancies about the author’s
biographical background and the exact dates of Utopia’s first publication; the connotations of the neologism “utopia”; the translations of the terms “utopia” and “utopian socialism”. 71 Pu lists two biographies of More, which were translated in Taiwan but have been difficult to get hold of in China except in a few libraries. See Pu (2016) 12. 72 Pu (2016) 10.
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the bounds of ideology, their progress has advanced more than those made in the study of
socialism.
Pinpointing the progress that is lacking in research into Utopia but arguing from a
slightly different perspective,73 Gao Fang observes that there has been a regrettable lack of
MA theses and PhD dissertations from a socialist research angle since the Chinese
economic reform in 1978 – “Reform and Opening Up” – and that although the Society for
Utopian Studies was founded abroad as early as 1976, 74 there have rarely been any
participants from China. Gao encourages a more active engagement in such international
networking opportunities, suggesting that it is a particular Chinese characteristic to research
utopian texts and experiments from a socialist perspective.75 The fact that Gao does not
simply mention the inadequacy of theses but instead describes a lack of them from a
socialist angle is itself a telling sign, not only confirming his role in the Party but further
evincing a loaded ideological proclivity in his approach to Utopia.
Despite Gao Fang’s authoritative status in regards to the study of Utopia and
beyond, he mirrors the theologian who was so taken in by More’s words that he ventured
out to locate the Utopian island. Although well aware that Utopia is a fiction, Gao contends
in one interview that Raphael Hythloday was in actuality a real person who was only made
out to be an invented character to serve the author’s objective.76 When asked whether he
agrees that the character and name of Hythloday are both made up, Gao replied assertively:
“I do not think so.”77 He questions the likelihood of the three prominent humanists’ –
More, Erasmus, and Giles – scheming upon falsifying the narrative. All these factors seem
to be Gao’s justification for his conviction that Utopia is an actual account only made up to
be a feigned one. Being one of the foremost scholars researching Utopia in China, Gao
could not have been this naïve and simply have walked away from all the evidence pointing
to Utopia being More’s own creation. Could it have been part of Gao’s intention of
73 Huang Shuai黄帅, “<Wu tuo bang> yu dangdai shijie he zhongguo—zheming xuezhe Gao fang
jiaoshou fangtanlu” <乌托邦>与当代世界和中国—着名学者高放教授访谈录 [Utopia, the
Contemporary World and China—Interview with Distinguished Professor Gao Fang], Dangdai shijie
shehui zhuyi wenti当代世界社会主义问题 130 (2016): 3-23. 74 Gao does not specify where the “abroad” might be. It can be verified that he refers to the Society founded in North America, which was in fact established in 1975 instead of the year after. Gao overlooks the Society of Utopian Studies in Europe founded in 1988. 75 Huang 4. 76 Gao stresses his stand in an interview with his student Huang Shuai. See Huang, “<Wu tuo
bang> xijie yishi kaobian” <烏托邦>細節軼事考辨 [Textual Research of Details and Anecdotes
in Utopia—Interview with Prof. Gao Fang], Shehui zhuyi yanjiu 社會主義研究 229 (2016): 1-8. 77 “我不以為然” is Gao’s original phrase. See Huang 4.
30
suggesting that all the socialist features portrayed in Utopia, such as communal property, are
attested historical facts? By asserting that Utopia is an authentic narrative documenting a
dialogue that truly took place, Gao’s approach renders Utopia not an ou-topia, but an eu-topia
that existed long ago on another continent. This line of reasoning, I suggest, could well
serve as a strategic pretext to introducing Utopia as a historical happening substantiating the
speculative grounds of the Chinese Dream, an approach that is so fervently advocated by
the current Chinese Prime Minister, Xi Jinping, as shown in his speech “Develop
Philosophy and Social Sciences with Chinese Features” delivered on 17 May 2016, in which
he refers to the classics that have influenced his thought; “Utopia by Thomas More” is the
third in line in Xi’s list, after Plato’s Politeia and Aristotle’s Politics.78
Like his article on Utopia’s translation history that ends on an ideological note, this
interview with Gao likewise celebrates the communist spirit, adding his own not-quite-well-
crafted neologisms: harmontopia, trutopia, goodtopia, beautopia, among others.79 Such invented
names, according to Fátima Vieira’s taxonomy, belongs to the class of derivative
neologisms.80 In Gao’s designation, true, good, and beautiful (真善美) are the salient
features that an ideal realm possesses. Once the three characteristics are achieved, the
harmontopia – the utopia of harmony – shall be attained; and this harmontopia is the
extension of communism operating on a worldwide scale, asserts Gao. Two intriguing
phenomena are observed here: firstly, a heightened sense of nationalistic ideology is
forthrightly proclaimed, believing China to be the leading force of the coming
“Worldutopia”; and that communism is advocated with counter-intuitive traits such as
“harmony”, a term that is often associated with pastoral visions such as Arcadia or the
Chinese archetype of the ideal realm, Peach Blossom Spring. Secondly, derivative results of
the sixteenth-century neologism “utopia” are being exercised here, but regrettably to a
poor end. What Gao Fang does is, through a reductivist approach, simply conflate two
Anglophone words to create his new terms. This is especially evident in the case of
“goodtopia”, which is simply a crude version of “eutopia”.
While there have been a number of academic debates on and propagation of
More’s Utopia in China, of the fifty-eight journal articles published in Taiwan between 2016
78 Xi Jinping, The Governance of China, vol. II (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2018) 366-77. 79 Huang 22. 80 Fátima Vieira, “The Concept of Utopia”, The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 3, 23. Ecotopias, alotopias, and most recently alimentopias related to food studies are the noted examples. The American computer-animated film Zootopia, released in 2016, also finely illustrates a derivative neologism.
31
to 2018 that I retrieved from Index to Taiwan Periodical Literature System, only one piece
touches upon Utopia’s fifth centennial. Even then, this article by Huang Hai centres on
science fiction, and the mention of Utopia is equated with the last Shangri-La. 81 The
distinguished sci-fi writer Zhang Xiguo, on the other hand, delivered a keynote speech in
2017 examining the idea of utopia and science fiction.82 Rather than delving into More’s
Utopia, Zhang starts with, in a general sense, the East’s and the West’s conceptions of an
ideal world, and further applies utopia to contemporary society, arguing that whichever
name “utopia” is called by, it all comes down to how a person settles in the world.
Expanding from the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s prospect-refuge theory,
Zhang suggests that the settling of a person is about prospect and refuge, that s/he departs
and strive for the bright, the prospect; and once it is achieved, s/he retreats to the hidden,
the homeland. Zhang relates this depart-retreat dichotomy to the ideal realms of the East
and West, arguing that the bright vision for which the Occidentals depart is Utopia and that
the hidden shelters to which the Orientals retreat is Peach Blossom Spring.83 This is a plain
generalisation that I myself take issue with. Yet this argument coming from an influential
sci-fi writer, who has written a collection of essays entitled Vtopia delineating a futuristic
virtual world,84 subtly highlights the common association of Utopia and Peach Blossom
Spring and insinuates a level of misconception that the reception of Utopia tends to be
refracted through. The lack of scholarly discourse on More’s Utopia in Taiwan85 and the
selected example of Zhang Xiguo’s understanding of the concept of utopia both
demonstrate that the study of Utopia in Taiwan is open to wider discussion. The above
indicate that Utopia in Taiwan has received fewer reviews than its more “fashionable”
81 Huang Hai 黃海, “Wu tuo bang wu bai nian yu Xiang ge li la” 烏托邦五百年與香格里拉 [Five
Hundred Years of Utopia and Shangri-La], Literature of the Saline Land 65 (2016): 203-10. 82 Zhang Xiguo 張系國, “Zhu qian bao, ke ji cheng yu wu tuo bang: wo de ke huan xiao shuo
chuang zuo zhuan ti yan jiang” 竹塹堡、科技城與烏托邦:我的科幻小說創作專題演講
[Zhubaobao, Science City and Utopia: My Lecture on Science-Fiction Creation], Zi ran, ren wen yu ke
ji de gong gou jiao xiang: di er jie zhu qian xue guo ji xue shu yan tao hui lun wen ji 自然、人文與科技的共
構交響:第二屆竹塹學國際學術研討會論文集 [Co-construction of Nature, Humanities,
Science and Technology: Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Bamboo Science] (Taipei: Wan juan lou, 2017). 83 Zhang Xiguo 14-15. 84 Zhang Xiguo 張系國, V Tuo Bang V托邦 [Vtopia] (Taipei: Tianxia Wenhua, 2001). The book
title V托邦 is a derivative neologism conflating “virtual reality” with “topos”. 85 This lack is partly due to “the general neglect of Renaissance and Reformation history” in Taiwan, as we will discuss further in Chapter Three, and partly due to the higher interest in modern utopias and science fiction than that in More’s Utopia. See Po-chia Hsia, “The Utopia in Chinese”, Moreana 69 (March 1981): 108.
32
distant cousin, science fiction; whereas it has drawn more attention in China, often
discussed in line with a socialist emphasis, and in some particular cases, with the
Communist Party’s promotion of the “Chinese Dream”.
5 METHODOLOGIES
5.1 CONCEPTUALISING PARATEXT
Ann W. Astell believes that studying the familial epistles, verses, and marginalia that were
printed in the first four Latin editions – or in her words the parerga – is the means through
which the original rhetorical context can be recovered.86 In fact, Astell emphasises that
More himself “attached great importance to the parerga as a way of placing Utopia within its
proper rhetorical context”.87 In discussing the fictional frame of Utopia, Dominic Baker-
Smith likewise refers to these “congratulatory epistles from men of note” as parerga, which
he defines simply as “the ornaments added to the text”.88 In order not to get mixed up with
Derrida’s use of the Greek word parergon, my project uses paratext to refer to all the
accompanying items outside the main text of Utopia. The concept of “paratext”, coined by
the French narratologist Gérard Genette in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, 89 has
frequently been referred to as a spatial category, e.g. “an undefined zone”, “an intermediary
zone between the off-text and the text”, 90 and “a transitional zone between text and
beyond-text”.91 As Genette reminds us, “[t]he word zone indicates that the characteristic
feature of this aspect of the paratext is basically spatial and material”.92 This textual – or
rather, paratextual – zone is pertinent to approaching a text because it has “the capacity to
86 Ann Astell, “Rhetorical Strategy and the Fiction of Audience in More’s Utopia”, The Centennial Review 29.3 (1985): 303. 87 Astell 303-04. 88 Baker-Smith (1991) 112. 89 This volume was originally published in 1987 in French, entitled Seuils, and was translated into English in 1997. Seuils means “thresholds” and, as Richard Macksey points out, possibly also works as a tribute to Genette’s long-time publisher Editions du Seuil. See Richard Macksey’s forward to Genette’s Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) xvii. 90 Genette 2. 91 Genette 407. 92 Genette 16.
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inflect the way we interpret a narrative, sometimes powerfully”. 93 To define and
conceptualise paratext, one must start from its etymological root para-, which specifies its
spatial feature of being beside or beyond. Items occupying a textual space other than the
main text become a metaphorical threshold connecting the reading experience with the
printed words. And yet, this relatively restrictive definition only depicts one dimension of
Genette’s taxonomy: peritext, or anything within the book such as prefaces, introductions,
explanatory notes, indices, chapter synopses, to name just a few. Epitext, on the other hand,
includes everything outside the volume, such as interviews, correspondence, and reviews.
In this exhaustive study that tabulates various categories of paratexts, the formula paratext
= peritext + epitext 94 is perhaps the most uncomplicated taxonomy that is based upon
spatiality within and outside the core text. There are, however, a wider array of taxonomies
that Genette postulates in his study.
Genette lists five paratextual characteristics: spatial, temporal, substantial, pragmatic,
and functional. The above classification – peritext and epitext – belongs to this spatial feature.
The temporal paratexts, on the other hand, are not as simple as during and after an author’s
lifetime, which can be termed anthumous95 and posthumous paratexts, respectively. There is
prior paratext that often appears in advertisements or announcements of an upcoming
publication; there is also original paratext, which by definition refers to the one that
“appear[s] at the same time as the text”96 but which is sometimes confused with authorial
paratext that, in most cases, is also original paratext.97 Whereas both “original” paratexts
and “anthumous” paratexts apply to those paratexts published between 1516 to 1518
which More had a hand in, I will primarily address them as “authorial paratexts” or
“Utopian paratexts” in my dissertation, so as to highlight the ones that received authorial
sanction and their closer association with Utopia at its initial stage of publication.
93 Horace Porter Abbot, ed., The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 239. 94 Genette 5. Anthony Pym, however, finds fault with the notion of epitext because it indiscriminately covers all sorts of reception. See Pym, “Translation Research Terms: A Tentative Glossary for Moments of Perplexity and Dispute”, Translation Research Projects 3, ed. Anthony Pym (Tarragona, Spain: Intercultural Studies Group, 2011) 93. 95 Genette adopts the neologism anthumous from the French humourist and writer Alphonse Allais (1854-1905), who used this term to specify those of his works published during his lifetime. See Genette 6. 96 Genette 5. 97 Genette draws attention to the possibility that a paratext can be both original and posthumous; that is, when a text is published posthumously. See Genette 6.
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The third paratextual characteristic – substantial status – designates the “how?” or
“the mode of existence”. 98 In other words, it explores how paratexts are manifested.
Textual – or verbal – paratext is the most common manifestation. Additionally, there are
iconic paratexts like illustrations and cover art; material paratexts such as the typographical
choices made during the publication process; and factual paratexts that can be as explicit as
award-winning bestseller status (operating like an endorsement) or sometimes the “implicit
contexts”,99 the less overt ones like the generic identification of the work and the historical
period in which the book was written or published. All this constitutes the auxiliary
knowledge by which the reading experience will inevitably be influenced. These additional
three subtypes of substantial paratexts – iconic, material, and factual – will all be included
in my project, with a particular focus on iconic paratexts, to be delved into in Chapter Five.
Following the substantial paratext is the pragmatic status, i.e. the characteristics of the
communication between the sender and receiver. Genette classifies pragmatic value into
three aspects: firstly, the nature of the sender (authorial or allographic100) and receiver (public,
private, or intimate paratexts); secondly, the degree of the authority and responsibility of the
sender; thirdly, “the illocutionary force of the sender’s message”.101 The illocutionary act is
one of the three linguistic acts put forward by J. L. Austin, referring to what is meant as
opposed to what is said, i.e. the locutionary act.102 Enumerating these possible practices,
Genette states that intention, interpretation, commitment, advice, and command could all
be part of the illocutionary act, making explicit the performative power of the message.
Commonly seen in the non-authorial (or allographic in Genette’s term) prefaces within my
investigation is the interpretation of and advice on how to approach a text. While a preface
may not have sufficient authority to persuade, prefatory writing inevitably serves as a guide,
introducing a text into a different context (culture or era), based upon the translational
interpretation and/or the editorial decision of making certain messages explicit to the
public.
Discussion of illocutionary force, as Genette notes, inevitably leads to the
functionality of paratext, which is of most crucial relevance among all the paratextual
98 Genette 4. 99 Genette 7. 100 ‘Allography’ or allographic paratext is used by Genette to refer to texts that “one person writes for another person’s work”, such as a preface or review. See Genette 5. 101 Genette 8. 102 John Langshaw Austin (1911-1960) was a British linguist who developed the speech-act theory. Of the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, particular attention has been placed on the second.
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characteristics.103 In fact, Genette’s explication of functionality best captures the whole
spirit of paratexts:
the paratext in all its forms is a discourse that is fundamentally heteronomous, auxiliary, and dedicated to the service of something other than itself that constitutes its raison d’être. This something is the text. Whatever aesthetic or ideological investment the author makes in a paratextual element (a “lovely title” or a preface-manifesto), whatever coquettishness or paradoxical reversal he puts into it, the paratextual element is always subordinate to “its” text, and this functionality determines the essence of its appeal and its existence.104
Paratext’s raison d’être is not just practical (in the case of physically constructing a book like
Renaissance book-making105), or aesthetic (such as enhancing marketability through a finely
designed layout), but most importantly, Genette postulates that it exists for the core text. A
paratextual item could be produced on commentary, explicatory, or manipulative grounds,
or as a result of other factors independent of the main text (such as an editorial preface
commenting on a specific book series to which the book belongs rather than commenting
on the book itself). Explicit or not, the aforementioned constitute the inextricably
intertwined connections between the text, paratext, the larger networks of meaning in
which the translations are produced, author, intermediary agent like an editorial team, and
the reader. A reader can never read a text alone; that is, a text never exists by itself. A
simple reading of a text by itself cannot account for the complexities embedded in and
generated by all the other (para)textual components.
103 Genette 407. 104 Genette 12. 105 In the early modern period, texts to be purchased were not presented in ready-made book form; instead, book purchasers often had to go to a binder to have the texts bound into one volume. As such, the paratextual materials provided crucial evidence as to where and how to properly construct a book. Depending on individual preference, book purchasers could also choose to bind different texts into one volume, making “each text a new peritext to its companions”. See Helen Smith and Louise Wilson, eds, Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 3. From this perspective, paratexts mattered in a significant way that they do not nowadays: these thresholds of interpretation were not only mediators of meanings, they catered to a necessity that is no longer present in modern book convention, that is, paratexts were constituent to the physical construction of the book as an object.
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5.2 REFRACTION VIA CULTURAL TRANSLATION AND PARATRANSLATION
Umberto Eco puts it well when he says that “translation is always a shift not between two
languages but between two cultures”.106 Translational peculiarities can be perceived as a
cultural phenomenon specific to the respective milieu. Seen in this way, Utopia should be
approached with the angle of cultural translation, rather than just a mere linguistic or
semantic transferal. As a concept, “cultural translation” has drawn attention in the field of
translation studies since George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
(1975). Steiner defines culture as the transfer of meaning as opposed to “‘linguistic-
semantic’ and text-based” translation.107 The most authoritative text on cultural translation
is perhaps Talal Asad’s “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social
Anthropology” (1986).108 Asad refers to the German philosopher Rudolf Rannwitz, who
holds reservations on how a language should be translated harmoniously, especially into a
remote target culture. He challenges the premise that a translator sets out wrongly:
They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English. […] The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.109
In response, Asad proposes that a good translator scrutinises his or her own state of
language, instead of assuming that the fault of “an absurd-sounding translation” lies in the
source text.110 Asad observes the power relation among languages and cultures that are
being inscribed by anthropologists; such power dynamics are not individually constructed,
but are “institutionally defined”, and often manifest in a colonial or post-colonial
context. 111 Similarly, in comparing Chinese and Western translational practices via a
historical survey, André Lefevere argues that the fact China has witnessed only three
106 Umberto Eco, Experiences in Translation, trans. Alastair McEwen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) 17. 107 Warren Boutcher, “From Cultural Translation to Cultures of Translation? Early Modern Readers, Sellers and Patrons”, The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500-1660, eds Tania Demetriou and Rowan Tomlinson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) 22. Cf. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 108 Talal Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology”, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) 141-64. 109 Quoted in Asad 157. 110 Asad 157. 111 Asad 157-58.
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developments of translational strategies in history reflects how China saw “the Other”.112
That “the Other was not considered very important” can be attributed to two factors,
namely that China deemed itself central and that it was a “relatively homogenous”
culture.113 This partially explains, among other factors, why the first Mandarin Utopia did
not see the light until as late as 1935.
My readings of Mandarin Utopias find resonance in Asad’s analogy with the work
of an anthropologist and psychoanalyst. Quoting a long passage from David Pocock on
social anthropologists’ nature as author-translators, Asad suggests a new take on the
author-translator collaboration: “if the anthropological translator, like the analyst, has final
authority in determining the subject’s meanings – it is then the former becomes the real
author of the latter.”114 Viewed from this perspective, several of the translators shall be
considered not just as collaborators in More’s Utopia – though not the real authors either –
but co-authors of its modern versions who have, through their own refractions, added or
subtracted layers of meaning to the original text.
While Genette does not discuss the relationship between translation and paratext in
depth, he has inspired subsequent researchers in the field of translation studies as well as
other disciplines such as media studies to explore this intricate interconnection.115 Şehnaz
Tahir Gürçağlar, for instance, brings up the fundamental baseline of the analogy between
translation and paratext: “Considering translation as a derivative activity always based on
another text that is chronologically anterior to it makes translation a commentary on the
original text, i.e. a paratextual feature presenting the original.”116 Expanding from this line
of thought, I concur that translation is a subtle act of commentary; even more so, it is
relaying and commenting on the original with other textual as well as non-textual
112 André Lefevere, “Chinese and Western Thinking on Translation”, Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, eds Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998) 13. Those three developmental phases are: during the second to the seventh centuries when the Buddhist scriptures were translated; beginning in the sixteenth century when the Christian scriptures were translated; and starting from the nineteenth century when Western thought and literary texts were introduced and translated. 113 Lefevere (1998) 13-14. The way China viewed the rest of the world was like, adds Lefevere, how classical Greece was not interested in “the Other”. 114 Asad 162. 115 For instance, Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar adopts Genette’s theory as a starting point and investigates the paratextual influence on Turkish popular literature, with special focus on authorship, originality, and anonymity. Contrary to how others believe translation should be read as paratext, Gürçağlar contends that this view is in fact a defective one because it limits the scope of translation research with an imbalanced focus on the source text. See Gürçağlar, “What Texts Don’t Tell: The Uses of Paratexts in Translation Research”, Crosscultural Transgressions: Research Models in Translation Studies II: Historical and Ideological Issues, ed. Theo Hermans (Manchester: St. Jerome, 2002) 59. 116 Gürçağlar 46.
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components, through which a text is re-presented and refracted. This brings us to a less
often discussed terminology, paratranslation, which Anthony Pym defines as the study of
translation “in constant relation to material supports, typography, images, voices, and the
extensive repercussions of paratexts within societies”.117 Or as Valerie Pellatt defines it in
broad terms, paratranslation is used “to denote the varied manifestations of translated
paratext”.118 This notion is closely associated with paratext itself.
Instead of looking at translation and paratext separately, my project with regard to
Mandarin Utopias is best understood from a paratranslational perspective, i.e. that the
written, iconic, material, and factual paratexts all constitute to the shaping of Utopia, and
that a translated work should be considered in not just the target text and paratexts, but all
the accompanying apparatus, including material manifestation, editorial intervention, and
the respective milieu in which the publication appears.
6 DISSERTATION STRUCTURE
In order to study how Utopia has travelled into the Mandarin ethos, I take a research path
divided into four stages, which correspond to four chapters. This Utopian voyage begins
with the basics: an overview of the publication history of its early modern Latin editions
published during More’s lifetime (1516-1519) and Ralph Robinson’s two English
translations (1551 and 1556). It is then followed by contextualising Utopia within
Renaissance rhetoric, in particularly by examining its two narrative devices, fiction and
dialogue. These two devices need to be applied both pragmatically and metaphorically, as a
channel to access Utopia, which was to become the epitome of More’s divided mind, best
illustrated by Stephen Greenblatt’s conceptualisation of self-fashioning into More’s role-
playing and More’s reflections on its limitations, or “his own incompleteness”.119 Fiction
and dialogue in Utopia are chosen for my analysis because they contribute to what I believe
is the structuring force of this narrative, ars est celare artem. The idea of ars est celare artem,
117 Pym 93. Paratranslation was developed by the School of Vigo, and is the founding stone of the new programme Translation and Paratranslation (T&P) at the University of Vigo. See José Yuste Prías, “Paratextual Elements in Translation: Paratranslating Titles in Children’s Literature”, Translation Peripheries: Paratextual Elements in Translation, eds Gil-Bajardí, Pilar Orero, and Sara Rovira-Esteva. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012) 118. 118 Valerie Pellatt, “Packaging the Product: A Case Study of Verbal and Non-Verbal Paratext in Chinese-English Translation”, The Journal of Specialised Translation 20 (2013): 86. 119 Greenblatt 33.
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“art lies in concealing art”, that art is achieved indirectly, is not a concept novel to Thomas
More. This force, that structures the utopian narrative, is achieved primarily via More’s use
of fiction and dialogue, contributing to the indirection without which any reading would
end up being too straightforward or one-sided. Or, in More’s case, it is the force used to
express his ideal vision indirectly. By reading Utopia paratextually, to see how Utopia has
been refracted through paratranslation, readers access Utopian paratexts as an extension of
the dialogue that was the agent of More’s self-fashioning.
The second phase of this Utopian journey travels to Chinese soil. It begins with the
first introduction of this concept into Mandarin via sources such as dictionary entries as
well as translations of other English political works. I then move on to discussing certain
traditional concepts articulating an ideal realm, in the hope of seeing how the reading of
Utopia may have been influenced by, or refracted through, the knowledge of archetypes. I
look into two particular concepts, which I term the Chinese counterparts of Utopia: the
pastoral Peach Blossom Spring and the political Da Tong [the Great Unity].
The third phase centres around Mandarin Utopias: the translation history and the
target texts themselves. This chapter introduces the translation history of the fourteen
standalone Mandarin editions, their styles, material presentations, features, as well as a few
mistranslations. The second half of Chapter Three employs close reading to compare the
translational variants among the Mandarin texts. Instrumental case study120 is the primary
method used to examine More’s invented names and a select passage: the peroration, where
“the most dramatic moment in all of Utopia occurs […] when the reader finds out whether
or not [Hythloday] succeeds with the most promising audiences, More and Giles”.121 A
general pattern is divulged by looking at how names have been rendered, and a different
Utopia than More had intended is discerned from certain mistranslations, especially in the
peroration.
The last phase tackles Utopia’s afterlives, by which I refer to its immediate textual
and visual afterlives (paratexts). Chapter Four is divided into More’s paratexts and Utopia’s
Mandarin paratexts, the latter of which include allographic prefaces and iconic paratexts.
The Chapter begins by analysing the significance, function, and effect of paratexts in the
120 Contrary to the intrinsic case study which is based primarily on one particular case with a descriptive approach, an instrumental case study requires interpretation and is “intended to provide insights into a wider issue” and “facilitates understanding of something else”. See Hossein Tavakoli, A Dictionary of Research Methodology and Statistics in Applied Linguistics (Tehran: Rahnama Press, 2012) 46-47. 121 Astell 306.
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early modern Latin editions that received authorial sanction, in the light of their
distinguished bifocal feature, serio-jocularity, as well as what their inclusion in, or exclusion
from, the Mandarin editions tells readers about Utopia’s textual journey. To be precise, I
divide the analyses of paratexts (both authorial and non-authorial) into three groups. In the
first group, I examine the authorial paratexts included in the Mandarin editions, which
allows me to understand how Utopia was meant to be read in its original milieu and how it
has been framed in a new context. I show much has been lost and reproduced, as well as
the effects of this on the reading experience. The second group includes the translators’
prefaces to respective Mandarin editions (part of which is explored in Chapter Three, but it
will be thematically discussed in Chapter Four): the examination of these translational or
allographic items enables me to understand reader response on the level of the translators.
To be specific, I examine: 1) whether or how fiction and dialogue, the two devices I
emphasise in my dissertation, have been discussed; 2) whether or not the paratextual
apparatus is explained; 3) how far the Chinese archetypes delineating an ideal world have
been used to portray – or to equate with – Utopia.
The third group engages with visual dimensions such as book cover and
illustrations. I read them both by the quantity and range of iconic paratexts included in
each edition and by a close reading of the non-authorial illustrations, discerning how
Utopia’s afterlives have been disseminated visually. My findings demonstrate how the
concept of utopia has thrived in both textual and non-textual, academic and non-academic
discourses. It is my intention to go back to the roots, Thomas More’s Utopia, and study how
this little golden libellus has been transplanted into Mandarin. All this will suggest that there
is no final phase of our Utopian expedition, that it travels on, as it is reincarnated through
refraction and through Utopia’s afterlives. This journey moves forward, and does not circle
back as Louis Marin suggests, because the utopian propensity to strive for the better is
universal, and all the contemporary texts appropriating the concept of utopia are a
corroboration of readers being on the utopian equation to produce, in Moser’s term, their
syntheses, the re-imaginations of a better alternative expressed in whichever format it comes
in. In this sense, the best image representing utopia is perhaps not of a circle but of a
spiral.
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CHAPTER ONE.
CONTEXTUALISING UTOPIA: PUBLICATION HISTORY AND RHETORIC
In order to locate Utopia in its original context, our Utopian journey commences with the
publication history of the early modern Latin editions that received authorial sanction, as
well as Ralph Robinson’s two English translations. This chapter then examines Utopia in the
light of Renaissance rhetoric, investigating More’s use of fiction and dialogue, both as
narrative devices and as philosophical concepts operating as a means of enquiring into the
alternatives, and of presenting More’s double-mindedness. The dynamics added to the
reading experiences are further amplified by the paratextual apparatus accompanying
Utopia’s publication, from its first appearance in 1516 down to the modern era in various
languages. The chapter then discusses More’s self-fashioning, in the light of paratexts as
extensions of the Utopian dialogue that voice More’s differing opinions. The first phase of
this Utopian sojourn, then, not only contextualises Utopia, but more importantly
substantiates how fiction, dialogue, and paratexts are integral to the shaping of Utopia, so
that neither can be considered without.
1 PUBLICATION HISTORY OF THE EARLY EDITIONS
Utopia is the brainchild of Thomas More’s observation of, critique of, and aspirations for
early modern England. The work was conceived in 1515 during More’s diplomatic mission
to Flanders; the mission was suspended in July but he did not return to England until
October. Those additional months spent on the Continent, during which time More was
relatively free from official duties, facilitated his composition of Utopia.122 The manuscript
was sent to Erasmus, who, along with the collaboration of other humanists, accelerated the
publication of Utopia by the end of 1516. The first edition of Utopia was printed in
Louvain by Dirk Martens; 123 with the growing popularity of the printing press, Utopia
reached a wider readership through re-publication in several other European countries as
well as its translations into the early modern vernaculars, namely German in 1524, Italian in
122 Cambridge 1995 (Utopia) xx. 123 The printer Dirk Martens is also known as Thierry Martin. Here I adopt the spelling used in Cambridge Utopia.
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1548, French in 1550, English in 1551, Dutch in 1553, and Spanish in 1643. In a study that
examines the Mandarin translations of Utopia, an overview of the publication history of
Utopia’s Latin editions and its first English translations is equally relevant in order to situate
the analysis in context.
1.1 EARLY MODERN LATIN EDITIONS, 1516-1519
The Latin editions of Utopia were in print from 1516 until 1777.124 The earliest Latin
editions include: Louvain 1516, Paris 1517, Basel 1518 (March and November), and
Florence 1519. The Louvain edition was printed by Dirk Martens, with Peter Giles being
the corrector and editor. This first printed edition, and logically the subsequent editions,
differed tremendously from its manuscript form in that a number of paratextual items were
appended. In describing the first four Latin editions, the Cambridge editors note three
points that distinguished the printed book from More’s manuscript: firstly, it contains a
collection of commendations solicited by Erasmus; secondly, a series of marginalia was
added by Erasmus and/or Giles; thirdly, some changes were made to the main text (by
Erasmus and possibly also by Giles), the most notable example of which being the
Graecisation of the proper nouns.125 Giles, a humanist and city clerk of Antwerp, is one of
the three interlocutors who participates in More’s imaginary dialogue in Utopia. The fact
that Giles was a real historical figure who at the same time served as a fictional character in
Utopia was one of the very first strategies that aimed at presenting Utopia as a true travel
account.
Not completely satisfied with the first edition, Erasmus asked More for a corrected
copy to be either printed in Paris or Basel, with the final decision being Paris. This time the
leading French printer, who was also Erasmus’s friend, Gilles de Gourmont, served as the
printer, while Thomas Lupset, to whom Guillaume Budé addressed a prefatory epistle that
appeared in this 1517 edition, was responsible for editing the proofs. Yet again Erasmus
124 Unless otherwise specified, the major reference for the discussion of the Latin editions is the Introduction written by David Harris Sacks for his edited volume of Utopia. See David Harris Sacks, ed. Utopia, trans. Ralph Robinson, 1556 (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999) ix. 125 Cambridge Utopia (1995) 271. George M. Logan, who provided the appendix for this Cambridge edition, offers two important instances where the proper nouns were changed from Latin to Graeco-based: the title (from Nusquama to Utopia) and the capital city of Utopia (from Mentirano to Amaurotico).
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was not at all satisfied with this corrected second edition. 126 The concern for better
representation – literarily and artistically – urged them to turn to the prominent scholar-
printer Johannes Froben, who then produced two editions in Basel, in March and
November 1518. Froben’s books were noted for their aesthetic values and visual
presentation, 127 which were reflected in not only their frontispieces but also, in this
particular case, the paratextual materials that the Basel editions carried. For instance, the
Utopian alphabets and commendatory verses, omitted in the 1517 Paris edition, were now
included again. The title page was designed by Hans Holbein, and a new woodcut map of
the island Utopia128 replaced the previous, much cruder map, whose artist is unidentified.129
All these aspects give the 1518 edition an aesthetical impeccability that best represented
More’s literary design; that is, an intellectual puzzle awaiting to be explored, resolved, and
possibly reacted to, through the reading of its texts and paratexts.
Not all translations use the same source text, but the most authoritative edition is
the March 1518 Basel edition, which was based on the 1516 edition, with more complete
ancillary items.130 The November 1518 edition is usually left out because it is “a complete
and close resetting of the March edition” and any changes were possibly made without
More’s authorisation.131 Following Froben’s model, Filippo Giunta’s heirs printed the 1519
edition in Florence; this time, however, none of the paratexts of the first edition were
present. 132 Interestingly enough, the 1519 Florence edition was printed alongside a
collection of classical texts and humanist works, including translations of Lucian’s works –
126 Vibeke Roggen, “A Protean Text: Utopia in Latin, 1516-1631”, Thomas More’s Utopia in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts, ed. Terence Cave (Manchester: Manchester Unviersity Press, 2008) 15. See also Cambridge Utopia (1995) 272. 127 Roggen 15. 128 McCutcheon, My Dear Peter : The “Ars Poetica” and Hermeneutics for More’s Utopia (Angers: Moreana, 1983)10; Roggen 15. 129 Sacks, ed., Utopia (1999) 78. 130 Cambridge Utopia (1995) 273. 131 Cambridge Utopia (1995) 273, quoted from Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter, eds, The Yale Complete Works of St. Thomas More. Vol. IV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965) cxc. Hereafter CW. 132 A new item was included in this edition, an epistle from Erasmus to Richard Foxe, who founded Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1516. The first English translator Ralph Robinson entered Corpus in 1536 and, as Terence Cave indicates, More’s and Erasmus’s works were studied there “as models of humanist Latin composition”. See Cave, “The English Translation: Thinking About the Commonwealth”, Thomas More’s Utopia in Early Modern Europe, ed. Cave 88. A link between Utopia and Corpus Christi College is first traceable in this prefatory item of the 1519 Florence Latin edition; in the second English translation of Utopia (1556), Corpus was printed in the title page as an introduction to the translator: “Raphe Robynson, sometime fellowe of Corpus Christi College in Oxford” (replacing “citizen and goldsmith” in the 1551 English title page). See “The English Paratexts”, esp. 205-10.
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Luciani opuscula – and it fundamentally conformed to the Basel editions.133 Fox observes
that More’s “encounter with Lucian was absolutely crucial to the development of his
mature vision and its literary and philosophical consequences were long lasting”.134 Indeed,
More was known for being the translator of Lucian’s work far before Utopia earned him
due reputation,135 and all this provides the implicit context for this 1519 edition. The fact
that instead of a volume of its own, the Florence edition was appended to other classical
texts rendered it a paratext of other core texts and thus may not contribute much to
research findings. No original Utopian paratexts were included with this publication; and
the fact that Utopia was placed at the very end means it might have been taken – for its
contemporaneous Italian readers – as “an afterthought” to other major classical works.136
The Cambridge editors suggest that “the relations of the first four [editions …] are
complex and each of these editions contains significant unique readings”. 137 Elizabeth
McCutcheon offers an overview of the early modern Latin editions and comments that
More and Erasmus “oversaw the preparation of the earliest editions”, namely the four
editions from 1516 to 1518. The concern for authorial sanction is undeniably a crucial
factor – though not always applicable – in considering the authenticity and faithfulness of a
translated work. In a work as convoluted as Utopia, a translation with authorial sanction
serves as a point of reference, thereby the preferred edition is the 1518 edition, which has
the most abundant paratextual apparatus.138
133 Cambridge Utopia (1995) 270. 134 Fox 35. 135 R. Bracht Branham states that More’s translations of Lucian had been published in fourteen editions by 1535, compared to six editions of his Utopia. See Branham, “Utopian Laughter: Lucian and Thomas More”, Moreana 86 (July 1985): 23. 136 Roggen 16. 137 Cambridge Utopia (1995) 270. 138 While this may hold true for the English renderings, however, it is not necessarily so for Mandarin Chinese, a language that is distinctively different from the Latin language family. The fact that the first Mandarin edition did not appear until as late as 1935, as well as several of the socio-cultural particulars, may have rendered the Cambridge editors’ said assertion less apt. To begin with, Latin has never been a mainstream subject of study in China or Taiwan. A quick look at all the translators involved in the process of translation reveals that very few had professional training in Latin; for Dai Liuling and Song Meihua who claimed to have referred to Latin editions, they were or are not Latin specialists, and hence the nuances from the Latin original may well likely not have been detected. There has already been abundant research conducted on the earliest Latin editions of Utopia. It is possible that the translators who claimed to have referred to the Latin text were in fact making use of the findings from these secondary sources to form and polish their own translated texts.
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1.2 RALPH ROBINSON’S ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS, 1551 AND 1556
Ralph Robinson, whose biographical background is obscure, was the first to produce an
English translation of Utopia. 139 Despite the critiques it received, Robinson’s edition
remained dominant for Anglophone readers for over a century, so much so that James
Binder contends that Utopia reaches the English-speaking readership primarily “via the
Robinson detour”, until Bishop Gilbert Burnet attempted another rendition in 1684.140
Robinson contributed two editions in 1551 and 1556, both published by Abraham Vele, but
printed by Steven Mierdman and Richard Tottel, respectively. David Harris Sacks provides
a concise account of the people involved in the publication of these two earliest
renditions.141 The translator, Robinson himself, as well as the publisher and printer of the
1551 edition, were all “Protestants working in Reformation London”,142 whereas the printer
of the 1556 edition was Richard Tottel, an Englishman – and more importantly a Catholic
– who overtook Mierdman’s job most likely due to the changing religious climate of Tudor
England. The change in editorial personnel reflects the shift in the socio-political milieu.
This reaffirms how general context may shape the process of textual production. Indeed,
the fact that the 1551 edition was published during the reign of Edward VI (who oversaw
Protestantism being recognised as the state religion) and the 1556 edition during the reign
of Mary I (who turned against Protestantism toward Catholicism) offers the implicit context
which serves, in Genette’s taxonomy, as the factual paratext143 to Utopia’s earliest two English
translations.
139 It should be noted that More himself was opposed to translating Utopia into English; hence Utopia was not available in English until 1551, after several other vernacular versions were published. See Lyman Sargent, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) 2. Reed Edwin Peggram suggests that this phenomenon is like other aspects of sixteenth-century literary history, where “England lagged behind the Continent on the one hand, and on the other hand threatened to rival her sister cultures in spite of her tardiness” and that Robinson’s translation is a demonstration of England’s “belated precocity”. See Peggram, “The First French and English Translations of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia”, Modern Language Review 100 (2005): 51-52. 140 James Binder, “More’s Utopia in English: A Note on Translation”, Modern Language Notes 62.6 (1947): 370. Likewise, Elizabeth McCutcheon suggests that Robinson’s translation “had acquired the status of a classical text before 1900”. See Elizabeth McCutcheon, “Review of Thomas More, Utopia, translated, edited, and introduced by Dominic Baker-Smith”, Moreana 50.193-94 (2013): 274-75 [hereafter “Review Essay”]. 141 Sacks, ed., Utopia ix. Sacks reports that the Robinson version was published four more times before 1640, in 1556, 1597, 1624, and 1639. However, studies have concentrated on the 1551 and 1556 editions, for these two are the ones with more individual research value. Unless otherwise specified, reference to these two English translations is taken from Sacks’ introduction. 142 Sacks, ed., Utopia 59. 143 Genette 33-34.
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This very first English rendition was nothing like its elaborate Latin cousins, in that
it had almost none of the original paratexts – not even the quatrain written in the Utopian
alphabet – nor the marginalia, which only appeared in the subsequent 1556 edition. In fact,
the only supplementary item added was a dedication to William Cecil, who was a
schoolmate of Robinson and from whom the translator had received financial aid. 144
Commenting on this “simple” and almost manuscript-like 1551 edition, David Sacks
suggests that it was done out of economic reasons, in that the publisher Vele aimed to keep
the price down so as to facilitate the book’s circulation, to the rich and the “middling sort”
alike.145 This line of reasoning may very likely be applicable, given the milieu in which the
translation was produced. Yet in doing so, the 1551 English Utopia was reduced to a travel
narrative suggestive of sardonic messages, and failed to make itself a complete cultural
artefact that could have represented More’s legacy.
While the 1551 edition was a “bare-bones effort”146 which was fundamentally a
reproduction of More’s manuscript, namely the two books of Utopia without the prefatory
epistles contributed by More’s coterie, the 1556 edition was a much-improved version, in its
correction, presentation, and appendages, that altogether helped reinforce the Utopian
discourse and image that More wanted to get across to his readers. Interestingly, the shift in
the political landscape that had an effect on the replacement of the first printer was also
mirrored in the changing of non-authorial paratexts in these two editions. With the
ascension of Queen Mary in 1553, William Cecil was no longer the principal secretary. To
avoid any possible persecution from the connection with Cecil, Robinson removed this
dedication; in place of this, there was an epistle to the general reader apologising for the
errors made in the first edition.147
David Sacks also lists events occurring during the respective years in which
Robinson’s translations were published. The first edition saw the light during a year of bad
144 By the time Robinson sought Cecil’s financial support, More’s name was already controversial due to his schism. Robinson’s choice was deliberate, knowing Cecil’s penchant for the writings of citizenship and governance. In fact, Cecil had already sponsored a number of writers and was in close contact with Sir Thomas Chaloner, who translated Encomium Moriae in 1549. It only seemed natural that William Cecil would offer his patronage to the translation of a work whose nature had been strongly associated with Encomium Moriae. See Sacks, ed., Utopia 60. 145 Sacks, ed., Utopia 62. 146 Sacks, ed., Utopia x. 147 The change reflects the status anxiety that Neil Rhodes detects in English Renaissance translations, whose paratextual items often witnessed a process of negotiation between socio-cultural statuses. See Neil Rhodes, “Status Anxiety and English Renaissance Translation”, Renaissance Paratexts, eds Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 2014) 108.
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harvest, 1551, also the year that witnessed “one of the worst outbreaks of social unrest
since Jack Cade’s Rebellion”.148 1556, the year in which the second edition was published,
continued to experience rocketing food prices, with an even worse harvest. A major revolt
against enclosure – an unfair policy that was also portrayed in Utopia – might have been
another catalyst for the re-publication of Robinson’s translation in 1597. The trade
depression and high unemployment rate in 1624 accompanied another appearance of
Utopia in the same year. “This publication pattern”, Sacks argues, “strongly suggests that
Utopia in translation had come to be viewed, at least by publishers, primarily as a work
speaking to the social, and especially the agrarian, problems of the age.”149 All these are not
just historical events; they reflect an interaction between text and context – in this case the
factual paratexts – that contributes not just to how a reader experiences a text, but to how a
publisher sees the need to re-publish an existing work.
2 RENAISSANCE RHETORIC
Elizabeth McCutcheon, like Dominic Baker-Smith, understands that More’s deliberate
choice to compose Utopia in Latin lies in his fine grasp of the potential readership and of
rhetoric.150 Rhetoric was part of the Studia Humanitatis; hence learned readers would have
few difficulties discerning the subtleties in Utopia, “a self-consciously rhetorical work”, as
Ann Astell calls it.151 Rhetoric as a general term is a means of persuasion, the art of
eloquence. It was a major component of the Renaissance curriculum. The Renaissance
itself represents a rebirth; in humanistic terms, it stands for the revival of classical rhetoric,
among other things.152 Studia Humanitatis, a Ciceronian phrase, designates a study of the
148 Sacks, ed., Utopia 67. 149 Sacks, ed., Utopia 68. 150 McCutcheon, “Review Essay” 281; see also McCutcheon, “Denying the Contrary: More’s Use of Litotes in the Utopia”, Moreana 31-32 (Nov 1971): 107. 151 Astell 302. 152 The Medieval Trivium includes rhetoric, logic, and grammar. This is also what Sister Mariam Joseph calls the three arts of language. Grammar was generally treated under the works of rhetoric and logic in Tudor England. See Joseph, Rhetoric in Shakespeare’s Time: Literary Theory of Renaissance Europe (New York: Harcourt, 1947, rpt. 1962) 4. John of Salisbury (c.1115-1180), author of Metalogicon (1159), defends logic in a broader category, treating the entire trivium as logic. See M. A. R. Habib, A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) 183.
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humanities that covers grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy.153 Alerting
us to the fact that this term has been applied indiscriminately to scholars who preached
“vaguely defined human values”, 154 Paul Oskar Kristeller specifies that Renaissance
humanists were a group of highly trained scholars who either taught or learned Studia
Humanitatis. In Thomas More’s case, the five branches of humanist studies manifested
themselves in different phases of his life and the works he engaged in.155 For instance, in
the field of grammar and history, More composed commendatory verses for grammar
textbooks, and gave lectures on Augustine’s City of God, in which Roman history was
among the major themes. His abundant knowledge of history, especially humanist
historiography, culminated in his History of Richard III, which More wrote in both Latin and
English but never managed to complete. In terms of rhetoric, among many of his other
achievements, More was a noted public orator, giving speeches on ceremonial occasions
such as welcoming Charles V on his London visit. As for poetry, More wrote both Latin
and English poems, the latter of which included some verse translations of Giovanni Pico
della Mirandola’s Latin prose pieces.156 Moral philosophy, to which political philosophy
belongs, is exemplified by his Utopia.
These disciplines are the basis of Renaissance philology. While both cover rhetoric
as part of their respective curricula, it is important to differentiate between what rhetoric
meant in the medieval trivium and in the Studia Humanitatis. Renaissance humanism overall
represents “a series of slow changes in the intellectual reorientation of European culture”,
specifically from metaphysics to epistemology, from viewing wisdom as “a contemplative
virtue” to viewing it as “virtuous action”, and from a quest for an absolute to a relative
good.157 The shift was reflected in the “other-worldliness” of the medieval scholastics to
153 Kristeller (1980) 5. Rhetoric in this study shall not be confused with ancient rhetoric, which underlined the juridical and the political, nor with the modern notion of “radical rhetoric” that highlights the propagandist connotation of this phrase; it shall also not be considered “the equivalent of empty rhetoric”, where excessive ornateness merely reflects pretence. See Kristeller (1979) 213, 242-43. 154 Kristeller (1980) 5. Referring to Kristeller, the Cambridge editors of Utopia remind readers that it was not about any specific philosophical position as there was no one commonly shared position; instead, Renaissance humanism was “a particular scholarly orientation”. See Cambridge Utopia (1995) xviii. 155 See Kristeller (1980) 6-7, 18. See also Cambridge Utopia (1995) xix. 156 More was primarily remembered as the translator and adaptor of Gianfranco Mirandola’s Life of Pico della Mirandola, published in 1510. 157 Walter Davis, “Thomas More’s Utopia as Fiction”, The Centennial Review 24.3 (1980): 250.
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the “this-worldliness” of Renaissance humanism.158 Rhetoric in the medieval trivium differs
from that of the Studia Humanitatis in that the former was criticised as abstract, “[having]
no true utility or direct relevance for human life”,159 whereas the latter was intended to
serve a good cause, despite how relative this concept could be. Distinguishing true
eloquence and sophistry, Hanna Gray observes,
true eloquence, according to the humanists, could arise only out of a harmonious union between wisdom and style; its aim was to guide men toward virtue and worthwhile goals, not to mislead them for vicious or trivial purposes. It was this conception of eloquence which the humanists placed in opposition to scholastic philosophy.160
Similarly, Walter Davis, in commenting on how rhetoric became an essential vehicle in the
Renaissance for moving people towards “virtuous action”, discusses the intersection of
wisdom and style: “Philosophy became ‘literary,’ and in many circles, literature became
almost as highly valued as philosophy.” 161 This shift in the essence of rhetoric was
exemplified in Thomas More, who demonstrated his true eloquence through his prolific
writings as well as lectures, as part of his instruments of engaging with current affairs.
The significance of Renaissance rhetoric manifests itself in the fundamental
generic presentation of Utopia, in which two of the three classical (rhetorical) genera are
embodied.162 Utopia is divided into two books. Book One, composed after Book Two,
consists of deliberative rhetoric. This type of oratory is usually a debate about policy or a
course of action, and is often presented via Platonic or Ciceronian dialogues. Expressing
two or multiple opinions in dialogic form, deliberative oratory is designed to persuade or
dissuade without particularly favouring either side of the dialogue.163 Book Two, composed
158 Habib attributes the causes of shifting from other-worldliness to this-worldliness to economic and political factors, namely the growing of trade and manufacture, the decline of the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy, to name but the obvious. See Habib 230. 159 Hanna Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence”, Journal of the History of Ideas 24.4 (1963): 501. 160 Gray 498-99. 161 Davis 251. 162 The three classical (rhetorical) genera are deliberative, demonstrative, and judicial, the last of which is devoted primarily to legal controversy and civil suits. Kristeller also reminds us that, unlike ancient rhetoric, Renaissance rhetoric was not mainly about political or judiciary oratory. See Kristeller (1979) 242. 163 Three common topoi of deliberative rhetoric include honestas (honour or morality), utilitas (utility or expediency), and necessitas (or “possible” in Quintilian terms). See John F. Tinkler, “Praise and Advice: Rhetorical Approaches in More’s Utopia and Machiavelli’s The Prince”, The Sixteenth Century Journal 19.2 (1988): 191.
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first and not in dialogic form,164 consists of demonstrative rhetoric. This is usually a speech
of praise or dispraise, and can typically be seen in praising civitas. Here the Second Book
epitomises demonstrative oratory in praise of the Utopian commonwealth. 165 In fact,
demonstrative oratory is usually more “allied to exaggeration and even fiction”.166 John F.
Tinkler therefore arrives at a fine line of reasoning that captures the rhetorical form of
Utopia: “When More switches from the deliberative mode of Book I to the demonstrative
mode of Book II, he switches from the realm of realistic deliberative advice to the realm
of hyperbole and fiction: the fictional quality of his Utopia or ‘Noplace’ is quite
conventional for demonstrative oration.”167 This analogy is pertinent not only because it
finely illustrates the compositional transition, but also because it brings up the other equally,
if not more, crucial element in the whole rhetorical structure of Utopia, namely the fiction.
3 MODES OF NARRATIVE
Rosalie Colie calls Utopia a mixture of genres that includes various literary topoi and
conventions.168 While different scholars have their own understanding of the nature of
Utopia’s mixed genres169 – though without major variations – A. R. Heiserman indicates that
this is what the Roman rhetoricians called satura, “a genre which mixes dialogues,
autobiography, fable, history, etc., to criticise human affairs”. 170 Even though not an
autobiography, Utopia does contain a high level of self-referentiality;171 while not a fable per
164 While most scholars recognise it as a monologue, or as Kristeller calls it “a dialogue only in name”, Edward Surtz argues that it should not be called monologue but a “one-sided dialogue”. See The Yale Complete Works of St. Thomas More, eds. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963) (hereafter CW) cxxxix. Quoted in Scheock 26. 165 George M. Logan, The Meaning of More’s Utopia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) 130n92. 166 Tinkler 192-93. 167 Tinkler 193. 168 Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973) 19, 76-102. Quoted in Marina Leslie, Renaissance Utopia and the Problem of History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998) 2. 169 For instance, Marina Leslie suggests that in composing Utopia, More “includes” literary conventions such as “imaginary voyage, speculum principis, model commonwealth, dialogue, satire, paradoxical encomium, epideictic oratory”, among others. See Leslie 2. 170 Heiserman 11-14. 171 Even though Utopia is in no way More’s autobiography, McCutcheon points out that there is a sense of self-referentiality implicit throughout the whole narrative. See McCutcheon, “Puns, Paradoxes, and Heuristic Inquiry: The ‘De Servis’ Section of More’s Utopia”, Moreana 51.201-02 (2015): 93. See also Kinney, who, in commenting on the compositional sequence of Utopia, suggests
51
se, the fictive element of fable is identified in Utopia’s “feignness”. Beginning with historical
events and continuing on to a dialogue, Utopia is a critique of More’s contemporary society.
All these elements together place Utopia in the realm of satura. Satura refers to a medley –
“a medley of metres, or of prose and verse” – but the first application of it to literature is
not certain. 172 Henry Nettleship suggests that its connection to literature might be
metaphorical and that satura was first used as a term “for a dramatic performance or a story
which was a medley of scenes and incidents”.173 It was only until the time of Quintus
Ennius (239-169 BC), who was “usually accounted Rome’s first writer of satire”,174 that
satura began to be developed into literature or, in Nettleship’s words, “a literary luxury [that
was] capable of a tone somewhat more serious than would have been suited for the stage
and the general public”.175 As far as the stage is concerned, one of the constant features of
satura is that it is “a description of isolated scenes, but never contains a regular plot”.176 The
other feature that has been preserved is that there is “a strongly-marked personal element”,
of which dialogue is an integral part.177 Satura underwent some changes in the hands of the
Roman satirist Lucilius (c.180-c.103 BC), who introduced the element of invective into this
genre. Lucilius’s satura was loaded with the influence of Greek comedy, in which personal
attack was prominent. 178 Horace criticised Lucilius for maintaining only the invective
element of the old comedy but failing to retain the jocular quality. In fact, Horace’s Satires
were “intended as a protest against that of Lucilius” in that the former left out invective,
the essential part of this genre introduced by Lucilius.179
These two constant features of satura find resonance in More’s Utopia. Book One is
relayed in a dialogic form, whereas the whole of Utopia is invective in disguise. How
Nettleship describes the spirit of the true satura likewise applies to Utopia:
that Book Two was intended as a work in its entirety and that it was “a self-contained and self-referential oration in praise of the ideal commonwealth”. See Arthur Kinney, “Rhetoric as Poetic: Humanist Fiction in the Renaissance”, ELH 43.4 (1976): 427. 172 Henry Nettleship, The Roman Satura: Its Original Form in Connection with Its Literary Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1878) 3. 173 Nettleship 3. 174 Kirk Freudenburg, “Introduction: Roman Satire”, The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 2. 175 Nettleship 5. Quintus Ennius was the Roman dramatist and epic poet who cultivated Roman literature that was strongly influenced by the Greek model, best known for the Annales. 176 Nettleship 17. 177 Nettleship 16-17. 178 Nettleship 6-7. 179 Nettleship 14.
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The speaker does not preach at or abuse, but describes and reflects upon the life of his contemporaries, and that with a mellow and genial wisdom. Like the fool in the tragedy, he stands at the centre of things, professing to see through imposture, to read things as they are, to expose the vanity of human wishes and the weakness or hypocrisy of human pretensions: above all things he is a plain speaker who will tell the world the truth to its face.180
Raphael Hythloday, the speaker of nonsense, is this wise fool that stands at the fringe of all
vices, observing, exposing, and ridiculing with his vain chatter, disguised in More’s
meticulously devised fictional frame.
3.1 FICTION IN UTOPIA
Either as a political satire or a jeu d’esprit literary piece, Utopia in contemporary reading is
considered to be fiction because the Utopian island and its people are fabricated. It is an
invented narrative mixed with historical anecdotes. In fact, Walter Davis points out that
while More’s first published work was the co-translation (with Erasmus) of Lucian’s prose
fiction, Utopia is in fact More’s “only fully developed work of fiction”.181 It is important,
however, to understand the fiction in Utopia not just as a literary genre but also as a
philosophical concept. Some critics, like Alan Nagel, confuse fiction with falsehood;182
however, lying should not equate to fiction or fictionality. This should be how we approach
the concept of “lying” in reading Utopia. As Nagel notes: “The author, again like Raphael,
just might be an inveterate liar; after all, he chose to translate Lucian’s Philopseudes, or ‘lie-
lover’”.183 There is always an element of reality or truth in fiction. Truth is not to be sifted
out from fiction. The American philosopher Nelson Goodman puts it well when he says
that “fiction cannot be about anything nonactual, since there is nothing nonactual, no
merely-possible or impossible worlds; […] Fiction, then, no matter how false or how far-
out, is about what is actual when about anything at all.”184 Goodman’s definition brings
180 Nettleship 13. 181 Davis 249. 182 Alan F. Nagel, “Lies and the Limitable Inane: Contradiction in More’s Utopia”, Renaissance Quarterly 26.2 (1973): 173-80. 183 Nagel 179. 184 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) 158. Iser quotes from Nelson Goodman’s definition of fiction; see Of Mind and Other Matters (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1984) 125.
53
home what Darko Suvin calls the utopian genre as the “possible impossible”.185 In a similar
vein, Hayden White argues that this is “what Aristotle had in mind when, instead of
opposing history to poetry, he suggested their complementarity, joining both of them to
philosophy in the human effort to represent, imagine and think the world in its totality,
both actual and possible, both real and imagined, both known and only experienced”.186
This is where the compelling intersection between fiction and fact emerges. Harry Berger
indicates that fiction is “etymologically and semantically related to terms meaning invention,
creation, construction, and to terms meaning illusion; it suggests both something made and
something made up”. 187 However, in explaining the Latin roots of fiction and fact, Martin
Procházka suggests that these two terms are in fact not so remote, and that fiction should
not be confused with illusion or fallacy. 188 Borrowing Leibniz’s term “compossible”,
Procházka points out that whereas Renaissance artists are often considered “the creator[s]
of the ‘second nature’”, in the eighteenth century, along with the advent of modern science,
“fiction is […] connected with a notion of the ‘second world’ or ‘heterocosm’ which is
‘compossible’ […] with the world created by God, yet by no means imitating or even
resembling it”.189 Harry Berger reminds readers that by the time of Leibniz and Newton,
the second world appears to be considered to be superseding the first world.190 “Like God,
the poet chooses from the infinite number of possibilities, materialising some of them in
the ‘heterocosm’ of his artwork”, writes Procházka.191 This “heterocosm”, literally another
universe, finds resonance in fiction as a means of creating an alternative world. We should
understand Utopia as a heterocosm presenting possibilities. This is where I distinguish the
viewing of fiction in Utopia on two fronts: pragmatically to use it as a narrative device, and
philosophically to understand it with the concept of heterocosm, a medium of
encompassing, experimenting, and exploring alternatives in the hands of the writer.
185 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979) 43. 186 Hayden White, “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History and Historical Reality”, Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 147. 187 Berger 41. 188 Martin Procházka, “Fiction in Science and Literature: Language Structures as Interfaces”, Pierres Gravées: Mélanges in Memoriam Michel Viel, ed. Yann Migoubert (Paris: Sorbonne-É ditions du relief, 2011) 237. 189 Procházka 238. 190 Berger 45-46. 191 Procházka 238-39.
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Already in early modern times, George Puttenham had adopted the term
“heterocosm” to describe the poet as the creator of another world.192 The construct of
seeing the artist as the creator of a second nature was developed by Sir Philip Sidney, who
argued:
Onely the Poet disdeining to be tied to any such subjectiõ, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into an other nature: in making things either better then nature bringeth foorth, or quite a new, formes such as never were in nature: […] her [nature’s] world is brazen, the Poets only deliver a golden.193
Devoting a subchapter to discussing the poem as heterocosm, M. H. Abrams specifies the
changing metaphor of the poem, from “imitation, a ‘mirror of nature’ [to] ‘that of the
poem as heterocosm, ‘a second nature’, created by the poet in an act analogous to God’s
creation of the world”.194 And poets, who display in poems their vision of the world, are
creators no less crucial than God. I am referring to poetry within the framework of this
thesis because poetry and fiction were interchangeable concepts in the Renaissance. Joseph
Levine suggests that there is a new sense of historical consciousness in the Renaissance in
terms of fiction, as opposed to how fiction was treated in the Middle Ages, where it was
“passed off as histories, or written histories into which they intruded fiction, almost
without criticism”.195 Likewise, what Abrams explains of the essence of poetry, I believe,
effectively captures Utopia’s nature as a heterocosm: it is “an object-in-itself, a self-
contained universe of discourse”.196 Indeed, More creates a different world in and with
Utopia, a fabricated realm embodying his aspirations as presented in a textual narrative.
Details of this ideal land are illustrated with a strong element of ekphrasis,197 the objective
of which is to “set it before our eyes”, as the Greek rhetorical tradition goes, especially
with the paratextual apparatus reinforcing this sense of vividness, making Utopia truly “a
self-contained universe of discourse”.
192 Quoted in Meyer Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Norton, 1958) 273. 193 Sir Philip Sidney, The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, Volume III. Defence of Poesie; Political Discourses; Correspondence; Translations, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923) 8. 194 Abrams 272. 195 Joseph Levine, “Thomas More and the English Renaissance: History and Fiction in Utopia”, The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500-1800, eds Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 83. 196 Abrams 272. 197 For a discussion of ekphrasis, see Carlo Ginzburg, No Island Is an Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000) 5.
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Fiction as a textual cradle nurturing potentialities is reflected in Dominic Baker-
Smith’s observation of the general pattern in reading Utopia: an emphasis on the Utopian
institutions over the mediating dialogues, the blueprint over the fiction,198 and that fiction
“is seen as more of a narrative device than an exploratory medium, and this seems to be
true of most readings of Utopia down to relatively modern times”.199 Seeing fiction as an
exploratory medium echoes my proposed second dimension of fiction in Utopia: that of a
heterocosm encompassing and exploring possibilities, a textual space for poet or fiction
writer to create, to enquire, and to trial. The fiction in Utopia provides the testing ground –
or the heterocosm – in which potentialities find materialisation. Stephen Greenblatt also
suggests that More’s predilection to “frame his fancy” evinces his “constant recourse in his
writing to the hypothetical situation”.200 Walter Davis, similarly, uses Cardinal Morton’s
commentary in Book One of Utopia to testify to his own argument that “[fiction] was
hypothesis or exploration, an image in words of what might be true or should be true”.201 To
Hythloday’s proposal of punishing criminals not by hanging but by making them slaves,
Cardinal Morton has, in fact, a welcoming attitude: “It is not easy to guess whether it would
turn out well or ill inasmuch as absolutely no experiment has been made” (81). Cardinal
Morton is portrayed here as a man receptive to hypotheses; More’s putting his vision down
on paper reflects his own proclivity for experimenting and exploring. Returning to my
distinction of fiction as a narrative device and a philosophical concept: fiction is the literary
medium that carries More’s heterocosm, the second world that has one foot in reality while
simultaneously presenting and testing an alternative betterness. Walter Davis’s concluding
remark finely sums up how to approach fiction in Utopia:
Surely the novelty of Utopia in Thomas More’s time lay not only in the communism of Utopia […] but also in his mode of presentation, in his fiction. Utopia is not an argument for communism. It is not an argument at all (Book I told us that). It is a fiction. The invitation Thomas More held out to his contemporaries was to enter into a whole new way, a hypothetical way, of thinking about life.202
198 Baker-Smith (2014) 493. 199 Baker-Smith (2014) 494. 200 Greenblatt 32. 201 Walter Davis 253. Davis argues that Morton is portrayed as a man who “tries to weld together ideals and facts by means of testing, by hypothesis—his is a provisional mind that plays with ideas, he is the hero of hypothesis”. See Davis 255. 202 Davis 268.
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3.2 DIALOGUE IN UTOPIA
The literary device that More adopted for Book One is what Edward Surtz calls “dramatic
dialogue”.203 I identify with A. E. Malloch’s definition of a dramatic speech:
a natural condition of dramatic speech is that, though it proceeds from an author, it achieves a status independent of the author. The dramatic author can manipulate speech without associating himself ‘personally’ with it. He can exploit falsehood without becoming a liar. He can make untruth serve the cause of knowledge.204
Unlike the Platonic dialogue which “simulates the give-and-take of actual conversation”,205
the dialogic form that More adopts is closer to the Ciceronian dialogue, composed of
lengthy speeches with occasional interruptions, presenting alternatives without offering a
definite conclusion.206 This, according to Baker-Smith, “had traditionally been the preserve
of philosophical authors”. 207 Without referring directly to the function of Ciceronian
dialogue, Quentin Skinner suggests that with all the ironies and unresolved obscurities in
Utopia, More’s intention was to challenge readers to “consider seriously whether Utopia may
not represent the best state of a commonwealth”.208 What is implied here is that a book
delivered in a fusion of serio-jocularity, ending with an inconclusive peroration, points to
the function of Ciceronian dialogue of persuading and dissuading without favouring either
side. It leaves readers to contemplate the potentialities and practicalities of establishing an
ideal commonwealth if modelled on the particularities in Utopia.
Richard Schoeck advises readers not to think of dialogues in too literary a way, as
the conversation between interlocutors at a given scene. Rather, attention must be paid to
the different levels of dialogue occurring in Book One. Schoeck specifies three levels of
dialogue at work: firstly, the conversation between More, Giles, and Hythloday as well as
the imaginary dialogues that took place at Cardinal Morton’s table some twenty odd years
previously. The second level of dialogue involves the epistles among More’s humanist
coterie that were published alongside Utopia. Those epistles were aimed at “continuing the
203 Edward S. J. Surtz, “Aspects of More’s Latin Style in Utopia”, Studies in the Renaissance 14 (1967): 93. 204 A. E. Mollach, “The Techniques and Function of the Renaissance Paradox”, Studies in Philology 53.2 (1956): 195-96. 205 George M. Logan, “Utopia and Deliberative Rhetoric”, Moreana 31.118-19 (1994): 105. 206 Cambridge Utopia (1995) xxii-xxiii. 207 Baker-Smith (1991) 118. 208 Quentin Skinner, “Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism”, The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 124. Emphasis mine.
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dialogue”.209 This metaphorical dimension of dialogue links to my analysis of the Utopian
paratexts, in particular those with authorial sanction (1516-1518). More’s humanist friends
that contributed to the prefatory apparatus were an “outer audience [functioning] as an
extension of the fictive humanist audience More creates within Utopia itself ”. 210 Seen from
this view, those paratexts inherently extend the Utopian fiction into a larger spectrum that
crosses the persona More’s reportage and authorial More’s real-life occurrences211, making
paratexts an essential element in accessing More’s Utopia. This level is reflected in how
Harry Berger distinguishes Utopia as “three moments”.212 In a similar vein, Dominic Baker-
Smith reads it as “three concentric circles”, composed of Hythloday’s portrayal of Utopia,
the scene-setting conversation in the opening of Book One with the discussions of the
social maladies of England and Europe, rounded up by the paratextual material.213 The
dialogue in Book One and Hythloday’s monologic account of Utopia are mentioned in
both Berger’s and Baker-Smith’s threefold categorisation. The difference between them lies
in the weight given to the paratextual apparatus: whereas Berger highlights a specific epistle
from More to Giles, the Prefatio,214 Baker-Smith understands all of the ancillary material as
equally crucial in constituting this layer of the concentric circles. Berger’s emphasis on the
Prefatio is reflected in the frequency of its inclusion in the Mandarin editions. As readers
move on to the epistles and commendatory epigrams from Utopia proper, they are
immersed in a lengthened narrative, wondering whether it is a fiction, a real account, or an
amalgamation of “sham historicity”. 215
The third level of dialogue is that Utopia provided an external model that had never
been seen before in Europe. Schoeck contends that before the sixteenth century Europe
was a remarkably closed society that had no other political or cultural models, except “the
209 Schoeck (1969) 25. 210 Astell 304-05. Schoeck notes that all these humanists wrote “from their own national and cultural communities”, thus providing alternatives to contemplate and expand. See Schoeck (1969) 25. 211 For the historical figure Thomas More as opposed to the character he penned in Utopia, I use authorial More and reportorial More (or persona More) to distinguish between the two. 212 The three moments include More’s first epistle to Giles, the First Book of Utopia, and Hythloday’s monologue which takes up the bulk of Book Two. See Berger 61, 71. Berger’s article is the abridged version of his book Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). In my thesis, I use Berger’s article version as reference. 213 McCutcheon, “Review Essay” 280. 214 Berger underlines the use of present tense in this letter being characteristic of the epistolary form. See Berger 61. 215 Baker-Smith, More’s Utopia 76.
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Platonic communities of the past and their like”.216 Unlike Aristotle’s and Plato’s models
that are “purely argumentative”, Utopia establishes a speculative model that sets the author’s
vision in a fictive setting. As Schoeck remarks, “[o]nce published, the Utopia offered such
an external model, for like any Renaissance poem it imitates, represents, and figures
forth”. 217 Of the three levels of dialogue, it is the second dimension, paratexts as an
extension of the Utopian dialogue – hence fiction – that I highlight in my dissertation.
4 MORE’S SELF-FASHIONING IN UTOPIA
Utopia as a whole has inspired a wide range of sometimes vacillating commentaries. More
had given those ideas – those opposing voices in the dialogue – much consideration, and
elaborated on them both in content and in form. These conflicting viewpoints lead readers
to another crucial point of interrogation: self-fashioning, and Stephen Greenblatt’s
theorisation is of enduring relevance in envisaging More’s dividedness of mind, manifest
primarily in the dialogue. Greenblatt explains that the starting point for his seminal book
Renaissance Self-Fashioning is that in sixteenth-century England there was a strong sense that
selves could be fashioned.218 Greenblatt observes that, at that time, “there appears to be an
increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable,
artful process”.219 Fashion was a strong currency “as a way of designating the forming of a
self ”,220 and self-fashioning had also acquired different meanings. Above all, its sense as
representation is pertinent to understanding the individual roles of More: “it suggests
representation of one’s nature or intention in speech or actions.” 221 Here we have the
persona More engaging in a fictional dialogue with yet another made-up figure, Hythloday,
and the account is documented by the authorial More, whose viewpoints represented by
his persona are undetermined in a real-life context, open to interpretation. Greenblatt
postulates that such a way of viewing self-fashioning brings us back to literature, because
self-fashioning “functions without regard for a sharp distinction between literature and
social life”. Social life, in More’s case, will be his public self and private self fighting against
216 Schoeck (1969) 25. 217 Schoeck (1969) 25. 218 Greenblatt 1. 219 Greenblatt 2. 220 Greenblatt 2. 221 Greenblatt 3.
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each other over whether to enter the King’s service, as demonstrated in Book One of
Utopia, among his other concerns.
Joseph Levine argues that More’s self-consciousness of his own conflicting
viewpoints and his willingness to display them in a written dialogue to be published was
pioneering in English literature, 222 substantiating “an increased self-consciousness [in
sixteenth-century England] about the fashioning of human identify as a manipulatable,
artful process”.223 If self-fashioning was about identity formation, then self-reference ought
to play a major role in this “artful process”. McCutcheon suggests that there is
an oblique self-referentiality about the discourse, made wholly visible when Hythloday explains how Utopians treat fools, that allows the authorial More to signal his consciousness of the text and reinforces the joco-serious perspective that grounds it and invites a multifaceted response from the reader.224
Such self-referentiality can be located at different points in Utopia. To begin with, More
himself was educated in Latin from an early age, and his Latin style was highly admired by
his fellow humanists. Despite the fact that he learned Greek only later in life, his mastery in
Greek was no less appreciated than his Latin.225 The self-referentiality in the storyline, then,
is exhibited in the experienced sailor Hythloday, whose mastery in Greek was better than
his Latin. In addition, Levine applies the concept of self-fashioning to More in regards to
the two orders of friars in Utopia. One order of friars is the ascetics, refraining from eating
meat; they are celibate and considered holier. The second order of friars participates in the
Utopian life and is considered the wiser. Levine makes the analogy that these two orders of
friars are like monastic life as opposed to public employment, as well as medieval
Christianity, which valued contemplative allegiance, as opposed to Renaissance humanism,
which highlighted active allegiance.226 These two polar opposite variations, however, were
embodied in the authorial More himself, not only in different periods but at times also in
the same phases of his life. It was about this time that More was considering whether to
enter King Henry’s service. The fact that More was aware of this unresolved dividedness
222 Levine 91. 223 Levine 71; Greenblatt 2. 224 McCutcheon (2015) 93. Similarly, Kinney contends that by beginning Utopia with historical events and by employing the author himself as an interlocutor, Utopia has been credited with being “extraordinary in [its] degree of self-reference”. See Kinney 440. 225 Kristeller indicates that the two lengthy epistles that More wrote to Martin Dorp and to Oxford University had addressed this subject. See Kristeller (1980) 6. 226 Levine 76.
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of his inner self and that he was not reluctant to convey it in Utopia renders it not just a
narrative satirising the social woes and portraying an ideal country, but more significantly, it
means that it represents a dialogue with and within More himself. 227 Or in David
Bevington’s words, it is “a dialogue of More’s mind with itself ”. 228 Such a dialogue
exemplifies Greenblatt’s conceptualisation of self-fashioning, which “occurs at the point of
encounter between authority and an alien.”229 The authority would be the Court and the
Church in which More took on a featuring public role; the alien, or the “threatening Other”
as Greenblatt calls it, would be More’s humanistic, heterocosmic vision against the
Institutions, manifested in the representation of the Utopian society. More importantly,
Greenblatt argues that self-fashioning “involves submission to an absolute power or
authority situatied at least partially outside the self ” and that when these two opposing
forces are located outside the self, they are simultaneously “experienced as inward
necessities”.230 Indeed, we find the most complex voices emerging at the intersection of
More’s public self and his private self: the persona More seems to have taken with most of
Hythloday’s propositions, except entering the Court and abolishing private property. This
ambivalence is not conclusive either in Book One or Book Two of Utopia, further
intensifying More’s self-fashioning and self-cancellation, the convoluted interplay of the
authority and the alien.
While the persona More is “a fictional caricature of author More’s uncertainty”,231
the mariner-narrator Raphael Hythloday in the dialogue, according to Greenblatt,
“represents all that More deliberately excluded from the personality he created and played;
he is the sign of More’s awareness of his own self-creation, hence his own
incompleteness”. 232 Attempting to negotiate his incompleteness via the creation of a
distinctive character, More “allows his public self and his excluded self to fight it out”.233
More’s public self is the one that entered the court, whereas the excluded self was the one
on the verge of entering a monastery for good. In Utopia, the persona More represents the
public self, whereas Hythloday is the “carefully crafted identity” that was excluded from the
227 For similar observations, see Levine 76-77. 228 Bevington 497; cf. Robert C. Elliott, “The Shape of Utopia”, English Literary History 30 (1963): 317-34. Bevington also calls this conflict “the two polarities of More’s own mind”. See Bevington 498. 229 Greenblatt 9. 230 Greenblatt 9. 231 Gerard Wegemer, “The Rhetoric of Opposition in Thomas More’s Utopia: Giving Form to Competing Philosophies”, Philosophy and Rhetoric 23.4 (1990): 288. 232 Greenblatt 33. 233 Fox 23.
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public self.234 Greenblatt’s chapter primarily discusses “the complex interplay in More’s life
and writings of self-fashioning and self-cancellation, the crafting of a public role and the
profound desire to escape from the identity so crafted”.235 Which was the self-fashioning
and which was the self-cancellation? Was the public self to be fashioned or cancelled? The
question was to be debated in Book One of Utopia; what is to be fought out, therefore, was
the inconclusiveness of More’s ambivalent vision. If this line of distinction is not made
accessible as the background knowledge to reading Utopia, the debate about whether to
enter the King’s service as well as the dispute between the friar and the fool in Book One
may appear to be unrelated anecdotes, taken merely as part of the storyline. This
ambivalence is not only strengthened in the peroration, where readers are to find out
whether Hythloday’s viewpoints are accepted by Giles and the persona More, but also in
the Utopian paratexts that function as an extension of the dialogue, which substantiates yet
again the importance of a paratextual and paratranslational approach to reading Utopia.
5 CONCLUDING REMARKS
The first phase of our Utopian sojourn set out with the publication history of the early
modern Latin editions published during More’s lifetime (1516-1519) as well as Ralph
Robinson’s two English translations of 1551 and 1556. The shifting of paratexts included
in these editions offers a clue as to how the changing milieux influenced what was to be
selected in a printed volume, further evincing the need to approach Utopia paratextually.
With this basic layout in mind, readers were then brought into the rhetorical context in
which Utopia was born. A critical reading of Utopia demands an engagement with its
rhetoric, especially so because it was conceived in an era in the curricula of which rhetoric
played a pivotal role. Renaissance rhetoric was different from that of the medieval trivium
primarily because the former was used as a vehicle for affairs of “this-worldliness”; it was a
product born out of the marriage between wisdom and style, in pursuit of urging people to
act virtuously. More’s moral and political wisdom was well merged with his eloquence
written in the libellus, in the form of deliberative and demonstrative oratory, a grand vision
disguised in dialogue and fiction. I then discussed the modes of narrative, specifically
234 Greenblatt 36. 235 Greenblatt 13. Fox, however, also points out how some critics find fault with Greenblatt’s self-fashioning for being too clumsy as theory of identity formation. See Fox 23.
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dialogue and fiction in the light of both narrative devices and philosophical concepts, the
latter of which was intended as a means to divulge More’s self-fashioning and to present
his hypothetical heterocosm. More’s Utopia, then, is his vision of what an ideal
commonwealth might be like if certain rules were followed; it is More’s heterocosm in
which he experimented with possibilities that found no materialisation in real life. All this
contributed to the reading experience for More’s intended early modern readership. That is
to say, fiction, dialogue, and paratext are tightly interlaced. While all Mandarin Utopias retain
the modes of narrative, the original paratexutal apparatus has chiefly been overlooked,
rendering a less holistic grasp of Utopia during the process of this cultural transferral. My
dissertation argues that it is through an awareness of these three that an informed reading
of Utopia is feasible, and that Mandarin Utopias, despite the degree to which they have been
refracted through translation, ought to approximate this level of representation if they are
to be faithful to More’s intention.
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CHAPTER TWO.
ARTICULATING UTOPIA IN CHINESE: INTRODUCTION AND ARCHETYPES
The second phase of the Utopian journey takes readers to Chinese soil, to see the before
and the during of this transplantation of text and concept. The first half of Chapter Two
discusses the initial introduction of the concept “utopia”, before the work itself was
officially translated into Mandarin in 1935. The latter half of the chapter takes readers a
step further back into two Chinese traditional concepts, Peach Blossom Spring and Da Tong,
also called the Great Unity or the Great Harmony. Moving from the Renaissance context
into the Chinese one, this phase investigates utopia’s first introduction and two archetypes
of ideal realms, aiming to uncover the initial refraction through which Utopia was exposed
to Mandarin-speaking readership.
1 THE FIRST INTRODUCTION OF THE CONCEPT “UTOPIA”
While Utopia as a book was not translated into Mandarin until 1935, the term “utopia” had
been introduced a few decades before any translation was attempted. This uniquely crafted
translation of the sixteenth-century neologism “utopia” is a beautiful conflation, with its
proximity to both sound and meaning. The first character, 烏 [wu], means dark; and most
importantly, it underlines the quality of being unreal or non-existent. When combined with
有 – “to have” – it highlights the sense of make-believe. A common idiom 子虛烏有 [zi
xu wu you], a conflation of an ancient person 子虛 with the term 烏有, literally means –
often pejoratively – pure imagination or an unreal thing. 烏 replaces the first two characters
of 無何有之鄉 [wu he you zhi xiang], sometimes written as 烏有之鄉 [wu you zhi xiang]
– both of which refer to Zhuangzi’s vision of the ideal world of nothingness, an illusory
realm. 236 The second character, 托 [tuo], means to entrust something, materialistic or
236 The last character of these two phrases 鄉 [xiang] signifies a region or a place in this context,
whereas 之 [zhi] is a possessive pronoun. 無何有 [wu he you] and 烏有 [wu you] fundamentally
refer to the same: while the former means having nothing, the latter indicates illusion or non-existence. When conflated together, both phrases denote a place of nothingness, which can be read as closer to the ou- feature of utopia.
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otherwise, to another. In the case of Utopia, More entrusts his aspiration to a fictional
island manifested in an imaginary travelogue, in the hope of it being circulated to a wider
readership, awakening their awareness, and possibly improving the socio-political landscape
of contemporaneous England. The third character, 邦 [bang], designates a country or place,
the Mandarin equivalent of topos. With the three characters conflated, 烏托邦 becomes a
place, or a no-place, into which an idealistic vision is projected, even though it has often
been used pejoratively, like its English source. This translation of the neologism “utopia” is
so exquisitely designed and has been so prevalent that even native Mandarin speakers like
myself refer to ideal or idealistic desires or plans as utopian – “wu tuo bang” – rather than
using the common Chinese archetype of an ideal world, Peach Blossom Spring, which
comes from a classical text that is part of the required reading in high school textbooks in
Taiwan.
It has been assumed that the term appeared with the first translation published in
1935, and another even less informed argument has attributed it to Dai Liuling (1913-1998),
the noted translator and scholar of British literature who published his first translation of
Utopia in 1956. In an essay collection that discusses the aptitude and demeanour of five
professoriate-intellectuals during the Second Sino-Japanese War, one chapter is dedicated to
Dai Liuling, titled, “Dai Liuling: The Man Who Brings Utopia into Mandarin”.237 This book
was published relatively recently, in 2013, which reveals a possible literary loophole: firstly,
the research of this work was manifestly not conducted to a high standard of quality,
having overlooked such a pronounced mistake. The fact that Dai was not the first to have
translated “Utopia” – either the term or the book – could easily be discovered had the
author engaged in a very simple and straightforward library catalogue search.
Countering the said mistakes, Gao Fang argues that the sinologist and
enlightenment thinker Yan Fu (1854-1921) was in fact the first who coined the term “wu
tuo bang” in his translation of Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics: And Other
Essays. 238 Yan’s translation of Huxley’s work was first published in segments in the
periodical 國聞彙編 [Guo Wen Hui Bian], founded by Yan and several other activists, and
237 Zhang Zaijun 張在軍, “Caiqing yu fengfan: kangzhan shiqi de wuda jiaoshou xubian” 才情與
風範: 抗戰時期的武大教授續編 [Aptitude and Demeanour: The Sequel to the Professoriate at
Wuda during the Second Sino-Japanese War] (Taipei: Xiuwei zixun, 2013) 41. 238 For more information, see Gao Fang 高放, “‘Wu tuo bang’ yi ci shou yi zhe shi shui?” “乌托邦”
一词首译者是谁? [Who Is the First Translator of the Term “Utopia”?], Xinxiang pinglun新湘评论
(9) 2013 <http://www.xxplzx.com/xxplml/awt2007/btwl/t20130514_420794.htm> 07 Nov 2013.
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later the complete translation of Evolution and Ethics was published in Hubei in 1898, which
was then widely circulated. Guo Wen Hui Bian was founded in 1897 by Yan Fu, and was the
first periodical published by the revolutionaries of the late Qing Dynasty. It advocated,
among other things, constitutional monarchy, which inevitably meant it was subjected to
persecution by Empress Cixi (1835-1908). Its office was burnt down during the Boxer
Rebellion; and with the breakdown of its printing machines, Guo Wen Hui Bian was
unavoidably terminated in 1900. Even though it survived a mere three years, the serial
publication of Guo Wen Hui Bian served as a pivotal space in which the revolutionaries
voiced their concerns and introduced what they considered advanced ideas, in the hope of
bringing change. This may be taken as, in Genette’s conceptualisation, the factual paratext,
that is, how a certain work finds its niche and how it is presented given a specific context.
The fact that Yan’s translation of Evolution and Ethics was published in this highly politically-
oriented periodical indicates that its target readers were possibly like-minded people who
were looking for enlightenment ideas, and the reader response may be influenced by the
larger context in which it was wrapped. It may be difficult to relate Utopia, or at least the
pre-figurations of utopias, to a book that advocates “Natural Selection, or Survival of the
Fittest”. In this seminal work, Huxley envisages an earthly paradise where conflict is non-
existent and human beings do not have to fight for survival. In his translation, Yan Fu
called the paradise that Huxley portrayed “烏托邦 [Wu Tuo Bang]”, and entitled the eighth
introductory sub-chapter “Wu Tuo Bang”.239 To avoid any confusion, Yan Fu supplied an
additional elucidation inside the main text that Utopia, or Wu Tuo Bang, is an ideal nation
that bears no real existence.240 It does not exist in space or in time, but only in people’s
imaginations. If this Wu Tuo Bang were ever to be attained, it could only be made possible
by human governance rather than natural law or divine order. Pu Guoliang points out that
in Yan’s earlier translation of the Shannxi edition the target text “hence to call it Utopia”
was initially rendered as “hence it is referred to as Huaxu in China, and the Westerners call
it Utopia”.241 華胥 [Huaxu] originates from a Taoist classic 列子 [Leizi], in which the
Yellow Emperor sleepwalks into a country where there is no hierarchy nor desire. People
239 Gao (2017) 182. The introductory chapter is called “Prolegomena” and is divided into fourteen sections. 240 Gao, “Also on Utopia” (2013) n.p. See also Pu, “Problems of the Study of Utopia” (2016) 8. The
original goes: “夫如是之群,古今之世所未有也,故稱之曰烏托邦。烏托邦者,猶言無是
之國也,僅為設想所存而已。”. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, trans. Yan Fu (Beijing:
Commercial Press, 1981) 22. Quoted in Pu (2016) 8. 241 Pu (2016) 8.
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are free of fear, pain, sorrow, and worry. The Emperor returns to reality and reigns his
country accordingly, bringing China to another heyday. Understanding what Huaxu means
and that Yan replaced it with Wu Tuo Bang offers a telling sign of how Yanfu’s
understanding of Huxley’s paradise has shifted from a Taoist take to an inherently
politically one: Utopia.
Intriguingly enough, the term “utopia” is not used anywhere in the main text of
Evolution and Ethics; instead, in illustrating this ideal realm, Thomas Huxley wrote: “Thus
the administrator might look to the establishment of an earthly paradise, a true garden of
Eden, in which all things should work together towards the well-being of the gardeners.”242
Rather than translating this original passage by Huxley, Yan Fu replaced it with an
annotation of his own about More’s Utopia, noting that this Wu Tuo Bang is the ideal
nation that More envisaged in the early sixteenth century, and that there is nothing to it but
fictiveness. Yan Fu himself never explained why he crafted 烏托邦 to title the introductory
chapter. Yet it is worth mentioning that Yan is renowned for inserting his own
interpretation and comments into his translations – not in the endnotes or footnotes but in
the core text – in which case, the translation is not so much a translation per se, but editing
and rewriting; or in Lefevere’s theorisation, refraction. The aforementioned would be a
fitting example – a chapter title added in the translation where the original text lacks one.
This also testifies to how translation should be read paratextually, or rather,
paratranslationally, as it produces additional meaning and may effectively affect the reception
of a narrative.
Yan Fu’s profound translation of the term “utopia”, that has proximity to both the
sound and meaning of the original, has been so influential that subsequent renditions,
dictionaries, and social criticisms all adopted this version, with the nuance in the second
character. For instance, examining his own personal collections, Gao comments that as
early as 1930, “Wu Tuo Bang” was mentioned on the seventh page of Zhao Lanping’s
History of Socialism;243 in the same year, the Commercial Press published a thick volume
carrying the same title, The History of Socialism, composed by Wu Liping. In this volume,
“Wu Tuo Bang” appeared in the first section of Chapter Two, a twenty-page discussion
242 Thomas Henry Huxley, The Major Prose of Thomas Henry Huxley, ed. Alan P. Barr (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgian Press, 1997) 294. Quoted in Gao (2013) n.p. 243 See “Also on Utopia” n.p. Later to be mentioned in Gao (2017).
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devoted specifically to Thomas More and his Utopia. This, according to Gao Fang, is the
earliest documented record of the Chinese Marxists scrutinising More’s Utopia.244
A more recent study by Yan Jianfu likewise challenges the year of the first
introduction of the concept of utopia by including reference books in his target of
investigation. In a comprehensive study that examines the late Qing novels, Yan Jianfu
devotes a chapter to discussing the construct of utopia, including the first introduction of
the term “Utopia” and how the utopian vision travels and manifests itself in late Qing
fictional works. Instead of analysing Utopia itself, that is, the fictional narrative that lends its
name to the eponymous genre, Yan Jianfu focuses on how Utopia was explicated in a new
cultural time frame, the re-contextualisation of which he defines as “conceptual travel”,
serving as the subtitle of his chapter.
In Yan Jianfu’s study, the translation of the book Utopia is only mentioned in
passing, when he states that the first one was published in 1935 by Shanghai Commercial
Press, referring to《民國時期總書目(1911-1949)》[The Compilations of Titles during
the Republic of China 1911-1949]. Yan Jianfu does not repudiate Gao Fang and several
other scholars who contend that Yan Fu gave Utopia its current Mandarin name, but his
research allows him to go a step further back, perusing when and how the term “Utopia”
was first introduced into Chinese. Yan Jianfu surveys several major reference books in the
late Qing dynasty, arriving at the conclusion that they can be divided into two groups, ones
by foreign missionaries in the late nineteenth century, and the others by the late Qing
intellectuals around the turn of the twentieth century.
The first group provides the earliest documented appearance of the term “Utopia”.
In the English and Chinese Dictionary compiled and edited by the German missionary
Wilhelm Lobscheid245 during the years 1866 to 1869, there is an entry for “Utopia” that
reads:
244 Quoted in Gao, “Also on Utopia” n.p. 245 A Chinese name was given to Wilhelm Lobscheid (1822-1893), 羅存德 [Luo Cun De]. This
sinophone name is coined in proximity to his surname, Lobscheid, although the degree of proximity is not high. It reflects the tendency of translating foreign names in accordance with their pronunciation. It does not happen often that the translation corresponds to both the sound and meaning, such how utopia is delicately rendered as “wu tuo bang”. Lobscheid, or “Luo Cun De”, serves as an example that only proximity to sound was met.
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Utopia, n. The land of illusory happiness, the land of luxuriance, the country of happiness, Peng Lai. Utopian, a. Of the blissful country, in accordance to the country of blissfulness.246
Two things need to be highlighted here: firstly, in this entry “Utopia” was given definitions,
but the term itself was left un-translated. Secondly, “Utopia” was explained as a fairly
general term, in closer connection to pre-figurations such as Arcadia,247 where people are
free of drudgery and happiness is granted. In fact, this dictionary definition was not
elaborate or descriptive. Instead, terms that are, in Lawrence Venuti’s words, of “domestic
intelligibility”248 were adopted, Peng Lai being a crucial example. Peng Lai is a toponym in
Chinese mythology where the Eight Immortals live and where the elixir of life is to be
sought. Yan Jianfu suggests that Lobscheid did so for ease of explanation, hence he
adopted concepts such as “illusory happiness” and Peng Lai, which would have been
abstract and yet familiar to Chinese readers. Translating foreign terms using Chinese
classical concepts was the translational practice commonly adopted in the late Qing
dynasty.249 This is the very first time that “Utopia” as a term was introduced into the
Mandarin context. By identifying with terms like “Peng Lai”, Yan Jianfu observes that
Lobscheid effectively withdrew the critical spirit as well as the solicitous concern250 that was
essential in understanding Utopia and further transformed it into a static interpretation. The
outcome, I argue, was similar to Chinese literary counterparts like Peach Blossom Spring
that underline a peaceful, drudgery-free life, and the pure happiness of an illusory land. In
246 The original reads: Utopia, n.幻樂之地,豐樂之地,安樂國,蓬萊。Utopian,a. 安樂國的,
照安樂之國。 247 Virgil’s version of Arcadia, illustrated in the Fourth Eclogue, also known as the Messianic Eclogue, is crucial in understanding the development of utopian thinking because, according to Sargent, Virgil “moved the past golden age to the future [and] the better world became based on human activity rather than simply being a gift from the gods”. See Sargent (2010) 16. This is the concept of human endeavour making all the difference. These two features have made significant adaptation to the myth as we would now commonly perceive it. Virgil’s version is no longer set from a nostalgic standpoint, and human efficacy, the one major factor that makes literary utopias as they are today, is brought into light. It could serve as a turning point from the mythical types to the early modern and modern utopias, where human beings are in control of their own destiny. In fact, in commenting on this transition, Sargent suggests that “Virgil’s images of the simple life in Arcadia are something of a transition between the fantasy of the first tradition and the human-created utopia of the second. And it is the human-created societies depicted by Greek and Roman writers that are most similar to More’s Utopia and the works that followed it.” 248 Venuti (2000) 484. 249 Yan Jianfu 顏健富, Cong ‘shenti’ dao ‘shijie’: wanqing xiaoshuo de xin gainian ditu 從「身體」到「世
界」: 晚清小說的新概念地圖 [From “Body” to “World”: The New Conceptual Map of the Late
Qing Novels] (Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 2014) 141. 250 Yan 141.
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stories of Peng Lai, often called “Peng Lai Fairy Island” or “Mount Peng Lai”, an image of
material abundance, luxury, and indulgence is portrayed. Comparing it with Chinese or
Western pre-figurations of Utopia, however, it is less an Arcadian Peach Blossom Spring,
and more akin to the Land of Cockaygne, where excessive pleasure is unconditionally
granted and relished. If we take Arcadia and Peach Blossom Spring as the static
interpretation of blissfulness and enjoyment, Cockaygne and Peng Lai are an active version
of pleasurable bliss.
A few decades after the term “Utopia” first appeared as a dictionary entry in the
1860s, with the socio-political turbulence in late Qing China that encouraged a wave of
looking Westwards, this foreign concept was again brought into print, this time with a
different explication and outlook. In addition to the said introductory chapter titled “Wu
Tuo Bang” in his 1898 translation of Evolution and Ethics, Yan Fu adopted the term again,
this time in his translation of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry in to the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations, published in 1902.251 In the footnote to the translated text in which “Wu
Tuo Bang” appeared, Yan Fu offers a more specific account of the author and content of
the book Utopia. This footnote offers a brief summary and highlights the democratic
nature of Utopia, as well as that it represents high aspirations and is difficult to achieve.
Wu Tuo Bang, title of a novel. Written by English prime minister Thomas More in the tenth year of Zhengde in the Ming [Dynasty], to allegorise a well-governed democracy. Wu Tuo Bang, the name of an island, a non-existent country. Thereafter any discussion of a highly idealised, difficult-to-achieve society is named Wu Tuo Bang.252
In the same year that the translation of the British economist Adam Smith’s work was
published, Liang Qichao, a scholar and revolutionary who fled to Japan after the defeat of
the Hundred Days’ Reform,253 addressed a letter to his teacher and fellow leader of the
Reform, Kang Youwei. In this letter, Liang wrote: “Englishman Thomas More wrote a
251 For more information, see Yan 142. 252 Smith, Wealth of Nations 387n1. Quoted in Yan 142. Translation is mine. The original reads: 烏託
邦,說部名。明正德十年英相摩而妥瑪所著,以寓言民主之制,郅治之隆。烏託邦,島
國名,猶言無此國矣。故後人言有甚高之論,而不可施行,難以企及者,皆曰此烏託邦
制也。 253 Yan 143. As the name suggests, this was an unsuccessful and a rather short-lived reform (lasting only 103 days) initiated by the Emperor Kuangxu with the support of reformists like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. It aimed at regenerating the long corrupt Qing dynasty with the vain hope of implementing a constitutional monarchy. It was suppressed by the Empress Cixi, and the goal of constitutional monarchy was never to become a reality in the Qing dynasty.
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novel that was extremely magnificent. His pupils translated it as Avatamsaka World.” 254
Avatamsaka Sūtra is one of the most influential scriptures of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Rather
than paradise, the name Avatamsaka has been adopted to refer to Buddha’s version of an
ideal, harmonious universe. Yan Jianfu argues that using Avatamsaka to refer to Utopia
reflects how Buddhist concepts were heavily relied upon when explaining foreign concepts.
He further offers an insightful observation showing how the adoption of certain Buddhist
terms appropriates temporal perception in a literary tradition that lacks the concept of the
future. This literary tradition was influenced by how the ancient Chinese dynasties operated:
the fact that ancient China was ruled dynastically, and that calendars were also based on
dynasties, means that there was no linear concept of time. Each dynasty started with a new
calendar cycle, and time moved not towards a future but towards the end of a dynasty, or
era. Time was perceived and understood as a cyclical construct,255 thereby ruling out a
prospective outlook. Looking back toward the ancient sages and prime time of King Wen,
the retrospective outlook was rooted in traditional values; hence a foreign concept like
utopia that is itself progressive-spirited would inevitably expect to meet some confusion in
terms of reception.
In the following year, 1903, distinguished educator and scientist Ma Junwu (1881-
1940), who had also founded a translation society, published an article whose title may be
rendered as “The Pioneer of Socialism Thomas More and his view on Avatamsaka”.256 The
direct association with socialism is made here, which reveals a more political orientation of
the concept and the book. Even if the book title was rendered in – or substituted with – a
Buddhist concept, Ma demonstrated a higher level of conceptual understanding. In this
case, we may conclude that it was not Utopia that was appropriated but Avatamsaka. Again,
instead of adopting “Wu Tuo Bang” or coming up with his own rendition of the term, Ma
opted for avatamsaka as a synonym for utopia: “Avatamsaka world Utopia, a fictive realm
254 Translation is mine. Quoted in Yan Jianfu 143. The original reads: 英國德摩里著一小說,極
瑰瑋,弟子譯其名為曰《華嚴界》。
255 Yan Jianfu x. He used the term “輪迴”, which is itself a Buddhist concept meaning the
transmigration of souls as well as an eternal cycle of life and death, to illustrate his point. However, I would suggest that there is a conceptual discrepancy here because as far as my understanding goes, Jianfu was simply attempting to highlight the cyclical movement of the time perception, without the intention of bringing in any religious undertone. Yet by using a very specific Buddhist concept, his argument might have misguided readers to imbue a religious understanding into the whole context. 256 The original reads “社會主義之鼻祖德麻斯摩兒之華嚴界觀”.
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that resides in the thoughts of sages.”257 Like the anonymous translator-editor who had
referred to More’s Utopia as Avatamsaka in the New Novel, Ma Junwu considered this early
modern European narrative to be the representation of the Buddhist Nirvana. He argued,
in the same article, that the reason Yan Fu titled the eighth introductory chapter of
Evolution and Ethics “Wu Tuo Bang” was likely based on Huxley’s annotation of the earthly
paradise and true garden of Eden. Despite his inference, it is apparent that both Yan Fu
and Ma Junwu had generalised Utopia along with Paradise, Eden, and Avatamsaka, different
versions of the ideal realm.
2 CHINESE COUNTERPARTS: POLITICAL AND PASTORAL
2.1 DA TONG: A POLITICAL UTOPIA
The passage 大同 “Da Tong” [the Great Unity] from the Records of Rites has often been
considered Confucius’s outline of an ideal way of life, and is sometimes referred to as the
“Confucian utopia”; it deserves to be quoted in full:
When the great tao ran its course, all under heaven were for the public good; they elected those who were virtuous and competent for various offices, and people kept to their word and cultivated amicable relationships. As a result, people were kind not just to their kin, and they cared not just for their own children; so the elderly could enjoy old age, the mature ones made good use of their strength, and the young all grew up well and fine. Those who had lost their husbands or wives and had no one to support them were all taken good care of, and so were those who suffered from handicap or illness. Men all had suitable jobs, and women all found good families through marriage. They hated to see good discarded on the ground, but they kept those goods not for their own use; and they hated to see efforts made not by themselves, but they made efforts not in their own interests. Thus no plot or conspiracy would arise; no thieves, robbers, or troublemakers would emerge, so much so that the outer gates to houses were never closed, and that was indeed the condition of having achieved Great Unity.258
257 Quoted in Chun, n.p. The original reads: 華嚴界者 Utopia,哲人意想中之一虛境也。 258 禮記正義 Li ji zhengyi [The Correct Meaning of the Records of Rites], in Ruan Yuan, Shisan
jing zhushu, 2:1414. Quoted in Zhang Longxin (2005) 188. The original reads: 大道之行也,天下
為公。選賢與能,講信修睦。故人不獨親其親,不獨子其子;使老有所終,壯有所用,
幼有所長,矜、寡、孤、獨、廢疾者,皆有所養;男有分,女有歸。貨,惡其棄於地也,
不必藏於己;力,惡其不出於身也,不必為己。是故謀閉而不興,盜竊亂賊而不作,故
外戶而不閉,是謂「大同」。
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Despite its various similarities to More’s Utopia, Confucius’s “Da Tong” is not a literary
utopia per se. To begin with, this passage on the “Great Unity” is not a fictional narrative,
but rather belongs to the realm of speculative and political philosophy, and therefore it
cannot be understood as a literary utopia. It elucidates the socio-political structure of
Confucius’s ideal society without a fictive setting; yet it still needs to be brought into the
picture because, as Zhang Longxi postulates, “utopia in the Chinese tradition is not so
much a literary representation as a philosophical vision, and it is not only in literature but
also in moral and political philosophy that we may look for utopian constructions”.259 Since
this Confucian Utopia – to use the term loosely – has been so prevalent, it can serve as
groundwork for the further discussion of Chinese archetypes of utopias. In fact, it does
reflect a few features of Peach Blossom Spring that have often been overlooked: for
instance, the proper amount of work that, in addition to natural resources, forms the
backbone of this bucolic community.
Similar to how the Genesis story helped build the Christian frame of mind, the
Confucian classics also influenced how, before a serious reflection on the work, a Chinese
reader imagined the ideal society. The passage quoted above takes place in a conversation
between Confucius and his disciples, in which the Master discusses the ideal state of
humankind’s living conditions. The title “Great Unity” already speaks volumes about
Confucius’s ideal; what is intriguing is that the portrayal of the Great Unity is built upon
the heyday of King Wen of Zhou (1152-1056 BC), a period in which prosperity, harmony,
and peace reigned. The sense of “lost perfection”260 and looking back to the time of King
Wen indeed makes this Confucian Utopia a nostalgic one; yet, unlike the biblical paradise
that is forever lost due to man’s disobedience, the Great Unity presents a utopian vision
that is rooted in the past but workable in the present, and realisable in the future. It
provides the stimulus and space to refine and reform, without which humankind may end
up stagnated or regressed. It is in this sense of refining and reforming that finds resonance
in More’s Utopia, as well as the re- feature of contemporary utopian mentality that allows
for renegotiation and trial-and-error.
While various branches of Chinese philosophy have often given the impression of
a more inward-looking mentality, the distinguished Chinese thinker Feng Youlan suggests
otherwise. He argues that
259 Zhang Longxi (2005) 187-88. 260 Zhang Longxi (2005) 189.
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because it “roams within the bounds of society”, Confucianism appears more this-worldly than Taoism, and because it “roams beyond the bounds of society”, Taoism appears more other-worldly than Confucianism. These two trends of thought rivaled each other, but also complemented each other. They exercised a sort of balance of power. This gave the Chinese people a better sense of balance in regard to this-worldliness and other-worldliness.261
While “the Great Unity” is permeated with Confucian ideas, the mixture of Confucian and
Taoist influence is explicit in Tao Yuanming’s Peach Blossom Spring, despite the fact that its
pastoral setting has often misled readers into a more retrospective and inactive
interpretation.
Confucius’s vision is nostalgic, longing for a quintessential model of ancient times
that had truly existed. In fact, the accompanying rituals – some would have taken them to
be religious acts and hence mistaken the ancient society to be a religious one – were
intended “as auxiliaries to [Confucius’s] moral philosophy. The ancestor worship and ritual
offerings to heaven and earth performed by Confucius and the later Confucians were all
outer forms meant to induce inner respect for antiquity and former kings, and to bring
individual and social ethics to perfection.”262 This passage clears doubts about whether
Confucian thinking is indeed rationalistic, and further reaffirms the crucial role the past
golden age governed by sage-like kings occupies for Confucian thinking. Commenting on
this Confucian utopia, Zhang Longxi offers an interpretation that, I suggest, points to the
fundamental difference between classical Chinese cultures and the Christian West:
The way back to ancient perfection is not through faith or divine intervention, not by waiting for the apocalypse or the Second Coming. But by a rigorous human effort at the present, in this world, by the individual strife of each moral being to revive the culture of the last golden age.263
This quotation first makes a clear distinction from those retrospective utopian
prefigurations such as Arcadia and the Golden Age that are aided, or made feasible, by
either natural or divine forces. The emphasis is on the here-and-now as well as the human
261 See Fung Youlan, Zhongguo zhe xue jian shi 中国哲学简史 [A Short History of Chinese
Philosophy] trans, Zhao Fusan (Tianjin: Tianjin she hui ke xue yuan chubanshe, 2007) 36. Fung’s argument departs from Chuang-tzu’s, which that “Confucianists roam within the bounds of society, while the Taoist roams beyond it”. 262 See Zhou Yutong, “Confucius” in Zhou Yutong jingxue shi lunzhu xuanji [Selected Papers on the history of Classical Studies], 385. Quoted in Zhang Longxi (2005) 174. 263 Zhang Longxi (2005) 187.
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efficacy of Confucius’s ideal vision. Despite being nostalgic, this Great Unity resembles
More’s Utopia – or rather, the core utopian spirit following the Morean paradigm – in the
sense that the ideal is no longer just an idealistic vision but an idealisation that can be
approximated by human effort.264
The mention of “each moral being” offers yet another interesting interpretation,
which reflects, implicitly or not, the underlying difference of the view on the society and
the individual. To be a moral being (君子, jun zi) – to be benevolent – is the highest
standard that an individual can achieve, according to Confucian doctrines. Confucius’s ideal
vision thus has to be worked from within and then expanded, step by step, to the family,
society, and the whole human race. In fact, in 大學 Da Xue (the Great Learning) – one of
the Confucian canons – an excerpt goes as follows:
Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy.265
A strong sense of working from within and then expanding to the collective is evinced.
This, I argue, categorises the fundamental difference between the Confucian utopia and the
Morean utopia266: while both are grounded in the here-and-now and the meliorist spirit, the
latter is to be worked from bigger units to smaller ones. That is to say, with the efficient
functioning of social regulations and juridical implementation individuals are guaranteed
security and welfare, hence happiness, in the Morean utopia. On the Confucian utopia –
“the Great Unity” – society is able to be rightly maintained and to prosper if individuals are
first cultivated to be moral beings that know how to stay well behaved.
Indeed, the moral dimension has greater emphasis in Confucian teachings; yet this
does not mean that morality or ethics are overlooked in More’s Utopia. The difference lies
in the priorities: More’s Utopia is, in all actuality, not a free society, since everything
conforms to a certain set of routines and regulations. Everyone is required to be a law-
264 Henri Maler (1995) 351. Quoted in Vieira (2017) 67. 265 The original reads: 心正而後身修,身修而後家齊,家齊而後國治,國治而後天下平。Translation is taken from the Chinese Text Project website <http://ctext.org/liji/da-xue> 22 May 2016. 266 By the Morean utopia, I am referring strictly to the Renaissance utopias. As far as law is concerned, it should be noted that in some of the utopias of the Enlightenment the perspective is different: while in the Renaissance it is the good law that makes the good man, in the Enligthenment it is the good man that makes the good law.
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abiding citizen, and to operate within the bounds of legal codes; otherwise punishments –
even the death penalty – are to be expected. It may not do justice to generalise that all
Utopians do no wrong simply for fear of the consequential punishment; but how this
utopian society is built and organised does suggest such an interpretation. Contrary to this,
the Confucian utopia stresses the cultivation of each human being; namely, when everyone
reaches the highest moral standard – becoming jun zi – no law or punishment is required to
maintain the social order because “all under heaven” have already been taken care of.
Despite its implicitness, these selected passages from the Confucian canon affirm its
rationalistic thinking and also shed light on the fundamental difference between the two
utopias. We cannot deny the utopian propensity – if we were to give it a label – in
Confucian teachings, manifested specifically in the passage on the “Great Unity”.
2.2 PEACH BLOSSOM SPRING: A PASTORAL UTOPIA
Best known as “Peach Blossom Spring”, The Account of Peach Blossom Spring was, in fact, the
preface to the poem of the same name, written by the hermit poet Tao Yuanming (c.365-
427) in 421.267 It portrays an idyllic, peaceful, self-sufficient village that forms Tao’s vision
of an ideal community. Like Book Two of Utopia, The Poem of Peach Blossom Spring depicts
the customs, social relations, and structures of Tao’s ideal, whereas The Account conveys
how a fisherman came across this wonderland, how he was cordially received by the local
villagers whose ancestors escaped the Qin dictatorship and have since cut themselves off
from the outside world, and how he eventually returned to reality. The villagers asked the
fisherman to keep their presence confidential, who, nevertheless, made marks on the peach
trees on his way out in the hope of finding the way back in future, but to no avail. This tale
has been so prevalent that an idiom is created based upon this poem –世外桃源 [shi wai
tao yuan] – meaning peach spring beyond the terrestrial world.
Zhang Shibao, in his thesis on the imagery and literary archetypes of the peach in
the context of Peach Blossom Spring, argues that there are two differing models of the ideal
world in Western literature, namely paradise and utopia.268 Zhang Shibao uses “paradise” to
267 See Appendix for The Account and its English translation. 268 Zhang Shibao 張史寶, “Tao de shenhua yu wenxue yuanxing yanjiu” 桃的神話與文學原型研
究 [The Myth of the Peach and a Study of Its Literary Archetypes] (Diss. National Chengchi
University, 2005) 99. Even though the use of “archetypes” does require further reflection, here in
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refer to “樂園 (le yuan)” – literally “blissful garden” – whereas the common translation for
paradise in Mandarin is “天堂 (tian tang)” – also the rendition for “heaven” – which comes
with more of a religious connotation. Risking a generalisation, this taxonomy reveals how
“utopia” has often been associated with paradise. Zhang Shibao uses this argument to
introduce his analysis of the myth of the peach and its literary archetypes. By examining
Peach Blossom Spring, Shibao attempts to discern whether Tao Yuanming’s ideal world is a
world of paradise or of utopia. He believes that the golden age represented by paradise is
usually transient and that its value is only apparent once it is lost. The pursuit of this static,
retrospective paradise also means inevitable, permanent loss. According to Zhang Shibao,
the profound aspiration to reach Peach Blossom Spring, as expressed in Tao Yuanming’s
poem, is also based on this paradigm of “losing and pursuing”.269 Just as Yang Yucheng
argues that the peculiarity of Peach Blossom Spring lies in the fact that it is both utopia and
anti-utopia and that it is a story narrating how an ideal world gets lost,270 Shibao proposes
that Peach Blossom Spring is a reflection on the nostalgia for the Garden of Eden, which
manifests itself as the paradise myth of the “eternal return”.271 But since the fisherman and
those who attempt to re-locate the Peach Blossom Spring never find their way back, or into,
this heavenly-like realm, it creates a literary pattern of losing-and-pursuing, the aspiration
to which perpetually remains in this mythical cycle. This literary pattern of losing-and-
pursuing indeed gives Peach Blossom Spring a nostalgic touch; yet this nostalgia should not be
conflated with one longing for the Garden of Eden, as Zhang Shibao suggests. The
Garden of Eden carries a religious tone, with a strong sense of divine intervention.
However, the nostalgia presented in Tao’s vision is similar to that of Confucius’s Great
this particular case I will remain loyal to the word choice that Zhang opted for his thesis title. For the abstract, see http://nccur.lib.nccu.edu.tw/handle/140.119/39077. Since, throughout this chapter, there are three authors with the same surname, Zhang Longxi, Zhang Shibao, Zhang Huijuan, the given name of the latter two will be used in the discussion in order to avoid confusion. 269 Zhang Shibao 99. 270 Yang Yucheng 楊玉成, “Shiji mo de shengshi: ‘Taohuayuan bing shi’ de wenhua yu shehui” 世
紀末的省詩:「桃花源并詩」的文化與社會 [“Reflections at the End of the Century: The
Culture and Society of Peach Blossom Spring”], Zhong guo wen zhe yan jiu tong xun 中國文哲研究通訊
18.4 (1998) 83. Quoted in Zhang Shibao 100. Shibao suggests that Yan is using “utopia” loosely in his essay to refer to the ideal society, lacking a progressive, into-the-world spirit. Moreover, “anti-utopia” instead of “dystopia” is used here because Yang inserted parenthetical information
showing “anti-utopia” right after where the original term 反烏托邦 (fan wu tuo bang) appears.
However, it should be noted that the Mandarin translation for 反烏托邦 is usually confused: some
use “anti-utopia” whereas some use “dystopia”—the prefixes of both indicate anti-, against, or opposite. 271 See Zhang Shibao 106 as well as footnote number 35.
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Unity as previously discussed; that is, a longing for the heyday during the reign of King
Wen of Zhou, “the perfect model for moral conduct and kingly rule”.272 Hence Tao’s
nostalgia and utopian vision are secular and rationalistic, modelled on an ancient paradigm
that in all actuality existed at a certain point in history.
Also examining paradise and utopia, Zhang Huijuan brings up this comparison:273
Even though both aspire to a more beautiful world, the paradise myth presents a static manifestation – a fixed point, an absolute reality. On the other hand, the fundamental feature of utopia is dynamic – an active land built from a mixture of the ideal and the real, as well as the good and the bad.274
For Zhang Huijuan, paradise is a self-sufficient, closed system, where simplicity is both the
requirement and the product of this static vision. This means that Peach Blossom Spring is
a paradisiacal realm rather than a utopia, as many have called it. Huijuan further postulates
that the late Qing novels were the first to incorporate the utopian spirit in Chinese literary
history. As opposed to the withdrawn and closed type of paradise, like the one penned by
Tao Yuanming, Huijuan argues, the late Qing novels painted a dynamic sketch of
numerous possibilities rooted in the here and now. She argues that the ideal microcosm
presented in those novels is the epitome of the macrocosm that is Qing China. She further
uses Peach Blossom Spring as a point of comparison, contending that “the [imagery of] ‘Peach
Blossom Spring’ in the late Qing novels is not at all reclusive or out of this world”.275 Her
elucidation bestows upon this semi-equivalence a fresher meaning – that is, its desiring of
goodness for all people rather than just for the self, its goal of reaching “this-worldly
paradise”,276 as well as its forward-looking mentality, all of which differentiate the utopian
impulse in those late Qing novels from the traditional Peach Blossom Spring spirit that has
a nostalgic and retrospective inclination.
272 Zhang Shibao 8. 273 Zhang Huijuan 張惠娟 , “Leyuan shenhua yu wutuobang─jian lun Zhongguo wutuobang
wenxue de rending wenti” 樂園神話與烏托邦──兼論中國烏托邦文學的認定問題 [“Paradise
Myth and Utopia – also on the Problems Identifying Chinese Utopian Literature”], Zhongwai wenxue
中外文學 15. 3 (1986) 80-81. 274 Translation is mine, except the terms in parentheses, which are included in the original text. The
original reads: 二者雖皆憧憬一美好世界, 然而樂園神話所呈現的,是一個『靜態』(static)的
面貌 ── 一個『凝滯的一點』 (a fixed point),一個『絕對的事實』(an absolute reality)。反之,
烏托邦的 基本風貌,是『動態』(dynamic)的 ── 一個理想與現實交織、美好與醜惡交 融所
構築的一個活潑的園地。 275 Zhang Huijuan 89. 276 Zhang Huijuan 89.
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From Zhang Huijuan’s analysis, it is clear that she categorises Peach Blossom
Spring as a static society like paradise and the late Qing fictions as dynamic, like those
utopias informed by the idea of progress.277 The fact that she uses the phrase “Peach
Blossom Spring spirit” to depict what we would have called the “utopian spirit” gives a fine
sense of how Peach Blossom Spring as a meme is rooted in classical Chinese literature, and
hence the reception of Utopia is highly liable to be influenced by, or refracted through, a
reading of Peach Blossom Spring.
3 CONCLUDING REMARKS
This chapter set out by examining how the concept of utopia was first introduced into
Mandarin, followed by an investigation of the two Chinese counterparts, a pastoral and a
political utopia, with the aim of discerning how the reading of Utopia may have been
refracted through these preconceptions. From the introduction of the term “utopia” as a
dictionary entry, to how “wu tuo bang” was inserted in the translations of two important
English socio-political discourses, and how “utopia” was rendered as the Buddhist concept
Avatamsaka, a progression in understanding and translational strategies is evident here.
That is, during the mid-nineteenth century, as a dictionary entry, “utopia” was defined via
traditional concepts (from Chinese mythology or otherwise) so as to offer domestic
intelligibility to the target readers. With Yan Fu’s footnotes in his English translations of
the two influential socio-political discourses in which he introduced Utopia, a better
understanding was shown, that is, as a well-governed democracy.278 Liang Qichao and Ma
Junwu using a Buddhist term, Avatamsaka, may be taken as translating with domestic
intelligibility in mind as well, but it distinguishes itself in how it appropriates the time
perception and how it highlights a political take by making explicit its association with
socialism. Here we also see how the understanding of the concept of utopia moves from
static and retrospective interpretation to a progressive outlook with a political orientation.
With Ma’s critical essays published in the early 1900s, despite the fact that “utopia” was still
277 It should be noted that within the field of Utopian Studies, More’s Utopia is generally recognised as static as opposed to the utopias informed by the idea of progress, which are dynamic in nature. That More’s Utopia is static is understood in the sense that its social and political community has not changed since its establishment by Utopus. 278 More’s Utopia is not strictly a real democracy; yet compared to the milieu in which Yan Fu was living, Utopia indeed represented a relatively liberal democracy and possibly an ideal to look up to.
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translated as Avatamsaka, Utopia as a book and as a concept – finally – for the first time,
was systematically reviewed and introduced into Mandarin.
This textual journey then circled back to ancient China. Examining Confucius’s
Great Unity and Tao Yuanming’s Peach Blossom Spring against the Morean paradigm suggests
that the most fundamental watershed lies in retrospective versus prospective ideal
communities. While More’s Utopia presents an unmistakably forward-looking vision, the
Great Unity and Peach Blossom Spring are looking back toward a lost perfection, either an
ancient heyday or a pastoral paradise. However, unlike Arcadia, where a plateau has already
been reached regardless of human effort, the two classical Chinese utopias279 – again using
the term “utopia” loosely – are not simply backward-looking visions that allow only natural
or divine intervention. To use J. C. Davis’s words, “that ideal past has an important
presence in social life”. 280 This critical function, working as a measurement, is what
distinguishes the forward-looking drive common in the literary utopias following the
Morean paradigm. If one were to focus on Utopia’s literary and pastoral counterpart – Peach
Blossom Spring – a clear distinction may be drawn; that is, as Zhang Huijuan proposes, Utopia
offers a dynamic vision as opposed to a static one. The pastoral setting of Peach Blossom
Spring paints a static picture that requires no change, as if frozen in time. Yet two points
need to be stressed when examining the social presence of these two utopian realms. First
of all, while Utopia and a great majority of Western utopias manifest a prospective
idealisation281, I propose that Peach Blossom Spring is retrospective and prospective at the
same time. Its looking back toward an ancient perfection is, undeniably, what makes this
pastoral utopia retrospective. However, as discussed earlier, exactly because the ancient
heyday had existed and hence had a critical function of evaluating contemporaneous
society, Peach Blossom Spring is able to offer a prospective vision – in other words, only
through being modelled on a retrospective vision is the prospective utopia possible,
because the idealisations are based on the premise of recuperating an ancient heyday.
The second point, likewise, departs from the social presence. It is well established
279 As previously discussed, the Great Unity is not a literary utopia per se. However, it should not be disregarded because its retrospective vision resembles that of Peach Blossom Spring, and both look up to the heyday of the sagely rule of King Wen of Zhou. 280 Davis (1981) 7. 281 Being prospective shall not be confused with the idea of the future articulated in the French euchronias of the eighteenth century and the British euchronias of the nineteenth century. That Utopia is a prospective idealisation should be understood in line with the previously discussed concept of heterocosm, a testing ground for experimenting possibilities that is divorced from a backward-looking mentality.
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that the social regeneration of Utopia is operable from external forces, namely strict laws
and rules regulating the social order of Utopia. Such a differentiation is encapsulated in J. C.
Davis’s observation: “In Utopia, it is neither man nor nature that is idealised but
organisation. […] His prime aim is not happiness, that private mystery, but order, that
social necessity.”282 On the other hand, organisation and order in Peach Blossom Spring are
not the goal to be strived for: while organisation is barely mentioned, order is the by-
product of self-improvement. The sense of cultivating moral beings and hence being
capable of retrieving the ancient heyday is manifest in Peach Blossom Spring, where a trace of
Confucius’s Great Unity is distinct. To be concise, while both utopias possess a critical
function of measuring their contemporary societies, Utopia aims at a social rejuvenation,
whereas Peach Blossom Spring stresses self-regeneration, and the Great Unity is a conflation of
both.
282 Davis (1981) 7.
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CHAPTER THREE.
TRANSLATING UTOPIA: TOWARD A MANDARIN ETHOS
There has been a paucity of systematic study of Utopia, or More’s oeuvre in general for
that matter, in Mandarin Chinese. General readers tend to take Utopia at face value,
associating it with an ideal world without further qualification. This chapter begins with the
publication history of the Mandarin translations, each with an introduction to their
respective features such as style and material presentation. The second half of this chapter
presents a close reading of translational variants: firstly, analysing the nomenclatural play
that Thomas More crafted as part of the rhetorical design of the text;283 secondly, a close
reading of the peroration. On a larger scale, this chapter aims to fill the gap in the existing
scholarship on Utopia in Mandarin translations. On a more specific level concerning
translational nomenclatures, it intends to address: a) whether a pattern can be schematised
in More’s nominal play once it is rendered into a language utterly distinctive from Latin or
English; b) how these translations inform readers of the general strategies in terms of
translating a foreign text, in particular foreign names. As for peroration, the passage chosen
for translational comparison, will demonstrate how More’s intention might have appeared
differently as seen by the translators.
1 INTRODUCTION TO THE MANDARIN EDITIONS: STYLES AND MATERIAL
PRESENTATION
My project examines the fourteen standalone Mandarin translations published up until
2016, the quincentenary of Utopia’s first appearance. The first complete Mandarin edition
was translated by Liu Linsheng and published in 1935 by the Commercial Press in Shanghai.
Some believe that there could have been informal adaptations from the Japanese
translations prior to this 1935 edition. This is highly possible, because at that time Japanese
283 I borrow the phrase nomenclatural play, or nomenclature, from James Romm, who offers an insightful analysis of the invented names in Utopia. Romm uses “nominal play” at times in substitution for nomenclature. To avoid too frequent a repetition, I use these three interchangeably, in addition to neologism, as all point to More’s invented names. See Romm, “More’s Strategy of Naming in the Utopia”, The Sixteenth Century Journal 22.2 (1991): 173-83.
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translations of canonical Western works were one of the major sources for the intellectuals
of the early twentieth century to have a “West-looking” perspective. In fact, the preface of
Guo Xiangzhang’s 1966 edition was translated from Japanese, which verifies the Japanese
influence on the translation practices during the middle of the twentieth century. 284 It was
followed by a surge in translating Utopia in the mid-twentieth century. Three editions were
produced around the middle of the century: Dai Liuling in 1956 (Beijing), Liu Chengshao
in 1957 (Taipei), and Guo Xiangzhang in 1966 (Taipei). Before Dai Liuling’s two further
editions (1982 Beijing, 1997 Taipei), Liu Lihua produced a brand-new translation published
in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, in 1978. The beginning of the twenty-first century saw the
publication of another seven renditions: Song Meihua in 2003 (Taipei), Wu Lei in 2005
(Beijing), Wang Jin in 2007 (Xian), Hu Fengfei in 2007 and 2012 (Beijing), Tang Yi in 2011
(Xian), the collaborative effort of Sun Pinghua and He Shan in 2013 (Beijing), and the
most recent publication by Li Lingyan (2016).
Despite the seemingly abundant Mandarin versions, a systematic study of Utopia
has unfortunately not yet become part of mainstream scholarship. Even in English majors
in undergraduate programs in Taiwan, Utopia is studied in excerpts in the Norton Anthology
of English Literature, or as part of the reading of Renaissance literature that is itself only
offered as an elective module in Taiwan. Hsia Po-chia arrived at a similar observation in the
early 80s when he offered a brief overview of the Mandarin translations of Utopia, on
which he commented that “[t]he unadvanced state of More studies in China and Taiwan is
partly due to the general neglect of Renaissance and Reformation history”. 285 This
observation, unfortunately, still holds true a few decades later, despite the gradual
adjustment. In “The Utopia in Chinese” published in 1982, Hsia points out that “there is a
striking paucity of studies on Thomas More in Chinese language”.286 He notes that, as of
the early 1980s, the only work by More that had been translated into Mandarin was Utopia,
and that only two versions were available, namely Liu Linsheng’s in 1935 and Guo
Xiangzhang’s in 1966. Hsia’s findings present an obvious flaw; that is, he overlooked the
284 See, for example, Eisel Mazard’s “Thomas More’s Utopia in Chinese & Japanese Translation”, 03 May 2015, <http://a-bas-le-ciel.blogspot.com/2015/05/thomas-mores-utopia-in-chinese-japanese.html> 11 Feb 2016. This is a blog post, which is not as well researched or properly cited as a scholarly journal article; yet it makes the necessary comparison between the Chinese and Japanese translations, pointing out their overall failure in delivering More’s jocular witticism. In Yan Jianfu’s study, he also points out the possibility that the late Qing intellectuals might already have had access to Utopia before it was officially translated into Mandarin, possibly from a Japanese translation. See Yan Jianfu 143. 285 Po-chia Hsia, “The Utopia in Chinese”, Moreana 69 (March 1981): 108. 286 Hsia 107.
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other two versions prior to Guo’s rendition, Dai Liuling’s 1956 and Liu Chengshao’s 1957
editions. Grounds for the oversight of the latter are easier to relate to because it was a self-
printed volume, and thus might have been less well circulated. Yet this does not justify why
the fairly wide circulation of Dai Liuling’s translation would have slipped Hsia’s attention.
The failure to locate these two versions may have reaffirmed the paucity in More studies
and research into Utopia in the earlier days, ironically in an article that suggests this very
deficiency.
1.1 LIU LINSHENG’S UTOPIA (1935)287
Having served as editor of the Commercial Press and the Zhonghua Book Company, Liu
Linsheng (1894-1980) enjoyed a high literary status. His was the first Mandarin translation
of Utopia. It was published by the Commercial Press in Shanghai, in the series漢譯世界名
著 [Chinese Translations of the Worlds Classics]. Using Robinson’s 1551 translation as the
reference text,288 it is a rather compact volume, small in size. Altogether it has seventy-three
pages, with the first sixteen pages marked as Introductory Remarks. 289 A fairly short
bibliography succeeds the remarks, dated – in the Minguo calendar290 – December 23rd of
the year twenty-three, which corresponds to 1934. This volume also conforms to an earlier
printing convention: vertical writing, to be read from right to left. A few notable features
287 Liu Linsheng 劉麟生, trans., Wu tuo bang (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1935). Liu Linsheng
(1894-1980) was a professor, the author of Chinese Political Ideals (1929), History of Chinese Literature (1932), among others, and served as the editor of the Commercial Press. Having received his bachelor degree in political science from Saint John’s University in Shanghai, Liu had a solid education in Chinese and English. 288 In the Introductory Remarks, Liu Linsheng mentions three English translations (Robinson’s, G. Burnet’s, and A. Cayley’s, without indicating the publication year of the latter two), and suggests that Robinson’s 1551 edition has been the most commonly used translation. See Liu 15. Hsia suggests that Liu adopted the edition of Robinson’s translation published by Everyman’s Library in London, 1926. See Hsia 107. 289 After Remarks, the page number resumes from one. At the closing paragraph of this introductory remark, Liu lists three English translations of Utopia. Gao Fang argues that Liu’s copy text is possibly Robinson’s, because Liu notes that Robinson’s translation is the most common (15). See Gao 191. I remain sceptical about Gao’s assertion, partly because the translational error “King Utopus” that has been perpetuated for centuries does not appear in Liu’s version. 290 The Minguo calendar, also called the Republic of China calendar is the system of numbering years currently used in Taiwan. This system was used in modern-day China from 1912 (after the overthrow of the Qing dynasty by Sun Yat-sen) until 1949, when the retreat of the Nationalist party to Taiwan and the founding of the People’s Republic of China led by the Communist Party took place.
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of this rendition are also possibly the result of this printing convention: the punctuation
marks are inserted outside the sentence – toward the right but in parallel to the immediately
preceding character – instead of being directly inside the line. Even the page numbers
follow the earlier convention, marked with Chinese characters rather than the Arabic
numerals that readers commonly see nowadays.
What is intriguing about this very first Mandarin edition is not just its occasional
archaic language, or its misinterpretation of the original text, but the fact that it is abridged.
Liu Linsheng’s abridged edition,291 from a research viewpoint, offers a wealth of potential
for examining what was left un-translated and the possible grounds for such omission (be it
deliberate exclusion or simple neglect of the reference text). Despite its being the first and
abridged edition, Gao Fang contends that a closer examination of the translated texts
reveals that this edition trumps Dai Liuling’s 1956 version. While I recognise the refined
poetics in Liu’s style, I disagree that it outweighs Dai Liuling’s rendition, primarily because
Liu’s, being an abridged translation, is less faithful to the original text. If Robinson’s 1551
English translation is described as a bare-bones effort, then this earliest Mandarin edition is
even more so, in the sense that it has none of the original ancillary items, let alone the fact
that the core text is not rendered in its entirety.
Its style is a mixture of the poetic and the colloquial: it is poetic in the sense that
Liu’s style is informed by classical writing (文言文), also known as literary Chinese;292 at the
same time, it has a colloquial touch because of Liu’s use of expletives. However, it is not
the kind of conversational style one would have read in Utopia’s English translations. Rather,
with its almost overused expletives – 咧 [lie] in particular, an expletive that is barely seen in
any written form, but more in online discussions or verbal chat – the whole reading
experience is rendered informal to the point that the serio-comic jest More had intended
seemed to have been reduced to mere frivolity.
The only paratextual item included in this very first Mandarin Utopia is an
introduction written by the translator Liu Linsheng, which serves as a reading guide. Gao
Fang suggests that the introductory remarks represent Liu’s initial research findings in
regards to Utopia.293 This introductory remark is divided into four parts: 1) a biography of
291 See Gao Fang, “Also on Utopia”, n.p. 292 Classical Chinese saw its decay in the early twentieth century. One of the objectives of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (part of the New Culture Movement taking placing during 1915-1921)
was to replace classical Chinese with vernacular Chinese (白話文). 293 Gao 191.
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Thomas More; 2) the origins and influences of utopianism; 3) a summary and criticism of
More’s Utopia; 4) the writing style of Utopia and its (English) translations. The biographical
sketch begins with More’s year of birth, supposedly a fairly definite year, as all the scholarly
evidence suggests. What Liu states there, however, is “1480 or 1478”, without further
indication of his source. It is inferable that, in the early twentieth century, Western classics
were only beginning to enter the Chinese-speaking world, and that not having sufficient
sources at hand might have been inevitable.
Another intriguing textual presentation is that, next to the year 1480, parentheses
with additional information were added: “明憲宗成化十六年” [Ming Xianzong Chenghua
shiliu nian]294 – signifying “the sixteenth year during the reign of Cheng-hua Emperor of
the Ming Dynasty”. This is the only case among all Mandarin editions where a reference to
the year of a Chinese dynasty is made. The reason for adopting this way of documenting a
year is understandable: Liu Linsheng was born in the late Qing dynasty, and Imperial China
officially ended only in 1912. 295 For modern readers like us, having this additional
information for comparison may have caused extra effort to match the years of two
calendar systems, since we are no longer familiar with the corresponding dynastic years.
Liu’s early education, on the other hand, was very much rooted in the imperial frame of
mind. To use the Christian calendar – Anno Domini – was a novel practice; that Liu would
insert such parenthetical information for the ease of his contemporaneous readers would
not be seen as a surprise tactic. However, the interesting end result is, in removing the
foreignness by noting the Chinese dynastic year, Liu Linsheng’s translation is imbued with
what I venture to call a sense of foreign-domestication: the localisation of a source text by
inserting information that is no longer up-to-date creates a sense of alienation that is
paradoxically rooted in the target language.
The second section of the introductory remarks, devoted to the “causes and
effects” of utopianism, lays out how Liu Linsheng defines utopia and utopianism. He
explains in simple terms that Utopia comes from Latin – concurrently insinuating a lack of
awareness of its Greek root – and that Utopia means “無何有之鄉”, the land of nowhere.
294 “Ming” refers to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) in Imperial China, whereas “nian” means year. “Xianzong” is the title of the ninth Emperor of Ming China who reigned from 1464 to 1487, and “Chenghua” is the name of that era. It should be noted that the era name started from the Han Dynasty, around 140 BC. It differed from dynasty to dynasty: one emperor could claim more than one era name, but usually one emperor owned one era name, which was especially the case during the Ming and Qing dynasties. 295 Liu Linsheng was born in 1894, whereas the feudal dynasty of the Imperial China, Qing Dynasty, lasted from the seventeenth century to 1912.
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This phrase has a Taoist origin, quoted from 逍遙遊 (“Happy Excursions”) by Zhuangzi.
As discussed in Chapter One, this phrase essentially refers to either a place that has
nothing, an illusory place, or metaphorically insinuates a mental state that is carefree and at
peace. Liu further adds that utopianism is about any ideal socio-political amelioration, thus
providing a rather simplistic and straightforward definition. In a brief sketch of how
utopianism evolved, Liu concludes that utopian socialism could be deemed the end of
utopianism. Especially after Hegel’s theory of historical evolution, we learn that progress
does not come from a premeditated plan, but from constant chaos, and trial and error, that
ultimately amount to advancement. Using a few simple words, Liu sums up the gist of
utopianism: that social progress is achievable, but a perfect society is ultimately a fantasy.296
For an early translation whose identification of the author’s birth year was not definite,
Liu’s simplistic definition of utopianism comes off surprisingly accurately.
That said, we need to return to what it is that Liu equates Utopia with. Indeed, he
understands utopianism to be any theory or belief that is concerned with political or social
transformation. The analogy he makes to explain utopia, nevertheless, seems to have gone
in the opposite direction, since “wu he you zhi xiang” – the land of nothingness – has a
passive connotation, minimising any possible association with socio-political regeneration. I
suggest that the reason behind Liu’s use of “wu he you zhi xiang” resembles his adoption
of the dynastic year, in that both are to remove the foreignness and to create an idiomatic
equivalence for his readers. Aiming at creating domestic intelligibility, Liu already had an
idea of what might be more accommodating for readers – hence the use of the dynastic
year and this eminent phrase from the Taoist thinker Zhuangzi. What he did not realise was
that to equate them would be to appropriate a celebrated Taoist concept to illustrate a
construct that fundamentally was conceived to address political concerns.
In the section providing a summary and critique of More’s Utopia, Liu lists five
characteristics:297
1. Communal property, and hence no need for currency;
2. Centralisation of power, but government officials are elected by citizens;
3. The social order is based upon the family unit, supervised by the nation, so
as to improve the human species;
296 Liu 10. The original reads: 社會上的進步,是可以辦得到,但是完美的社會,始終是一種
幻想了。 297 Liu 14. Translation and emphasis are mine.
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4. Universalisation of education, with an emphasis on pragmatism and the
cultivation of morality, as well as life-long training;
5. Freedom of religious belief.
Of the five points, the fifth appears to be refraction: either a result of Liu’s
misinterpretation, or as a less cautious word option resulting from directly quoting the
original text. There is indeed a level of religious tolerance in Utopia, but to call it religious
freedom is an overstatement, since there appears to be a caveat in almost every aspect of
Utopian life, including religion.298 In addition to an instance of refraction, the third on the
social order is of particular interest. The first half of the sentence is accurate, but
concluding this line with “to improve the human species” is a sentiment that is not
pronounced in Utopia. The line reads “改進人種”, which literally means to improve the
human species. It has much more to do with eugenics, a theme that does appear in sub-
genres of utopian literature. In fact, the portrayal in Utopia where couples examine each
other’s body before marriage so as to “avoid bodily defects” can be deemed as a practice of
eugenics. 299 As Claeys notes, “Utopias have thus commonly stressed the physical
improvability of human stock as a key goal, usually through the promotion of a healthier
life, and from the Renaissance increasingly through scientific advancement”300 In other
words, if a better future workable by human contrivance is the modern utopia and the one
achievable by divine intervention is a utopian prefiguration, I suggest that what Liu
Linsheng analogises here – to improve the human species – is in fact a foreshadowing of a
postmodern utopia. There is no evidence from where in Utopia Liu reaches such a
conclusion regarding improving the human species. There was a surge of utopian writing
and sci-fi writing around the turn of the twentieth century in China, coinciding with the
time when the Republic of China led by the Nationalists overthrew the Qing Dynasty
(1912), as well as a few notable works that do bring up scenarios introducing eugenics, such
298 For instance, different religions are practiced in Utopia, as long as all Utopians acknowledge and worship Mithras, the one Supreme Being. For further analysis, see Sanford Kessler, “Religious Freedom in Thomas More’s Utopia”, The Review of Politics 64.2 (2002). 299 Gregory Claeys, “Introduction: Socialism and the “Eugenic Turn” in British Utopianism, 1875-1900” The European Consortium for Political Research (2004): 8. <https://ecpr.eu/Filestore/PaperProposal/6f6bdba6-e557-4592-b5fc-e618e0d13fd4.pdf>. For more discussion on eugenics, See Claeys, “The Origins of Dystopia: Wells, Huxley and Orwell”, The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 300 Claeys (2004): 8.
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as Liang Qichao’s The Future of New China (1902)301 and Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone
(1905).302 The mention of improving the human species indicates that, if not misreading
Utopia, Liu might have been attempting to catch up with the literary trend of eugenics in
his translation.
1.2 DAI LIULING’S UTOPIA (1956, 1982, 1997)303
Perhaps it was because of the wide circulation of his works as well as his fame as the
translator of Shakespeare’s Sonnets that created the illusion that it was he who brought
Utopia into Mandarin: Dai Liuling has been mistaken at least two times in documented
record to be the person who first translated Utopia into Mandarin.304 He contributed three
editions to the Mandarin Utopias: Sanlian (Beijing, 1956), Commercial Press (Beijing, 1982),
and Zhiwen (Taipei, 1997). The overall commonalities of these three renditions are that
they all include the first prefatory epistle from Thomas More to Peter Giles, the core text, a
selection of the correspondence between Erasmus and More, and an overview of the
various editions and translations of Utopia. Of all the epistles that were included in early
modern editions aiming at endorsement and buttressing the text’s authenticity, only More’s
first epistle to Giles survived in this cultural transference. This crucial epistle was entitled
“Prefatio” in the first four Latin editions, and perhaps this was the reason Dai Liuling
chose to include it, and possibly he left out all the others due to the limitations of textual
space. Yet, this economic reason – textual or otherwise – would not suffice to explain why
Dai included the other non-authorial paratexts, which in all actuality take up a rather
lengthy amount of space in the printed volume. One possible interpretation is that Dai’s
301 Liang Qichao 梁啟超 , Xin Zhongguo Weilai Ji 新中國未來記 [The Future of New China]
(Guangxi: Guanxi Normal University Press, rpt. 2008). It was originally an unfinished novel, with only five chapters written during Liang’s lifetime (1873-1929). Liang was born in Guangdong, China, one of the Chinese Enlightenment thinkers. 302 Wu Jianren 吳趼人, Xin Shitou Ji 新石頭記 [New Story of the Stone] (Shanghai: Gailiang
Xiaoshuo She, 1908). Wu (1866-1910) was a late Qing novelist, who was noted for his vernacular writing style aimed at a readership without formal classical education. 303 Dai Liuling 戴鎦齡, trans., Wu tuo bang 烏托邦 [Utopia] (Beijing: Sanlian Publishing Co., 1956;
Beijing: Beijing Commercial Press, 1982; Taipei: Zhiwen Publishing Co., 1997). 304 For instance, the chapter title in the collected volume that pays homage to the intellectuals of Wuhan University during the Second Sino-Japanese War reads, “Dai Liuling: The Person who brought Utopia into Mandarin”. See Zhang Zaijun 41.
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editions were aimed at a more scholarly and systematic introduction of Utopia, as well as
the milieu in which they were conceived.
The serio-comic jest designated by More might not have registered in Dai’s reading,
or it may have been less of a focus than associating this canonical work with socialism and
communism, the agenda of which was made specific in the preface to the 1982 rendition
published in Beijing. For instance, in discussing how labour creates collective wealth, Dai
refers to it as being appraised by Lenin to be the great socialist thinking, the exact sentence
of which is removed from the 1997 Zhiwen edition published in Taiwan.305 The 1956
Sanlian edition even includes a list of reference books, which does not exist in the other
two editions. This reference list is divided into three categories: classical works of Marxist-
Leninism, historical data, and pertinent literature on Thomas More. Six titles are included
in the first category on Marxist-Leninism, which reveals a trace of the ideological
preference behind the choices.
As far as its core texts are concerned, the 1997 edition is a reproduction of its 1982
cousin. Its partially different non-authorial paratexts suggest a turn in ideological focus: for
instance, the essay on the historical meanings of Utopia that highlights its socialist
orientation was removed from the 1997 Taiwan edition, and there is no longer a
recommended reading list for Marxism. However, what is to be noted is the reference texts
of the previous two editions. The first edition was based upon the 1912 volume edited by
W. D. Armes (with Robinson as its source text) and the 1953 Russian translation published
by the Russian Academy of Sciences. This edition is translated from Latin, and the
commentaries are by A. I. Malenin and F. A. Petrovskii, with a preface by Vyacheslav
Petrovich Volgin (Moscow: Publishing House of Academy of Sciences of USSR, 1953). It
contains a 34-page introduction and a postscript plus commentaries, which verify the
allographic items included in Dai’s translation.306 To be exact, what was taken from the
Russian edition includes: chapter titles, paragraph layout, definitions, and errata of certain
major sentences and words. More importantly, the essay on Utopia’s historical meanings and
all other appendices are extracted from it. All these formed the basis of the paratextual
apparatus, mostly non-authorial – or allographic in Genette’s taxonomy – in Dai’s 1956
305 The original sentence reads “这些就是列宁所称许的‘伟大的老空想家们提出来的’思想”.
See Dai (1982) 9. This sentence is absent in the same passage in the Zhiwen edition, see Dai (1997) 21. 306 I thank Martin Procházka for locating this Russian source for me. Based on the Russian edition, Dai’s 1956 translation is charged with Soviet influence. Gao Fang questions Dai’s choice of the reference text, given that Dai majored in English literature and pursued advanced studies at the University of Edinburgh. See Gao (2017) 193.
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edition. This first translation of Dai’s, with its heavy commentary (there are 230 endnotes
translated from the Russian edition), offers readers a more thorough understanding of
More’s thought, and, furthermore, according to Gao, it is a manifestation of the Soviet
scholar’s research on Utopia and how it was disseminated in Russia.307 This 1956 edition,
therefore, is an end product refracted through Dai’s interpretation and, more so, through a
Soviet lens of the 1950s since a large part of the allographic items are extracted from the
Moscow edition.
The end product of Dai’s retranslation during the 70s is the 1982 edition published
by Beijing Commercial Press, later to be also published in Taiwan in 1997 with changes in
paratextual items. In the translator’s preface to the 1997 Zhiwen edition, Dai claimed to
have made major revision of the whole book toward the end of the 70s, from which the
English reference text was no longer Robinson’s but the fourth volume of The Complete
Works of St. Thomas More published by Yale University Press.308 By inference, the Russian
source was dropped entirely. This Yale edition, published in 1965 was, according to
Elizabeth McCutcheon, a breakthrough in the study of More’s Utopia.309 Even though Dai
Liuling himself claimed to have used the first four Latin editions as major reference points,
this claim is dubious because there is no evidence showing Dai had profound knowledge
of Latin, nor are any of his prolific writings or translated works based upon a Latin work.
It is possible that at best Dai used the bilingual version and secondary sources from those
Latin editions, which he believed to be a sufficient substitute for primary texts. He further
pointed out that both G. C. Richards’ and J. Churton Collins’ editions were his source for
the revisions. 310 Dai’s protégé Professor Li Dao, then in London, assisted him in
transcribing the correspondence between More and Erasmus – hence a collection of
epistles between the two Renaissance humanists is appended in all three of Dai’s
translations.311 Interestingly, even though Dai’s second edition was based upon a different
source text, all these ancillary elements that appeared in 1956 were not left out in the
subsequent editions. Dai’s “re-translation”, in this case, applies only to the main text.
307 Gao (2017) 193. 308 Dai (1997) 25-26. The bilingual Yale edition was edited by Edward Surtz; the Latin copy-text was the 1516, 1517, and 1518 editions, whereas the English text was a revision of G. C. Richards’s translation. Dai himself notes that he began translating Utopia at the beginning of the 50s, and the final product was entrusted to Sanlian to be published. 309 McCutcheon, “Review Essay” 275. 310 Dai (1997) 20. 311 There may be confusion in terms of time frame, since Dai’s first edition (1956) already included this collection of letters between More and Erasmus, and yet Dai claims that this effort was only made during the 70s when he was working on the revision.
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Dai’s three editions, however, have different allographic prefatory items. In Dai’s
first edition, there is no preface, only the essay on the historical significance of Utopia by
Soviet scholar Vyacheslav Petrovich Volgin. In the essay discussing Utopia’s historical
significance, the purpose is similar to that of the commendatory verses in the Latin
editions of Utopia – to endorse and to exalt Utopia, not just its literary value but its political
relevance. This essay praises Utopia in relation to The Communist Manifesto. In fact, this essay
is less about endorsing Utopia than paying tribute to Marxism-Leninism and communist
thinking. Toward the end of this essay, it is asserted that only when socialist thinking is
combined with Marx’s genius theory can socialism transform itself from being utopian and
illusory to a realistic force of life.312 What is insinuated here is that, even though More’s
work is rightly exalted as the pioneer of socialism, and that not one work in socialist
history could outweigh Utopia until the French Revolution, all this has to be coupled with
Marx’s genius theory. From here, it is not difficult to see the ideology of the editorial board
and/or the translator who decided to include this essay, especially in the 1956 Sanlian
edition where it is located at the beginning of the volume, after the portrait of More and
before the main texts. The priority as well as the textual location of this non-authorial
paratext proves even more intriguing when compared with the third edition published in
Taiwan in 1997, in which this essay is deleted entirely.
The second edition includes two prefatory elements: a publication note by the
editorial office and the translational preface by Dai Liuling himself. This publication note is
not intended for Utopia, but rather for the translational series of the World Classics. This
note opens with the line commenting that:
Our publishing house has always valued transferring and translating the world classics. Starting from the 50s, we have been devoted to translating and publishing those classical works from before the birth of Marxism and to introduce representative works from different schools. […] We firmly believe that only by amplifying our brains via the wealth of knowledge created by human beings are we able to build a modernised socialist society.313
312 Dai (1956) 15. 313 Emphasis mine. “Transferring and translating” is the literal translation of “移譯 ”; both
characters convey the meaning of carrying across. The original reads: 我館歷來重視移譯世界各
國學術名著。從五十年代起,更致力於翻譯出版馬克思主義誕生以前的古典學術著作,
同時適當介紹當代具有定評的各派代表作品。[…] 我們確信只有用人類創造的全部知識
財富來豐富自己的頭腦,才能夠建成現代化的社會主義社會。
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What is clear here are a few lines with an explicit ideological message – it explains the
selection criteria, and the selected works are meant to be read pedagogically, with the
objective of helping to shape a socialist country. The note was written in January 1982 by
the editorial team of the Beijing Commercial Press, which understandably cannot be found
in the third edition published in Taiwan, where socialist thinking has never been part of the
ideology. It is precisely this type of allographic appendage that evinces how broadly Utopia
can go with and be applicable to various supplementary items.
1.3 LIU CHENGSHAO’S UTOPIA (1957)314
The third Mandarin translation, by Liu Chengshao, came almost two decades after the first.
Even though Dai Liuling’s version of Utopia was published a year before Liu Chengshao’s,
the latter was not informed of Dai’s rendition, which seemed to have been unavoidable,
given the political tension between China and Taiwan at that time. The book cover is
coloured dark red, with the three big characters Wu Tuo Bang printed vertically. There is no
mention of the author or the translator on the book cover. The first mention of More is
on the second page of the translator’s preface, where utopia is defined. Readers are only
informed of who the translator is towards the end of the preface, when Liu Chengshao
signs off with a name, date, and place. This reflects the early phenomenon that a translated
work tended to be less thoroughly and faithfully re-presented, manifest already in the
display of its author’s name. Like the convention detected in Linsheng’s version, this
volume was also printed vertically, with a special font as well as relatively large line spacing,
and with page numbers in Chinese characters. The punctuation marks, however, no longer
follow the earlier convention but are marked in the fashion that is seen nowadays. A closer
examination suggests that the edition’s reference text is Liu Linsheng’s 1935 edition, mainly
because both are abridged editions and contain none of the authorial paratexts, and some
of the mistakes or translational peculiarities are detected in both. The wording and
expression are not always the same, but the interpretational mistakes are very often
identical; for instance, both renditions insert a parenthetical note indicating that Hythloday
refers to “the ideal person”.
314 Liu Chengshao 劉成韶, trans., Wu tuo bang 烏託邦 [Utopia] (Taipei: World Bookstore/self-
printed, 1957).
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Liu Chengshao (c.1932-?) was a freelance translator, and not much of his
biographical background can be traced, except that he served in the army and retreated
with the Nationalist party to Taiwan in 1949.315 He did translate another work: a version of
Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince was published in 1966. This other translation of his is
mentioned in passing here because both could be read as political treatises and more so
because both of these works were self-published – not only is this unique among Utopia’s
translations, it is a rather peculiar case in translations of all kinds, then and now.
The first page after the book cover comes with a dedication that reads:
Dedicated to
My forever most-revered departed friend, Ms Chang Yixuan316
I have examined two copies of this edition, one from Tunghai University in Taiwan and
one from Hong Kong Baptist University, both of which contain the translator’s autograph
as well as a one-line note dedicated to the respective university. Liu Chengshao’s rendition
is a relatively personal one, not just from the fact that he self-published it but also that he
included, to use Genette’s taxonomy, an intimate paratext, a dedication to Ms Chang, as well
as a private paratext, the one-line handwritten note addressing the recipient universities.
These practices demonstrate the role of books as material artefacts “in the reader’s social
life, family history, professional practices, political commitments, and devotional rituals”;317
in Liu Chengshao’s case, the intimate and private paratexts reveal a trace of both his social
and personal life.
This 1957 rendition has fourteen lengthy endnotes by the translator (marked as 譯
者註 [translator’s notes]). Equally interesting is that some additional information is
sometimes not listed under endnotes, but rather inserted inside the main text, separated by
parentheses. A few features can be gathered from the above examples: the way Liu
Chengshao composes his own notes reinforces the impression that this is a rather
315 Lai Tzu-yun Lai 賴慈芸, “Youling yizhe yu liuwang wenren – zhanhou Taiwan yizhe shengtai
chutan” 幽靈譯者與流亡文人 — 戰後台灣譯者生態初探 [Ghost Translators and Exiled Men
of Letters – A Description of Translators in Post-war Taiwan], Fanyixue yanjiu jikan 翻譯學研究集
刊 17 (2014): 35. 316 Translation is mine. The original reads:
獻給
我永遠最敬愛的亡友 常儀璇小姐. 317 William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) xiii. Quoted in Jennifer Richards and Fred Schurink, “Introduction: The Textuality and Materiality of Reading in Early Modern England”, Huntington Library Quarterly 73.3 (2010): 345.
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personalised, non-official, and possibly not peer-reviewed translation. A similar impression
is also generated from the translator’s preface, in which Liu addresses the actual reader
directly in a fairly colloquial tone. It reads as follows:
This book is mostly based on More’s intention, but the footnotes are the translator’s interruption.318 If someone were to say: Are you not exaggerating? I believe that people are all in a frenzied state of fury seeing a play; can they demonstrate any refined manners? Don’t forget that this is Utopia.319
Liu Chengshao has already anticipated possible reader response, especially as this book was
relatively freshly introduced into the sinophone cultures. He assumes that many of the
scenes and commentaries depicted in More’s Utopia may have created a sense of
exaggeration and hence an unrealistic vibe. From what modern readers already understand,
Utopia is an imaginary work and a level of fictionality is inevitable. However, from this
passage, it appears that Liu Chenghao presumes that readers are treating Utopia as a play,
hence disregarding the iconoclastic nature of Utopia. This, on the other hand, reflects that
Liu has taken in only the serious intention of Utopia – overlooking the jesting part – and has
attempted to translate this book with a pedagogical and iconoclastic purpose.
Liu Chengshao’s translation is also unique in significant ways. It is an edition
abundant in explanatory notes. In addition to the parenthetical information, Liu
Chengshao supplies his own endnotes after each subchapter. These translator’s notes are
elaborate and lengthy. In most cases, instead of elucidating the original text, the endnotes
read as if expressing the translator’s own thoughts on particular issues, and the first-person
pronoun is frequently adopted. Such an arrangement makes reading it almost like
experiencing two texts in juxtaposition.
That the translator’s own words are presented as being part of the original text is
what I find most intriguing. Those additions indeed give the book a more personal touch.
It is no longer just a translation; it is what makes Utopia not the Morean Utopia per se, but
the Utopia of Liu Chengshao. With Liu’s translation, Utopia is refracted through Liu’s
commentary, which is blended with the original text. There is a high degree of liberty in
the way Liu Chengshao translate Utopia, as a result of which this Utopia almost become a
318 The original phrase for “interruption” is “插嘴”, which is very conversational, not at all a
refined way of saying “interruption”, especially in a book. “插嘴” literally means “insert mouth”. 319 Liu Chengshao 3-4. Translation is mine. The original reads: 本書多是照莫爾的意思,不過註
是譯者的插嘴,如果有人說:你未免給他擴大其詞了?我想人不都是在看戲的急怒裡,
能有修養嗎,那就不要忘了這是烏託邦。
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re-written work. Three examples will be presented here to illustrate how More’s Utopia is
refracted through Liu Chengshao’s translation, additions, and occasional misconceptions:
The first two are related to happiness and what facilitates happiness, whereas the third
appears at the closing of the book to wrap up this fictional work.
A lengthy section in Utopia is devoted to the discussion of happiness, what
constitutes it, and how to pursue such happiness. It begins with the nature of happiness,
and that the consensus among the Utopians is that “human happiness consists largely or
wholly in pleasure”. Before it moves on to discussing physical and mental pleasure, there
appears a passage in Chengshao’s edition that is clearly not taken from the original text:
The most valuable happiness is love and creation, nothing is grander or happier than those: the former is about true love and passion. Even if it is limited, it remains noble and ardent. If we expand the scope of love to the love for all, then it is the love loaded with immortality! As for the latter, creation is the meaning of shared happiness, which gives such great pleasure and honour to people.320
If one were not familiar with the original text of Utopia, one would have little reason to
doubt that this passage was authorial. As abstract as it may be, this passage fits into the
context, and it makes universal sense. What is intriguing is that “love” is the one thing that
is not discussed in More’s Utopia. The closest it comes is when More, speaking via Raphael
Hythloday, proposes that the first bodily pleasure includes sexual intercourse, or delivery of
offspring, as some translations go. Why would Liu Chengshao insert this particular
passage? What urged him to write it or what was his intention beyond this translational
intervention? Could this have been in any sense connected to his dedication to Ms Chang
Yixun? One can only speculate.
The second example with regard to facilitating happiness is a more rational one
than the previous case. When Hythloday recounts what the Utopians have learnt from the
outside world, a list of classical works is given, including works by Aristotle and Euripides.
He further praises how Utopians are advanced in the medical field and that they have learnt
paper-making as well as print technology from outside travellers, namely the Europeans.
This is where the non-authorial text comes in:
320 I am reserved about the use of “creation” in this translated text. It is indeed a direct translation
of “創造”, but judging by its context, it may well refer to procreation. The original reads: 最有價
值的快樂,沒有比愛情創造再大再快樂的了:前者真愛和熱情,就是在狹隘裡,也多麼
高超而熱烘烘,要是再擴大博愛於眾情,那快樂多充滿著不朽呢!尤其是後者,創造更
代表著共同快樂的意義,給人家是多大的快樂與榮幸。
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They are now very much developed in scientific research, trying to improve life using scientific methods and to increase production with scientific expertise. They apply science to all kinds of human happiness, aiming to reach a blissful scientific life. With their freedom of thought, there is no restriction in terms of speech; right and justice can thus be practiced, and rationalism is exercised ever more smoothly; creation is followed by creation, and people have truly reached the state of equality, freedom and fraternity.321
Again, this passage fits right into the context and even serves as a fine conclusion to the
discussion of scientific development in Utopia. This add-on, however, has manipulated
More’s design for the Utopian community. If one were to read Sir Francis Bacon’s New
Atlantis (1624), the first half of this passage would reasonably put everything into context.
Yet this is Utopia, where the emphasis on scientific advancement is not part of More’s
grand scheme. Every single sentence in this passage makes perfect sense; in fact, all points
raised here may well apply to an eu-topia. More does not explicitly refer to freedom of
speech or freedom of thought in Utopia. However the way he depicts the dining scene and
the morning lectures reflects a certain level of freedom of expression as well as choice.322
Thus, from the second part of this passage, despite its being a non-authorial appendage
making itself out to be the main text, it can be inferred that the translator is aiming at a
more analytical entry point for actual readers to access – as well as assess – the
circumstances in Utopia. Moreover, the socio-political environment Liu Chengshao lived in
was relatively restricted, without much freedom of speech. This additional text may likely
be Liu’s own ideal and wish; hence he ended this passage with the slogan from the French
Revolution, only in a different order – equality, freedom, and fraternity.
Utopia ends with the reportorial More commenting how he cannot completely
agree with what Hythloday says, and that he can only wish rather than expect to see these
things happen in his own society. In several translations, there is one line, as if it is a stage
direction, narrating that Hythloday’s afternoon talk about the politics of Utopia is
321 The original reads: 現在他們對科學的研究都非常進步了,用科學的方法去改良生活,用
科學的技術來增加生產,把科學用到於一切的人類幸福上,成為幸福的科學人生人。配
合著他們的思想自由,言論不受限制,正義公理得以伸張,理性更能有暢通,創造繼起
著創造,人民真正是到了平等自由博愛的境地。 322 Utopian citizens are encouraged to take part in hearing lectures that interest them. At meal times, the youngsters are encouraged to talk and freely express themselves, but this is in order for the elderly to find out the former’s disposition and temperament. Therefore my emphasis is on the “certain” level of freedom, in that the freedom always comes with a presupposition or a caveat.
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completed here. Yet in this 1957 translation, there is another passage immediately
succeeding it:
Let us look at the Utopian politics and compare it with our own realities. It is as if our rulers have been corrupted by wealth and power, bedazzled by enjoyment and lasciviousness. Can we not appeal to our countrymen and beseech them to be prepared for the consequences that ensued?323
This appeal could have passed off as More’s own words to his contemporaneous readers.
However, in fact, it is Liu directly addressing his own actual readers, the readers in Taiwan
during the mid-twentieth century that had undergone martial law (1949-1987). A universal
truth that is applicable to various cultures and different time frames – that is what makes a
classic a classic, whose enlightening effects are capable of moving beyond temporal and
spatial boundaries. This is not to legitimise Liu’s deliberate insertion of his own words into
the main text, but they do urge the readers to question their own social realities and to
contemplate what inspired Liu’s inclusion of this passage.
1.4 GUO XIANGZHANG’S UTOPIA (1966)324
Published in the mid-1960s, Guo Xiangzhang’s is the second complete translation of Utopia.
As with Liu’s two translations, no authorial paratext is included. The second page
immediately succeeding the book cover is a copy of the original title page, while on the
opposite side is a one-line dedication that reads: “We hereby express our thanks to
UNESCO for having funded the publication of this book”.325 This is the only translation
of Utopia sponsored by UNESCO. In 1971, Taiwan withdrew from the United Nations; no
other editions or reprints received the same sponsorship.
Preceding the main text, there is a lengthy biographical account of Thomas More.
What distinguishes it is that this biographical sketch was not written by Guo Xiangzhang
323 Translation is mine. The original reads: 我們看看烏託邦的政治,對照我們各國的現實,好
像我們各國的主政者,都被祿位腐化醺醉了,享受和淫樂弄昏迷了似的,我們不能不向
各國的同胞呼籲了,我們能準備接受其後果嗎! 324 Guo Xiangzhang郭湘章, trans., Wu tuo bang 烏托邦 [Utopia] (Taipei: Guoli bianyi guan, 1966).
The translator’s name that appears on the English title page is “Ko Hsiang Chang”, which is using the Wade-Gilos system. However, for the sake of consistency, I use the Hanyu pinyin system throughout, which reads “Guo Xiangzhang”. 325 The original reads: 本書由聯合國教育科學文化組織補助出版謹此致謝.
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himself or the editorial team; rather it is a translation of the work of 戶川秋骨 Shūkotsu
Togawa (1871-1939), a Japanese scholar who specialised in British and American literature.
This biography is so far the most extensive and descriptive introduction – though not
necessarily as analytical as Dai Liuling’s version – among all Mandarin editions of Utopia. It
is forty-eight pages long, which, in a volume that altogether has 142 pages, takes up a major
proportion and may even suffice to form a study in itself.
There is no mention of the source text of Guo’s translation. Judging by the fact
that Guo opted to translate Togawa’s preface, one may venture that the Japanese rendition
served as his reference. While Hsia Po-chia suggests the likelihood of this, 326 a close
reading of the text indicates otherwise. When illustrating Hythloday’s Ulysses-like
disposition, the reportorial More comments that “this attitude would have cost him dear, if
God had not been gracious to him” (45, 47). The translational error of rendering “cost
him dear” to “買著鹿” – literally “buying (a) deer” – reveals that Guo’s source text is
English. 327 Such an absurd, nonsensical rendering is evidence of Guo’s negligence in
misreading dear to deer, and Guo’s direct-translation of this mistake indicates that his
version was modelled on an English edition, rather than a Japanese one.
This forty-eight-page introduction is divided into twelve sections, aimed at
Togawa’s readership, namely the Japanese. Guo did not alter Togawa’s words when editing
this introduction. For instance, when stating that More was from London, Togawa writes:
“More was a Londoner. Expressing it with our (Japanese) words, he would be from
Shitamachi (New Downtown) in London.”328 Shitamachi is the downtown, or “the lower
parts of a town” in Japanese, a historical district of central Tokyo, historically connected
with merchants, tradesmen, and artisans. As such, Togawa appeared to suggest that More
was from the business class living in the city of London. Unlike the American
“downtown”, Shitamachi is geographically and culturally specific; however, by generalising
Shitamachi to downtown, Guo Xiangzhang seemed to be at a loss with the Japanese word
and context. It is self-evident that the information – “Japanese” – inside the parentheses is
326 In the essay reviewing the two Mandarin translations of Utopia, Hsia suggests the possibility that, although no reference was given, Guo’s source may well have been the Japanese translation. See Hsia 107. 327 To say either “to buy a deer” or “bought a deer” in Japanese would be “鹿を買う”、”鹿を買
った” (reads: shika o kau; shika o katta), which proves that Guo’s rendering comes from his
misunderstanding of the English text (from “cost him dear” to “cost him deer”) rather than from a Japanese source. 328 Guo 3. The original reads: 摩爾是倫敦人,若用我們(日本人)的話表示出來,他是倫敦
的下町子(新市區)的人。
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an insertion by the translator. Making this analogy indeed carves an easier entry point to
More’s life for Japanese readers. However, this is not necessarily the case for Chinese or
Taiwanese readers. Undeniably it could produce the same desired effect as that for the
Japanese readers for the elder generations who, for instance, had undergone the Japanese
Occupation of Taiwan (1895-1945) and those who had studied or lived in Japan, which was
not an uncommon phenomenon. Yet for those who had not received a Japanese education,
or for those relatively unfamiliar with this culture, an analogy like this barely helps. It might
have appeared trendy for some, but it no longer has the function of advancing domestic
intelligibility.
This is not the only case where a Japanese reference appears. When discussing why
More composed Utopia in Latin, Togawa offers his own insight:
At that period of time, writing prose or verse in Latin was exactly like our people (the Japanese) composing Chinese prose or Chinese poetry.329 […] Milton’s Latin poems have been universally acclaimed, which I believe is like those Chinese prose and verses making their way to the literary circles of various countries. If one were to argue that More wrote Utopia in Latin simply because he was avoiding the possibility of persecution, I’d rather think that it is an idea not worthy of adoption.330
Togawa is not the only person who refutes the reason behind More’s use of Latin being for
the sake of avoiding censorship. Writing from a Japanese point of view, he offers a novel
comparison of this choice of language. Such an analogy is not to be found elsewhere in the
Mandarin translations, which marks its epochal peculiarity when Taiwan was going through
a transitional period from the Japanese Occupation (1895-1945) into the Martial Law
period (1949-1987).
Stylistically speaking, Guo’s rendition is clear and conversational (especially with the
frequency of expletives used), but at the same time idioms are adopted as well, making the
whole reading experience closer to a lively text that speaks directly to its readers. It is, like
the 1957 Liu Chengshao edition, rich in explanatory notes; yet unlike its predecessor, Guo’s
endnotes do not deviate from explaining the main texts. There are thirty-one endnotes
329 Some understand this “Chinese poetry” – 漢詩 (han shi) – as the poetry written in classical
metrical format called “文言詩” (wenyan shi; classical poems), which serves as a direct contrast to
the vernacular poems. 330 Guo 16. The translation is mine. The original reads: 當時以拉丁文作文賦詩,正如吾人(日
本人)作漢文漢詩一樣,並無甚可驚異之處 [. . .] 彌爾頓的拉丁文詩是馳名國際的,我以
為正如漢文漢詩流傳到許多國家的文壇一般。如果說摩爾顧及到用英文寫這本書會有危
險性纔以拉丁文寫成,我毋寧以為是不足採信的想法。
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appended to the First Book, and twenty after the Second Book. All fifty-one notes are
concise explanations of proper nouns appearing in the main text, be they real historical
figures, toponyms, or invented names that are part of More’s elaborate jest. Unlike Liu
Chengshao’s endnotes which are overtly elaborate and may have functioned less as
explication than as the mouthpiece of the translator, Guo’s fifty-one endnotes are
condensed, strictly giving background information or explaining etymological origins. Hsia
Po-chia criticises Guo’s translation as a “disappointment because it does not represent an
improvement over the 1935 edition”.331 It is a dubious evaluation, however, firstly because
Hsia’s review essay examines only the 1935 edition and the 1966 edition, which he believes
to be the only available Mandarin translations of Utopia at the time he was writing (1981),
overlooking the other two versions prior to the 60s, meaning his assessment lacks a fair
basis. Secondly, Guo’s translation does demonstrate a notable progress from the very first
Mandarin edition, especially so as it is no longer an abridged edition. However, Guo’s
translation manifests quite a few inconsistencies in how the names are translated and
presented. The translated names sometimes come with the original in parenthetical marks,
sometimes the original names appear in the endnotes with additional explanation, while
other times the original names are not given at all. It is as if the translated names were
provided merely to replace the foreign original, to occupy textual space. All this reflects the
early, developmental stage of translating Utopia – as well as of translating foreign texts into
Mandarin in general – before the twenty-first century.
1.5 LIU LIHUA’S UTOPIA (1978)332
Liu Lihua’s translation has long been out of print. It is not listed in any of the major library
catalogues in China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan. I was able to retrieve this edition only as late
as 2017. Its publisher, Sanxin Publishing, is no longer in business. The book cover is
More’s portrait; there is a title page prior to the table of contents, in which a pattern
resembling a printer’s flower is shown. Of all Mandarin versions, only Liu Lihua’s and Liu
Linsheng’s editions are printed with this kind of decorative frame. There is no mention of
the reference text, but based on the version of More’s invented names and the Utopian
paratexts included, it is evident that Paul Turner’s – who coined Anglophone equivalents
331 Hsia 107. 332 Liu Lihua 劉麗華, trans., Wu tuo bang 烏托邦 [Utopia] (Kaohsiung: Sanxin Publishing, 1978).
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such as Raphael Nonsenso to replace Raphael Hythloday – was the source.333 Turner’s
rendition is of a particular kind in that he aims at imbuing the text with a modern vibe: he
coined many of the names and toponyms appearing in Utopia based on linguistic roots and
meanings, with a combination of contemporary equivalents in English. In the introduction
to this Penguin Classics edition, Turner writes, “As modern education very seldom includes
Greek, I thought the only way of implementing More’s intention was to convert such
proper names into English equivalents. Accordingly, Hythlodaeus (who came from Portugal)
appears as Nonsenso, Anydrus as Nowater, and Ademus as Nopeople”.334 Thanks to this, Liu
Lihua’s edition brings a novel light to the re-translation of Utopia in view of Turner’s
unique modernisation of More’s coined names. Turner is not just translating the invented
names; he is actively participating in this cerebral jest, either to complicate or to simplify,
the interpretation could go both ways. Attempting to reach the same end, Liu Lihua has
created Mandarin equivalents, though not in every instance, such as River Nowater and
Raphael Nonsenso, to be discussed in the next section of this chapter. Hers is also the only
instance among all Mandarin Utopias that has successfully rendered and highlighted the
significance of Hythloday, or Nonsenso, in the translation just by translating the name.
Conforming to Turner’s text, Liu Lihua includes the epistles from More to Giles
and Giles to Busleyden. The endnotes are likewise directly taken from Turner’s edition; the
difference is that Lihua deletes eight notes from Book One and eighteen from Book Two.
A two-page afterword is appended after the endnotes, in which utopia’s etymology,
definitions, and Chinese counterparts such as Da Tong and Peach Blossom Spring are
alluded to. Utopia is defined in two aspects: first “to imagine an illusion that is impossible
in the real society” and second as “the romanticised documentation of an ideal nation”.335
The first line of observation reinforces the mythical and impractical features that are often
pejoratively linked to Utopia; however, by later on alluding to More’s narrative as
“romanticised documentation” Liu Lihua interpolates a sense of concreteness interlaced
yet again with a mythical flavour, that of the romanticised. Liu further specifies that Utopia
is rendered as Wu Tuo Bang, with proximity to both pronunciation and meaning, which
“indubitably has become a neologism in Mandarin Chinese”.336 Her observation, dated to
333 Paul Turner, trans., Utopia (London: Penguin Books, 1965, 2003). 334 Turner xii. 335 Liu 156. The original reads “想望在現實不可能有的社會的幻影” and “對理想的國家之浪
漫的紀錄”. 336 The original reads: 無疑地已成為國語的新語彙了。
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the 1970s, is the only translation where utopia is specifically referred to as becoming a
neologism in Mandarin.
1.6 SONG MEIHUA’S UTOPIA (2003)337
If we look at Utopia as a cultural product that has travelled, Song Meihua’s edition is closest
to the Morean heritage. This edition is up until now the most complete in terms of
authorial paratexts and is the most elegant translation with regard to its language. It was
born out of the first group of Western classics selected by the National Science Council of
Taiwan under the project of Translating and Annotating Classics (經典譯注計畫 ). This
project is based on a three-year cycle, still running today. The National Scientific Council
of Taiwan, which commissioned this translation, initiated this Project in 1999, and Utopia
was one of the first four classics to be (re)translated. Viewing translators as information
mediators, J. C. Sager argues that they “adjust their work more closely to the needs of
secondary readers, or indeed, where suitable, upgrade the end users to the class of primary
readers”.338 Song Meihua, in her way of translating and annotating, delivers the text to a
primary readership, supplementing them with the particulars necessary for capturing the
original context. This is not simply her personal decision, but done in compliance with the
objective of the translation series, where we see all other works included in the series are
presented with detailed annotations and original paratexts.
This 163-page translation marks itself out in two distinctive ways: its elegant as well
as idiomatically apt style that manifests the intricacies of the target language, and its
relatively complete paratextual materials that all other editions lack, further rendering
Song’s version both scholarly and artistic. It is scholarly because explanatory notes are
generously provided, along with the marginalia that are missing in all other Mandarin
translations.339 It is artistic because it is one of the very few instances where a relevant
illustration pertaining to Utopia is placed as the book cover, and the arrangement of
paratexts renders this volume a refined artistic product whose linguistic content has been
changed and yet which artistically aims at a faithful representation of its original.
337 Song Meihua 宋美璍, trans., Wu tuo bang烏托邦 [Utopia] (Taipei: Linking Books, 2003). 338 J. C. Sager “Text Types and Translation”, Text Typology and Translation, ed. Anna Trosborg. (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997) 33. 339 However, Song missed out several marginal notes included in the original source.
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It is also the only Mandarin translation in which the other names of Utopia appear
– Eutopia and Udetopia. The word Eutopia, blissful place, appeared for the first time in the
commendatory verse allegedly written by More’s nephew Anemolius. Speakers with basic
knowledge of Greek and Latin would understand from the start that “utopia” puns in both
Greek and Latin, referring to a good place that is nowhere to be found. For Mandarin
speakers with no pre-existing knowledge of Latin or Greek, such a play on words is lost in
translation. With the inclusion of this commendatory poem that brings up Eutopia,
Mandarin-speaking readers are granted access to the double-layer implication of the word
as it was initially coined, rather than either remaining entirely unaware of it or only getting
a glimpse of it through explanatory notes. Among all the Mandarin Utopias, only Song’s
rendition includes this poem, in which eutopia is translated as “樂土” [le tu], literarily
“happy soil” or “happy land”. The phrase le tu first appeared in the poem “Big Rat” in The
Book of Poetry, a collective work by various anonymous authors from the eleventh to the
sixth centuries BC. “Big Rat” is taken as a trope for a despotic ruler from whom all citizens
were in dire need to run away. They were in search of the blissful land – 樂土 – where they
could settle and live happily ever after without duress or heavy taxation. Here Song adopts
the usage from The Book of Poetry to translate Eutopia, making it explicit that Utopia is the
good place to which people aspire.
1.7 WU LEI’S UTOPIA (2005)340
While Song’s edition is the richest in original paratexts, Wu Lei’s version is the one that
offers the most abundant non-original paratexts, with 191 illustrations as well as captions.
This number is given on the cover page, below the title, possibly for marketability. The
reference edition is not stated, but judging by some translational specificities341 as well as
the two texts appended after Utopia – a version of More’s biography and the epistle from
Erasmus to Ulrich von Hutten – it is evident that Dai Liuling’s 1982 edition serves as the
source.
340 Wu Lei 吳磊, trans., Wu tuo bang: Guanyu weilai wanmei shehui de quanbu shexian烏托邦: 關於未來
完美社會的全部設想 [Utopia: All the Visualisation About the Future Perfect Society] (Beijing:
People’s Daily Press, 2005). 341 For instance, how Peter Giles is referred to as “the perfect friend” in Dai’s 1982 edition instead of the 1956 one.
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Published by the People’s Daily Press in Beijing, it is the fanciest of all Mandarin
Utopias: it is the first volume among the series of 文化偉人代表作圖釋書系 [the
pictorial-annotated books of the cultural masters’ works], and it contains a plethora of, in
Genette’s term, iconic paratexts. It is also the only translation that inserts a non-authorial
subtitle on the cover page, 烏托邦: 關於未來完美社會的全部設想 [Utopia: All the
Visualisation About the Future Perfect Society], stressing the adjective “perfect”, which the
mainstream definition of utopia rejects. A short publication note is provided at the very
beginning, explaining the selection criteria for this book series. It aims at choosing those
great classical works that have shaped human knowledge, and its target readers are the
intelligentsia. The main objective behind this series is to re-translate those works with the
aim of making the translations more accurate and compressed, and to annotate focal
points via illustrations. In this way, the editorial team suggests, all those pioneering
thoughts can be easily decipherable and internalised into daily common sense. Yet after a
scan over this extravagantly pictorial volume, one has to ask what kind of reading
experience this edition produces and whether those added iconic paratexts indeed facilitate
a better reading, which will be further discussed in Chapter Four. Wu Lei’s translation stands out not just because of its elaborate visual presentation
with the plentiful non-authorial (and many times irrelevant) illustrations that are themselves
of high research value, but also because it is the only edition that offers a synopsis of the
two books and of each chapter. The summary is inserted immediately after the chapter title,
which is itself also supplemented with its pinyin spelling. It is unclear why the editor-
translator opts for such an arrangement because the additional pinyin spelling of the
chapter title does not add to the reading experience. Nor is pinyin spelling supplied
anywhere else in the volume other than the chapter titles. At best, it can be taken as a
layout arrangement to add layers to the presentation that barely generate individual value.
The explanatory notes are displayed in parenthetical marks, inside the main text but
in a different font. However, despite the variation in font to distinguish the author’s voice
from that of the translator, those remarks interrupt the reading flow. This plus the diverse
and often irrelevant illustrations render the reading experience a complex one. It situates
More’s Utopia in a larger historical and cultural context; yet those far-fetched associations
beg the question of how much has been appropriated, and what kind of end product the
translator-editor hoped to deliver with this pictorial volume.
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1.8 WANG JIN’S UTOPIA (2007)342
Wang Jin’s is the first bilingual edition of the Mandarin Utopia, published by Shaanxi
People’s Publishing House in 2007.343 Except for the fact that this edition includes the first
prefatory epistle from More to Giles and a three-page editor’s note supplied by Wang Jin, it
appears to be a rudimentary translation. It gives no clue as to which English translation is
printed in parallel to the target text. A close reading suggests that the English text was
taken from Bishop Gilbert Burnet’s translation and that Wang Jin modelled the edition on
Dai Liuling’s 1982 edition to a great extent. On the book cover, only the names of the
author and the translator-editor are mentioned. What is more, the word 英 enclosed in
brackets is placed in front of the name Thomas More, as an indication of the nationality
of Thomas More.344 For general readers without previous knowledge of Utopia, they would
have simply assumed that Utopia was written in English, and that the English text printed in
the volume was penned by the Englishman Thomas More. This, interestingly, matches the
anecdote that Paul Turner brings up in his translation for Penguin Classics: “Educated
people are often unaware that the book was written in Latin, and many imagine that they
have read the original, when what they have actually read is Raphael Robinson’s
translation.”345
The only prefatory item in this edition – an allographic one – is an editorial note,
entitled “Words from the Editor”. The first half of this note talks about how the rational
spirit originated from ancient Greece, and how with the development of rationalism the
West has had a fundamentally different value and frame of mind compared to the East,
which has had a stronger emphasis on the heart. It was time, this editor proposes, to open
the eyes to see the world via the translation of those Western classics, otherwise the
Chinese would still exclude themselves from the outside world, believing that they were
living in the Peach Blossom Spring. The editor’s critique, however, appears to be a
stereotyped and clichéd commentary, that might have been applicable at the turn of the
twentieth century when the concept of utopia was being introduced to China by foreign
missionaries or late Qing intellectuals. Providing such an outdated review in a modern
context, regrettably, confirms my conjecture about this book series, in particular this
342 Wang Jin 王金, trans., Wu tuo bang 烏托邦 [Utopia] (Xian: Shaanxi People’s Publishing House,
2007). 343 “Shaanxi” should in fact be spelt “Shanxi”, but I use the spelling that appears on the cover page. 344 英, pronounced ing, refers to England or English. 345 Turner 22. Quoted in McCutcheon, “Ten English Translations/Editions” 106.
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volume, being a hasty production. The second half of this note offers biographical
background on Thomas More, a summary of Utopia, and an evaluation of the literary
status and socio-political influence it has achieved. A phone call with the Shaanxi People’s
Publishing House indicated that Wang Jin was still a graduate student when she translated
Utopia, and her version was printed only once and the publishing house no longer has
stock. We may thus qualify this editorial note as a guide to reading Utopia; or to be precise,
Utopia through Wang Jin’s fairly simplistic rephrasing, which equates Utopia with the
pastoral Chinese counterpart, Peach Blossom Spring.
Even though Wang’s edition is a complete translation and includes the letter from
More to Giles, this version is much less sophisticated than the previous two abridged
editions (1935, 1957), especially in terms of language use. Detailed footnotes are a feature
of Gilbert Burnet’s English rendition, but none of them are reprinted in Wang’s bilingual
edition. In a few places Burnet also inserts parenthetical notes, and those are rendered
verbatim in Wang’s translation. There appears one exception in which Wang includes her
own parenthetical note inside the main text, distinguished by the phrase “translator’s
note”.346 This note is a brief introduction to Dionysius the Younger, who once studied
under Plato. Dionysius is alluded to in Utopia as an example to demonstrate the
philosopher’s failed attempt to turn a ruler into a philosopher king. There are more than a
few other historical figures mentioned in Utopia, but the fact that Dionysius is the only
exception where Wang offers her own note begs the question as to whether this passage
had a special resonance for her or if it is a mere reflection of inconsistency in translating a
foreign text.
This creates a more serious problem in accessing a text whose many invented
names are profound in each linguistic unit and require sensible decoding. Usually the
decoding in Mandarin translations takes place in explanatory notes, be they endnotes,
footnotes, or parenthetical remarks. Without the supplementary explication, this 2007
edition becomes an even flatter translation – both in content and in style – and the original
jest embedded in the narrative is lost in this linguistic transferral. Possibly the only feature
that would match the feature of the “Collector’s Edition” printed on the front cover is its
glitzy cover art, to be examined in Chapter Four. However, in all other aspects, including
346 Wang’s note reads: “(译者注: 代俄尼喜阿,公元前四世纪西西里岛的统治者,柏拉图曾
是他的哲学老师)”.
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content and material presentation, barely any of them live up to the claim of this volume
being a collector’s edition.
1.9 HU FENGFEI’S UTOPIA (2007 & 2012)347
Hu Fengfei’s translation is a surprise read. This volume was published in the series To Read
Masters’ Works in An Easy Way, 348 the objective of which is to popularise the Western
classics and to make reading them pleasant. What Hu does is not to add explanatory notes
to clarify the invented names, historical figures, customs, or toponyms. Instead, a
considerable amount of passages are inserted into the main text, connecting the dots,
submerging into the original narrative, and simultaneously creating another thread of
narrative parallel to More’s Utopia. Hu’s refined writing style makes the reading experience
like perusing an original novel. The sense of political didactics is erased as readers read
along the lines, as if travelling with Hythloday himself. For instance, at the beginning of
Book Two, a passage is added to guide readers into the original portrayal of the topography
of the Utopian island:
This is a brand-new world, a tranquil insular country. Everything about it – its river, towns, inhabitants, law, and customs – reveals harmony, wisdom, and civilisation, delivers a sense of awe and a heart-warming sense of emotion, and creates a yearning and longing in a person. I think I am blessed, for I have had the honour to witness this civilisation in my lifetime, and have engraved the marks of that beautiful kingdom deep down in the bottom of my heart. Please travel with me to that sacred land. Your life will then have a reason to be cherished and a goal to pursue after. And it all starts with Utopia…
The Utopian Island is like a leaf boat anchored silently in the boundless ocean. From afar, it appears like a mirage discharging an air of mystery in the ethereal realm […].349
347 Hu Fengfei 胡凤飞, trans., Wu tuo bang 烏托邦 [Utopia] (Beijing: Beijing Publishing Co., 2007,
2012). The major difference between these two editions is the book cover. The visual presentations vary, but both carry More’s portrait on the cover. Other than that, not much has been altered in the second edition, therefore I do not distinguish them as separate editions. 348 The series name is taken directly from the back cover. The original reads: 西方經典悅讀, which
can be rendered as The Pleasant Read of Western Classics. 349 Hu, trans., Utopia, 52. The original reads: 這是一個全新的世界,這是一個寧靜的島國,它
的河流、城鎮、居民、法律、風俗,它的一切,無不透露著和諧、睿智和文明,給人一
種震撼和感動,讓人懷著一份嚮往和憧憬。我想我是幸福的,因為在我的一生裡,我有
幸見證了這樣的文明,並在心裡深深地刻下了那個美麗國度的印記。請和我一起做這樣
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This passage further collapses the borderline between a real travelogue and a “mirage” to
be hoped after. Just when readers are promised that they will march together with the
narrator to a civilisation of harmony and wisdom – a real model to aspire to – they are
brought back to reality by words like mirage and mystery, subtly reminding them of its
fictional nature. The description of the Utopian island is also interlaced with Hu’s poetic
additions, making what would have sounded mathematical and topographical a pleasurable
read. This is only one of the many instances where Hu expands the original with his own
portrayal, and sometimes it is so strongly felt that Hu’s additions even outweigh More’s
words. Hu’s Utopia is therefore an amplified Utopia: layers of reading have been added to
the double narrative created by Hu’s voice, and More’s voice is sometimes subsumed in the
voice of the translator.
In other words, this amplified Utopia shall be considered to be an adaptation. In
addition to the common association with a transpositional practice in which a generic
mode is recast, Julie Sanders proposes the following definitional lines: it can be “parallel
editorial practice”; it often “offer[s] commentary on a source text”; it can also be an effort
to “make texts ‘relevant’ or easily comprehensible to new audiences and readerships via the
processes of proximation and updating”.350 Those additions have made Hu’s Utopia more
readily accessible and relevant to its Mandarin-speaking readers. However, unlike Liu
Chengshao’s 1957 abridged edition, which also contains a number of the translator’s words
in the main text, Hu’s rendition is different in the sense that not only does it contain a
plethora of additional long passages, the translation is rendered in a poetic manner,
interspersed with a high number of adjectives. I have commented on Liu Chengshao’s
edition being a co-authored work by Liu and More. In Hu’s case, not only will I call it a co-
authored literary piece, but I see Hu’s voice featuring even more prominently than that of
More himself. Hu Fengfei translates with the aim of getting Utopia across to readers in a
simpler and more pleasurable manner. The end product is a success in that it is rid of “the
accent of translation”, a construct propounded by the Taiwanese scholar-translator Lai
Tzu-yun,351 that is often detectable in translated works aiming to remain faithful to the
一段旅行,踏進那片神聖的土地。從此以後,你的生命裡就有了可以珍惜的理由,有了
可以追求的目標,而這一切,從烏托邦開始… 烏托邦島像一葉扁舟,靜靜地停泊在無邊
的海洋上。遠遠看去,就像一座海市蜃樓,虛無飄渺中透出神秘的氣息 […]。 350 Sanders 18-9. 351 I take this phrase from Lai Tzu-yun, who finds a distinguished “accent of translation” in the
early Mandarin translations. “Accent of translation” is a direct rendering of “翻譯腔”. This phrase
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source texts but that end up sounding awkward to the target readers. On the other hand,
Hu’s work is not to be gauged by its degree of fidelity to the original text, since an
adaptation entails a higher level of creativity during the process of rewriting. In fact, Linda
Hutcheon suggests that the success of an adaptation should be determined by the degree
of creativity that makes the adapted text “one’s own and thus autonomous.”352 In adding
those substantial passages, Hu Fenghei has indeed steered off from Utopia, and has
successfully entered and re-created his version of Wu Tuo Bang.
1.10 TANG YI’S UTOPIA (2011)353
Published in 2011, Tang Yi’s 236-page bilingual edition appeared in the series “Full
Translation Reading books ideal”, as printed on the book cover.354 The rear side of the
book cover contains a terse biography of Thomas More, but nothing about the translator,
reflecting the lack of recognition of the translator’s status in general in China. It is a
curious omission, especially when, in contemporary translated texts, the common practice
is to include both a biographical sketch as well as a list of publications from both the
author and the translator. The “disappearance” of the translator is further manifest in the
one-page reading guide, in which Tang Yi signs off as “the translator”, dated June 2011,
without stating his name. For a fairly modern translation, this signing off as “the
translator” is almost bizarre and intriguing, as if it was an anonymous translation or was
under a pseudonym. If we understand how a translator’s spirit is exercised in his or her
work of art as a process of self-fashioning, the absence of Tang Yi’s name is self-
cancellation, intentional or otherwise.
is brought up in many of Lai’s articles researching Chinese translations of English and Japanese
works. For instance, see Lai’s “Paoxiao shanzhuang zai Taiwan: fanyi, gaixie yu fangzuo” 咆哮山莊在
臺灣 : 翻譯、改寫與仿作 [Wuthering Heights in Taiwan: Translations, Adaptations and other
Derivative Works], Compilation and Translation Review 6.2 (2013): 1-39. Similarly, Peter Newmark calls the grammatical awkwardness of a translated text as “translationese”. See Newmark, A Textbook of Translation (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice-Hall International, 1987) 13. 352 Hutcheon 20. 353 Tang Yi 唐译, trans., Wu tuo bang 乌托邦 [Utopia] (Changchun: Jinlin Publishing Co., 2011). 354 Despite its grammatical awkwardness and error, I adopt the original series name as it appears on the book cover. The lower case of the last two words is also from the original, not a typo, therefore suggesting either a lack of a proficient level of English on the side of the publishing house or
negligence in the proofreading process. The original series name is “理想藏書 * 英漢讀本”, which
can be rendered as “Ideal Book Collection, English-Mandarin Bilingual Texts”.
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Tang’s is a fairly bare-bones edition, in that the only paratextual item included is a
one-page reading guide, a sixteen-line passage to be precise, divided by a brief biographical
sketch and a summary. The translation itself also reveals a level of immaturity consistent
with the terse preface. Errors are to be found, and some lines read awkwardly as if written
in a haste or even taken from Google Translate. Such an “accent of translation” manifests
itself in the core text, resulting sometimes in an interruption of the reading flow, at other
times twisting the original meaning to an unwanted or illogical outcome that may or may
not be detected by readers. For the latter, when Hythloday recounts the punishment for
adultery, the English text reads: “He that attempts a married woman to adultery is no less
severely punished than he that commits it” (169). Tang renders this as “其罪行並不輕於
他對其進行強姦”, the translation of which is “this crime is no less severe than him raping
[the married woman]”. The term “rape” is not metaphorical here. How Tang interprets
committing adultery as raping the adulteress is beyond reason. It is a bilingual version,
where the English and Mandarin texts run parallel to each other on the printed page. How
many readers cross-reference the English text is not to be known; for those who read only
the Mandarin translation, this line may appear disconcerting. That readers might raise
questions or simply categorise this line as aberrant, like, for instance, the Utopian custom
of examining the naked bodies with a third party present before marriage, is not unlikely.
What can be confirmed is that from both paratextual and translational aspects, Tang Yi’s
edition is a disappointing product, despite the fact that it is the third most recent version,
and thus ought to have demonstrated much more maturity than the earlier translations.
1.11 SUN PINGHUA AND HE SHAN’S UTOPIA (2013)355
The third and most recent bilingual edition was published in 2013, in the series Great Ideas
from Penguin. This Penguin bilingual edition is a mere translation of Books One and Two,
along with two prefatory epistles preceding the main text. The editorial board does explain
their choice of excluding all other paratexts, which is to reconstruct the original condition
in which the text was produced and for readers to experience the text with their own
355 Sun, Pinghua, and He Shan孙平华 & 何珊, trans., Wu tuo bang [Utopia] (Beijing: Penguin Books,
2013).
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rational thinking, without other points of reference. The aim is to highlight the authorial
intention, which is also the major theme of this series.
The English text, instead of the new Penguin Classics version by Dominic Baker-
Smith published in 2012, is the previous translation by Paul Turner. The chances are that
by the time Sun Pinghua and He Shan started their translation, Baker-Smith’s edition had
not seen the light of publication. However, using Turner’s translation as the reference
produces yet another mystery to be solved. Turner provides a glossary to help readers
decipher his English equivalents of More’s coinages. However, in this bilingual edition
published in 2013, the glossary is not provided, nor are any explanatory notes available. It
creates a major drawback because the nomenclatural fun escalated by Turner’s translation
loses its effectiveness in Mandarin and generates further confusion in view of the
undecodable significations that are often rendered with only proximity to pronunciation.
Four prefatory items are included in this book, all of which are non-authorial. The
first is an article in lieu of a preface. This very first prefatory item is a publication note
elucidating why it is of urgent relevance to re-translate those classical works, along with
their selection criteria. The second and third prefatory items are in fact the same; the
former is the translation of the latter entitled “Introduction to the Chinese Editions of
Great Ideas”. The purpose of this series, Great Ideas from Penguin, as stated in this
introduction, is concerned with authorial intentions. The publisher Simon Winder states
that the goal of the series is
to recreate a more intimate feeling – to recreate the atmosphere in which, for example, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or John Ruskin’s On Art and Life was first published – where the reader has no other guide than the original author and his or her own common sense. […] the original intention of the author becomes once more important.356
The raison d’être of this series of Great Ideas is thus made apparent, as when dealing with a
translated text it is inevitable to consider whether to opt to stay faithful to the source text
or to cater to domestic intelligibility and thus sometimes sacrifice loyalty to authorial
meaning.
Since this series is aimed at re-exploring “the original intention of the author”, it is
understandable that this rendition does not have the “interference”, or the editorial
intervention, of glossary and endnotes, as Paul Turner’s English edition does. However, the
356 Sun & He 5-6.
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choice to use Turner’s English translation and the inclusion of a guide to reading Utopia
written by the Chinese translators make the objective of Great Ideas from Penguin
inconsistent. For one thing, Turner’s rendition is a rather modern one, which has at a
certain level created some deviance from the original Latin text, or from the earliest
English translation by Robinson. That is why a glossary and translational endnotes are
included in Turner’s English edition for Penguin Classics. Without the glossary and
endnotes, readers of this rendition have to spend extra effort to decipher those newly
coined terms by Turner, such as “Nonsenso” and “Aircastle”, 357 or “Blindland” and
“Cloudian”, referring to the people Alaopolitae and Nephelogetae.358 The fact that Sun and He
transliterate Turner’s renditions of names without further explanation pushes readers away
from the authorial intention, where the names were meant as comic puns, and further
reinforces the foreignness, which is not up for dissection. Secondly, even though it is made
explicit in the introduction that its aim is to recreate a direct dialogue with the author, there
is a reading guide (written by the two translators) which offers a short biography of More,
summarises the content, and even puts forward a critique as to how Utopian society is an
archetype of socialism in every single aspect. They further add that Marx and Engels
praised Utopia, believing that it sheds light on communism, which may have in one way or
another encouraged readers to approach this book from a communist perspective. This
pre-structuring of how readers access the book is the exact opposite of what this book
series is intended to provide, namely, “to recreate a more intimate feeling […] where the
reader has no other guide than the original author and his or her own common sense”.
Such a conflicting arrangement invites doubts as to whether this version of Utopia was
translated independently of the objective of this Penguin book series.
1.12 LI LINGYAN’S UTOPIA (2016)
The most recent publication was Li Lingyan’s 2016 edition, by the University of Northwest
Press in China. Despite its seemingly celebratory intent, coinciding with Utopia’s
357 “Nonsenso”, as previously mentioned, is what Turner names Raphael Hythloday, the one who speaks nonsense. “Aircastle”, on the other hand, is the name Turner uses to refer to Amaurote, the capital city of Utopia. It is relatively easier to associate Aircastle, from castle in the air, with a city that exists only idealistically; yet it loses the original meaning of “dim, faint, or shadowy” from the word Amaurote. 358 “Alaopolitae” is from alaos (blind) and polites (citizen), whereas “Nephelogetae” is from the nephele, meaning cloud. See Turner 118.
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quincentenary, it is a rather rudimentary rendition, primarily because it does not reproduce
any of the original paratexts with which Utopia was initially published, nor does it provide
an explanatory frame for the service of target readers. None of the paratexts printed in the
early Latin editions are included. The preface penned by Li is the most that this edition
offers in terms of an explicatory base. As we will see in Chapter Five, it is the only case
where none of the Utopian prefigurations are mentioned at all, nor is the etymological root
of Utopia sufficiently delineated. In fact, only the ou- segment, hence the pejorative
connotation of a sense of disillusion, is highlighted.
Li’s translation commences with a five-page preface, followed by the table of
contents, and then Utopia proper. Thirty-one footnotes359 are included in Book One, most
of which are explanations of toponyms and historical figures, as well as five notes
indicating sources cited from the Bible. There are, however, only three footnotes in Book
Two. The first footnote is to specify who Theophrastus was,360 and the second note is to
elucidate that the ducat was a common currency in the Middle Ages.361 The third and last
footnote in Book Two is the only explanatory note in Li’s edition that touches upon More’s
invented names as well as the only case where the original neologism is provided:
Cynemerne and Trapemerne, meaning the starting day and the last day of the month,
respectively. No footnotes about important characters like Peter Giles and Raphael
Hythloday are provided, despite the fact that notes on historical figures such as Seneca and
Amerigo Vespucci are laid out in detail. This contrast suggests a level of inconsistency in
the organisation of the footnotes, further evincing a partial grasp of Utopia on the part of
the translator.
Unlike most of the other translators, who had a background in the humanities, Li is
an adjunct professor at the School of Economics and Management in Northwest
University, China. She holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and mechanics,
with master’s and doctoral degrees in economics. Her faculty webpage indicates that her
current research direction is business management and theories of international investment,
none of which suggests an easy association with Utopia.362 However, a co-authored article
(2015) in the Journal of the Party School of CPC Hangzhou, in which she investigates how New
359 The format of the footnotes in this version is similar to Dai’s 1982 edition. 360 Only a terse line stating “Greek philosopher, c.372 BC-287 BC” is provided in the footnote, without supplying the original spelling of the name. See Li 66. 361 Li 83. 362 Her publication list on the faculty website only goes up to 2006, all of which are management-related. See <http://ems.nwu.edu.cn/shizituandui/htm/lilingyan.html> 14 August 2017.
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Marxism monopolises capitalist theories, may have revealed a trace of ideological
preference, especially given that the publication platform belongs to the Communist Party
of China. The journal advocates Marxism, Mao Zedong’s thought, Deng Xiaoping’s theory,
and “the Hundred Flowers Movement”363 to be its founding principles; specifically, it aims
to be the platform for expressing ideology, and for decision making in regards to the
teaching of the Party School.364 Li’s contribution to and association with a media platform
tightly linked with the Communist Party justifies her attempt to re-translate More’s Utopia
and that its end result is, unfortunately, an elementary product born out of the translator’s
non-professional training in translation.
The back cover of this volume indicates that it belongs to a translational series of
political classics (政治學經典譯叢) by the Northwest University Press, which also includes
Aristotle’s Politics, Rousseau’s The Social Contract, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Hobbes’s Leviathan,
and Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. In the press release about Li’s translation, the
Press states that in recent years it has adjusted the focus of publication to introducing
contemporary Western classics, including those on the subject of politics. Utopia is not a
contemporary work; it is nonetheless listed under the category of political science classics.
This generic arrangement creates a factual paratext, the implicit context predisposing readers
with a veil of political preconception to examine the book with a didactic eye. Li’s edition is
also a bare-bones effort, like Robinson’s, except for her preface and footnotes. A five-page
preface by Li Lingyan is the only paratext in this most recent edition. Like the most
common functions that a preface serves in modern publications, it offers a brief biography
of Thomas More, a summary of Utopia, a few historical features to help understand the
milieu in which Utopia was composed, and Li’s own views on Utopia. Li brings up the full
title of the book, and emphasises the ou- feature of the title, by remarking that “Utopia”
has become the synonym of “empty thought”, as well as how subsequent intellectuals have
adopted it to portray an imagined ideal place set in future.365 She excludes all prefatory
363 The Hundred Flowers Movement took place in 1956 when the then Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong encouraged the expression of opinions toward the communist regime in order to “promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science”. The name of the movement comes from its slogan: “Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend.” See Oxford Dictionaries <https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/hundred_flowers> 23 June 2018. In the course of a year, this movement was wiped out as the Anti-Rightist Campaign surfaced. The slogan was raised again years later, but freedom of speech has never been a reality under the Communist Party of China. 364 For the introduction of this Journal, see its official website: <http://manu24.magtech.com.cn/hzdx/CN/column/column291.shtml> 17 June 2018. 365 Li 1.
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epistles and verses that are part of the whole rhetorical apparatus that shapes Utopia as it
has been throughout the centuries. Whether this was a deliberate editorial decision or a lack
of analytical understanding of Utopia remains unclear. However, the final product is
appropriate to a reading of Utopia as a straightforward political treatise, and to the inclusion
of the book in a series of translations of political classics.
2 DECODING MORE’S NOMENCLATURE: LOST IN TRANSLITERATION
More’s network of Greek puns does not simply entertain; they organize. Hythloday is a distributor of nonsense and almost everything he describes from his travels has a name coined from Greek words connoting ‘nonsense’ or ‘non-existence’ (a quality which renders things nonsensical).366
In a general sense, translation is an act of rewriting from one language to another. The
narrative is presented in a different linguistic form, but ideally the meanings remain similar,
or are largely unaltered, in order to be faithful to the original. However, this is not the case
with More’s Utopia. More’s original text is so deliberately elusive that it may be taken as a
series of codes exhibited in the form of names, sentences, rhetorical strategies, and literary
devices, so that, fundamentally, this literary work is like a labyrinth waiting to be explored.
There may not be a pre-designated or any easy route to reach the exit, just like the many
different interpretations of Utopia not necessarily arriving at the same findings in regards to
the text.
All the seriousness is disguised in a subtle jest manifested in various rhetorical
strategies and naming constructions. The brilliance of each invented name is disguised in
the conflation of Latin, Greek, and sometimes Hebrew or Persian roots. Even the surname
of the author, whose etymological root indicates fool, has effectively generated a sense of
playfulness and ambiguity for readers who are familiar with the Greek language. That the
alleged eye-witness account of Utopia is recounted by a person whose surname means
“expert in nonsense”, and documented by a historical figure surnamed Morus – folly –
provides the informed readership with a brilliant introduction to the ironic structure of this
utopian narrative.
366 Eric Nelson, “Greek Nonsense in More’s Utopia”, Historical Journal 44.4 (2001): 890.
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This section investigating More’s nomenclatural games begins with the narrator-
traveller Raphael Hythloday, the Princeps Utopus, moves on to the official names, and then
ends with the ethnological names More coined. I examine the translational variants from
their construction, which involves the naming strategies. The meaning of certain words is
lost and renewed through the translations from Latin to English and Mandarin. In the
process of translation, the translators act as readers and mediators, interpreting the
meanings of the original text along with their subjective experience, aiming at transfusing
their domestic elements and evaluations into the foreign text. A re-evaluation of these
translational variants challenges the notion of (un)translatability, uncovers the meanings
lost and gained through translation, and reaffirms that translated texts are products of
cultural meanings.
A simple generalisation offered by Dominic Baker-Smith is that the naming
strategy is encapsulated in the Greek compound ou-/eu-topos.367 This overall pattern does
highlight the paradoxical complications prevalent throughout Utopia, especially in invented
names and in opposing voices. Yet More’s sophisticated nomenclature schemes can barely
be summarised in this single statement. Quoting Sir James Mackintosh, Joseph Levine once
again reminds readers that “[a]ll the names which [More] invented for men and places were
intimations of their being unreal”, and that this viewpoint has remained standard. 368
However, these two distinguished utopian scholars’ views on More’s nomenclatural
schemes are challenged, and indeed overthrown, by James Romm’s 1991 article examining
the naming strategies in Utopia. Romm uses the early modern Dutch philologist Gerhard
Vossius (1577-1649) as a case in point to demonstrate how the attempts at schematising
More’s nomenclature have failed, but how this has not discouraged subsequent critics from
making continuous efforts at schematisation. Drawing on most scholars’ views, Romm
offers a rough pattern that divides the ethnologic names into two types: firstly, those like
the Utopians that “ironically negate the peoples they describe”; secondly, those like
Macarians that “identify some prominent moral or ethical quality”.369 Yet what complicates
and makes this schematisation unsuccessful is that there are other invented names that fit
neither, or both, of the two types.
367 Baker-Smith (2014) 494-95. 368 Levine 81. 369 Romm 174. The etymological root of Macarians comes from makarios, meaning blessed and happy. See Cambridge Utopia (1995) 95n74.
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Decoding the original names was already a demanding task; transferring it into a
language distinctively different from the Latin family group further obfuscates the results.
The look at the first introduction of the term “utopia” into Mandarin provided previously
offers a brief overview of how the understanding has evolved and how this beautifully
crafted translation embodies in itself proximity to both sound and meaning. This is one of
the rare cases in which both ends – sound and meaning – are met. In translating More’s
nomenclature constructions into Mandarin, exceptions exist, but transliteration has been
the most commonly adopted strategy. To examine the noun construction, this section
divides More’s nomenclature in Utopia into four groups – Raphael Hythloday, Princeps
Utopus, official titles, and ethnological names – in order to address on what levels
translations are happening and how effectively they have transmitted the original.
2.1 RAPHAEL HYTHLODAY370
It appears that most names related to Utopia are paradoxical, as is Utopia itself. Some basic
knowledge of Greek and Latin is required to decipher the message, however disguised or
otherwise. In fact, when commenting on More’s philological and semiological
inquisitiveness, James Romm argues that Greek and Latin served for More as “a kind of
code, the meanings of which could be extracted only imperfectly or not at all”.371 The
name of the narrator, Raphael Hythloday, is a prime example.372 His first name stems from
the Archangel Raphael, who is also seen as the messenger of God (in the apocryphal Book
of Tobit) who serves as a guide leading Tobias on a journey.373 The name Hythloday, like
many other names in Utopia, is etymologically double-encoded. It is formed from a
combination of the Greek hythlos and daios, and is most commonly translated as “expert in
trifles” or “well-learnt in nonsense” (11).374 Elizabeth McCutcheon postulates that “[t]hen
370 While both the Latin Hythlodaeus and the anglicised Hythloday are equally commonly adopted in translations and review articles, I use Hythloday to refer to the traveller-narrator. However, whenever a quotation is used, the original form as it appears will be adopted. 371 Romm 173. 372 Acknowledging how this name establishes a pattern that runs the narrative, Romm nevertheless deliberately left it out of his analysis. See Romm 183. Baker-Smith notes the tendency for abbreviating the surname to Hythloday in English editions. See Baker-Smith (2014) 495. 373 Turner xii. See also Cambridge Utopia (1995) 31. 374 Another similar definition offered by the Cambridge Utopia is that the name Hythloday means “distributor or peddler of nonsense” in Greek. However, Richard Halpern asserts that hythlos does not suggest vain chatter but rather “non-philosophical speech […] speech aimed at pleasure rather
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there is the name of the narrator: is this world traveler the healer of God, the opener of
eyes, his first name suggests, or the peddler of nonsense his family name speaks of, or both,
so that we must both believe and disbelieve in him and his narration?”375 That is, although
the linguistic root can be traced, the result often frustrates readers, who are left incredibly
confused about what More intended to convey. It should be borne in mind that the utopian
polity depicted in the Second Book is Hythloday’s “eyewitness account”, and if the person
who recounts his utopian experience has a name insinuating that the narrator himself is an
expert in nonsense or skilled at pleasant speech, how much can readers take his words as a
genuine account? In his Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch writes that “[r]eal ciphers are not
static; they are figures of tension, they are tendentious process forms and, above all, in fact,
on this path, symbolic ones”.376 Such symbolism is embedded in each cipher and word,
which then become even more mutated, or complicated, and lost many times, in the
Mandarin Utopias. The most common translational practice of rendering a foreign name
into Mandarin is to use transliteration, which is often accompanied by a footnote or
endnote elucidating its original name and meanings. In the case of Raphael Hythloday, the
rule of transliteration applies almost consistently among all the Mandarin translations.
Editions Appearance in the
Mandarin text
Romanisation and/or
translation
Explanatory notes if
applicable
Liu, 1935 拉斐爾(Raphael
Hithloday,此係理想
的⼈)
La Fei Er (Raphael
Hithloday, this means an
ideal person)
(explanatory note
displayed in
parenthetical remark in
the main text)
Dai, 1956 这位拉斐尔—这是他
的名字,他姓希斯拉
This La Fei Er – This is his
(given) name, his surname is
The endnote specifies
Hythloday’s Greek
than knowledge”. Conversely, diaos does not mean scholarly knowledge but “‘experienced,’ ‘cunning’, ‘skilled’ as an artisan might be skilled at his craft”. So Halpern offers an alternative translation, “skilled in pleasant speech”, which fundamentally removes the sense of contradiction or oxymoron. See Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991) 142. 375 Elizabeth McCutcheon, “The Language of Utopian Negation: Book II of More’s Utopia, 1985”, Moreana Special Issue 51.201-02 (2015): 42. Heiserman reads the name as “a satiric mixture of jest
and earnest – Mr. Healer-from-God Talker-of-nonsense”. See Heiserman 166. 376 Bloch 165.
119
德 Xi Si La De roots (“üthlos” and
“daiein”, the first part
of which appears in
Plato’s Republic), stating
that More adopts this
name to stress an
unwarranted person. It
also points out that the
authorial More speaks
via Hythloday and
disguises himself as
someone countering
Hythloday in order to
avoid censorship.
Liu, 1957 拉裴爾(Raphael
Hithloday),(指理想
的⼈)
La Pei Er (explanatory note
displayed in
parenthetical remark in
the main text)
Guo, 1966 拉斐爾 La Fei Er N/A
Liu, 1978 拉斐爾・無稽 La Fei Er・Wu Ji 原意為無稽之談 [the
original meaning is the
talk of nonsense]
Dai, 1982 这位拉斐尔—这是他
的名字,他姓希斯拉
德
This La Fei Er – This is his
(given) name, his surname
is Xi Si La De.
The footnote here
does not offer
etymological
explication; rather it
specifies that names in
Utopia are mostly
coined by More, an
“empty talker”.
Dai, 1997 這位拉斐爾—這是他
的名字,他姓希斯拉
This La Fei Er – This is his
(given) name, his surname
N/A
120
德 is Xi Si La De.
Song, 2003 名叫拉斐爾,姓希適
婁岱
Named La Fei Er,
surnamed Xi Shi Lou Dai
N/A
Wu, 2005 拉斐爾・西斯拉德 La Fei Er・Xi Si La De N/A
Wang,
2007
姓希斯拉德,名叫拉
斐爾
Surnamed Xi Si La De,
named La Fei Er
N/A
Hu, 2007
& 2012
拉斐爾・希斯拉德 La Fei Er・Xi Si La De N/A
Tang, 2011
這位拉斐爾—他的家
族傳下來的姓⽒為希
斯拉德
This Le Fei Er – whose
surname passed down by his
family is called Xi Si La De
N/A
Sun & He,
2013
拉斐爾・諾森索 La Fei Er・Nuo Sen Suo
N/A
Lee, 2016 他姓海思洛德名拉斐
爾
His surname is Hai Si Luo
De, name is La Fei Er
N/A
This table summarises how Raphael Hythloday has been translated into Mandarin, namely
via transliteration. “Raphael” is a common Christian name – just like Thomas or Peter –
which already has a prevalent rendering, that is, 拉斐爾 [La Fei Er]. There is a very minor
nuance in the second character (斐; 裴), with differences in intonation and radical. This
variation is rather incidental and hence has no individual study value.
However, a few points are worth mentioning here. To begin with, Liu Linsheng
(1935), Liu Chengshao (1957), and Guo Xiangzhang (1966) all translate only the given
name Raphael, without offering his surname. 377 Despite the very minor formatting
variation, the parenthetical notes in the two Lius editions indicate that Chengshao’s was
377 A small nuance in Liu’s two editions is that the radicals – as well as the pronunciation – of the second character are different, even though both were rendered with the aim of close proximity to the original sound.
121
modelled on Linsheng’s translation – for this name at least – because of the typo in the
spelling of Hythloday and of the definition of Raphael. To be specific, the parenthetical
notes in both editions write “Raphael Hithloday” and define Raphael as the “ideal person”.
An ideal person comes nowhere close to a peddler of nonsense. It can be inferred that Liu
Linsheng generalises the narrator who talks about the ideal polity to be an ideal person
himself. Secondly, in Liu Linsheng’s and Guo Xiangzhang’s versions, the name Raphael is
underlined, the proper name mark of the Mandarin writing system. In modern days, this
proper name mark is rarely used, apart from in official writings. Yet it was not uncommon
to see the proper name mark in texts of earlier days, especially in vertically typeset texts, to
which the three discussed editions belong. Thirdly, the 2013 Penguin edition uses
transliteration as well; however, instead of transliterating Hythloday, its source text is Paul
Turner’s rendition: “Raphael Nonsenso”. Turner exquisitely exemplifies the objective the
Yale editors had in mind when translating More’s invented proper nouns, that “the names
will strike modern Anglophone reader ‘as the names in Latin do the Latin reader’”.378 The
Yale Utopia is unquestionably one of the cardinal reference editions in English, but in my
view, if we were to disregard More’s contemporaneous readers’s initial experience of
reading Utopia, no other translations to date have surpassed Turner’s brilliancy and success
in rendering the same effect as the Latin readers received. Regrettably, Sun & He’s Penguin
bilingual edition spoils the fun by failing to provide any explanatory notes to the
transliterated names. Thus, Nonsenso becomes “Nuo Sen Suo”. This omission makes the
rendered surname not just less acute, but pointless, because Nonsenso is rendered with
proximity to its English pronunciation. It could also be printed as “Sen Suo Nuo” or “Suo
Sen Nuo”. The order of these three characters can be reversed, switched, or even replaced
with other characters; it would not have mattered because readers would not have
understood that this foreign surname in fact had a profound implication embedded in its
construction. The point of satirising the narrator’s credibility comes adrift when the
anglicised name Nonsenso is reproduced in a set of characters that attempt to imitate its
pronunciation, at the expense of the referential significance. The proximity to
pronunciation in this case fails to match the translational beauty, loses its denotative clarity,
and is devoid of referential significance, let alone the fact that 諾森索 is not a literal
translation, whose characters do not reveal anything resembling nonsense.
378 Quoted in Baker-Smith (2014) 495.
122
The Penguin bilingual edition was published in 2013; the other translation modelled
on Paul Turner’s was published in 1978 and, in the case of Raphael Hythloday, reproduced
a name closer to what More would have intended. “拉斐爾・無稽” reads as “La Fei Er ・
Wu Ji”, literally “Raphael Nonsense”. The translated surname “Wu Ji” stems from the
idiom 無稽之談, signifying a talker of nonsense. Liu Lihua, translator of the 1978 edition,
specifies in an endnote that she adopts the sense-for-sense translation of the surname to be
無稽, nonsense (141). Among all other editions that transliterate Hythloday, some without
explanatory notes, Liu Lihua’s version is as yet unparalleled. It is unfortunate that her
edition has not managed to survive long in the market.
Another intricacy revealed by the display of this name is analysed by Gerard
Wegemer, who looks into the manner in which Raphael Hythloday is introduced by Peter
Giles. He compares the Latin original, Robinson’s, and Surtz’s with his own version, which
aims at rendering the original as literally as possible: “Now this Raphael, for such is he
called, with the family name being Hythlodaeus […].”379 Wegemer questions the grounds
on which a distinction is made “between what Raphael is called and what he is known to be”
and understands this formulation to be a hint at Hythloday’s identity: if he is “a self-
proclaimed healer of God (‘Raphael’) or [if] he actually belong[s] to the family of those
well-learned in nonsense (‘Hythlo-daeus’)”.380 Starting from the turn of the twenty-first
century, all seven recent editions translate the full name, unlike the aforementioned three
that simply offer the given name Raphael. Some render it as “surnamed Hythlodaeus,
named Raphael” or the other way around (Song, 2003; Wang, 2007; Lee, 2016), while some
adopt the common presentation of the Anglophone names that separate the surname and
given name with a period (Liu, 1978; Wu, 2005; Hu, 2007 & 2012; Sun & He, 2013). Dai
Liuling’s three editions all render this line of introduction as “This is Raphael – it is his
(given) name, his family name is Hythloday”. The difference lies in the notes: in the 1956
edition Dai includes etymological roots (whereas his subsequent editions do not),
specifying that the first segment of the etymology üthlos also appears in Plato’s Republic.
He further specifies that More uses this name to signify an unwarranted person – 莫須
有. In Dai’s second edition, 莫須有 is removed; in place of it is 空談的見聞家 (“an
empty talker”) as well as an emphasis on the fact that most of the names in Utopia
were coined by More. Dai’s rendition, to a lighter degree, distinguishes the surname
379 Wegemer 296. 380 Wegemer 296.
123
and given name of the traveller-narrator via the explanatory notes. The only one that
appears to have transmitted the subtlety of Giles’s manner of introduction is Tang’s 2011
edition, which reads “this Raphael – whose surname passed down by his family is called
Hythloday”. While readers might find the mention of “a surname being passed down by
his family” repetitive, they are encouraged to question this redundancy.
2.2 PRINCEPS UTOPUS
It is no accident that Hythlodaeus does not give us the name of a single Utopian except, of course, Utopus himself.381
What does a name tell us? Silencing the names speaks volumes. It is an act of self-
cancellation, as Greenblatt would call it. It diminishes individuality, a trait that is not
encouraged in the Utopian commonwealth. If Utopus is the only name spelt out, the
significance of this name is multiplied. Having discussed how the term “utopia” is
rendered, it is necessary to examine its namesake Utopus as well as his position – that is,
how “Princeps Utopus” is translated and understood in Mandarin translations. As
suggested in the section on publication history, the very first English edition published in
1551 was a bare-bones effort. The syntax, style, and word choice that Ralph Robinson
adopted were colloquial, and he made mistakes, many of which were deliberate. The word
Princeps serves as a curious case in point. Princeps was the Latin word adopted by More to
refer to the conqueror of the island and its law-maker, Utopus. Princeps denotes a principal
or main officer; it was also the title of the first Roman emperor, Princeps Augustus.382 A
common view that is widely accepted in the Utopian Studies community about this
misinterpretation of Robinson’s presumes that More had no intention of referring to a
king or kingship, as pinpointed in the first part of the book title—“On the Best State of a
Commonwealth.” While both hereditary and elective monarchies existed in early modern
Europe, More’s Utopia is a Commonwealth, whose “head of state is not a hereditary
381 Greenblatt 44. 382 See <https://www.britannica.com/topic/princeps> 06 June 2019. Born Gaius Octavius, Augustus’s military conquests had made him the first Roman emperor, thus establishing monarchy in the Roman Empire. See also <https://www.britannica.com/topic/monarchy> 10 October 2019.
124
monarch” and whose community is “founded on law for the common [good]”.383 This is
evident in how the Utopians elect their state officers, Syphogrants and Tranibors (or
Phylarchs and Protophylarchs in the modern tongue). By translating Princeps as King,
Robinson fundamentally converted a state into a monarchy.384
Even though Princeps is not part of the nomenclature game that More devised, the
fact that it is associated with Utopus makes it necessary to consider the two together. Even
more so, using this word in a text that invites multi-layered readings opens up possibilities
other than a simple misinterpretation. While recognising the possibility of the conversion
of Utopia’s political system by the word “king”, McCutcheon argues that Robinson’s
appropriation was also likely due to a convenient perspective, reflecting “general
Elizabethan usage as well as the more specific political structure in Great Britain and other
western countries at that time”.385 This, in Lawrence Venuti’s words, would be to inscribe
the text with domestic intelligibility. This phenomenon is rather common in Mandarin
translations; for instance, in the passage where the reportorial More was asked to be in
service of the “king”, the earlier three Mandarin editions (1935, 1957, 1966) render it as 諸
侯 [zhu hou], the title of the feudal princes of the Zhou Dynasty and the Warring Times
(c.1046 BC-c.221 BC). The principalities, or states, were “gifted” by the Emperor to his
relatives or ministers as a reward. The feudal system operated differently in each dynasty,
but the general rule was that within each principality, 諸侯 – or the feudal prince – held a
certain level of autonomy but was to abide by the Emperor’s order and law. Undeniably by
translating Princeps with the title of 諸侯, a sense of domestic intelligibility is generated.
Nevertheless, such a translation is erroneous because it presupposes that power is
delegated by the supreme authority, the emperor. Furthermore, an inevitable and
unwarranted association with the ancient feudal system is made at the same time. Less keen
readers may have simply taken it as the title of the leader; for critical readers, such a
connection with the feudal system in a narrative where citizens are allowed to vote may well
create unnecessary confusion, hence More’s ideal commonwealth presented in these three
editions has become a mixture of different political systems.
383 See <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Commonwealth-association-of-states> 10 October 2019. 384 Richard Marius, who contributed to More’s biography, believes that Robinson transforms a “solidly republican Utopian commonwealth” into a monarchy (xi). Quoted in McCutcheon (1992) 106. 385 McCutcheon (1992) 106.
125
When commenting how, with Robinson’s translation, Utopia was transformed from
a book aimed at a particular learned audience to one aimed at a mixed readership of the
rich and the middling sort, David Harris Sacks puts forward a perceptive argument:
It was now a work more of social amelioration than of philosophical inquiry and political satire. It is perhaps for this reason that Robynson persists in treating Utopus, the conqueror of Utopia and the maker of its laws, as a king. If Utopia was to be a truly practical book leading toward the elimination of present-day social evils and toward the improvement of conditions for the poor, it was not possible to rely solely on bringing the hearts and minds of the people to clear insight. Any specific reform would require the concerted action of the political classes under the initiative and with the approval of the prince.386
Indeed, whether it was a reflection of the Elizabethan political structure, a critical response
to More’s term Princeps, a pure mistake, or an incidental translation, remains an open-ended
inquiry. What can be confirmed is, as Terence Cave suggests, that More’s text moves by
means of translation, and that different interpretations of the text lead to different
translations, and vice versa. Robinson’s choice of words was pivotal because various
translations were based on his edition, thus it in fact could be considered that a
Robinsonian Utopia has been perpetuated for centuries and travelled across national-
cultural borders.
Editions Mandarin translations Romanisation
Liu, 1935 烏託伯 wu tuo bo
Dai, 1956 烏托普 wu tuo pu
Liu, 1957 烏託伯 wu tuo bo
Guo, 1966 烏托布斯王 wu tuo bu si wang
Liu, 1978 烏托波 wu tuo bo
Dai, 1982 烏托普國王 wu tuo pu guo wang
Dai, 1997 烏托普國王 wu tuo pu guo wang
386 Sacks 68.
126
Song, 2003 烏托帕斯 wu tuo pa si
Wu, 2005 烏托普國王 wu tuo pu guo wang
Wang, 2007 烏托普國王 wu tuo pu guo wang
Hu, 2007 & 2012 烏托普國王 wu tuo pu guo wang
Tang, 2011 烏托普國王 wu tuo pu guo wang
Sun & He, 2013 烏托普 (Utopos) wu tuo pu
Li, 2016 烏托珀斯
烏托珀斯國王(85)
wu tuo po si
wu tuo po si guo wang
A general pattern can be discerned here: transliteration has been applied in the main. This
three-syllable name “Utopus” is divided into two parts: wu tuo – the same two characters as
in the book title Utopia – and this is consistent throughout all renditions; the last syllable
“pus” is either rendered as bu si, pa si, po si, or pu. Following Robinson’s interpretation, and
in fact Dai Liuling’s second edition (1982), six editions append either 王 [wang, “King”] or
國王 [guo wang, “National King” in its literal sense] to the name Utopus, making it explicit
that the conqueror of the island was not just the Chief Officer but a king. These seven
editions are: Guo 1966, Dai 1982 and 1997, Wu 2005, Wang 2007, Hu 2007 and 2012, Tang
2011, and Li 2016, with Li using either transliteration or King in two different places where
Utopus appears. In his rendition, Wu Lei appended one line prior to the translation “King
Utopus”, specifying “the first king of the nation Utopia”. This additional insertion inside
the main text reaffirms the sense of monarchy, fundamentally twisting the original meaning.
Tang’s translation shows “King Utopus”, even though the word king does not appear in the
English text that runs parallel to his translation. What is intriguing is that Dai Liuling’s first
edition renders Utopus without “King”, but “King” has been added in his subsequent
editions. The change of reference text (from mainly a Russian one to the Yale edition)
evidently plays in this shift, which simultaneously reflects a deficient level of understanding
of this Latin word and the political system implied.
The other editions apply transliteration in the case of Utopus. There is, however,
one subtlety in the 1935 and 1957 editions that makes the translation perceptively exquisite.
These two editions render Utopus as 烏託伯, wu tuo bo, which without an attentive eye
127
would easily be taken as similar to all the other editions that applied transliteration. The
application of transliteration is not incorrect; yet in this case, 烏託伯, wu tuo bo is much
more profound. The third character – 伯 bo – has proximity to the sound “pus”, but more
importantly this character denotes an elder(ly) uncle in Mandarin. Uncle could be a blood
relation or otherwise; it could also be without particular meaning but simply a familiar way
of addressing an elderly person. Most crucially, though, it could serve as a signification
conjuring respect. In this case, Utopus is no longer deemed to be the monarch on high, but
a wise elder who is on an equal political footing with all citizens in Utopia and to whom
people look up to. If we reflect on the classical Chinese utopian counterparts, an
association is naturally made: that the ideal, well-governed country is led by the wise old
sage to whom citizens look up.
2.3 OFFICIAL TITLES: SYPHOGRANT, TRANIBOR, PHYLARCH, PROTOPHYLARCH
Another case that demonstrates the complexity and sophistication of More’s nomenclature
games is shown in the titles of the Utopian state officers: “syphogrant”, “tranibor”,
“phylarch”, and “protophylarch”. Syphogrant is the officer governing every thirty families
in one district and tranibor is the head of every ten syphogrants. Phylarch is the
corresponding “modern” name for syphogrant, whereas protophylarch is the same for
tranibor. All these titles are of More’s construction: a conflation of sophos (wisdom) plus
gerontes (the elderly), syphogrant can be explained as “old men of the sty”.387 Tranibor is
from thranos (bench) and bora (food), hence “bench-eater”. Paul Turner, in his much-closer-
to-anglicised translation, not only renders Tranibor as Bencheater, but also offers a
compelling interpretation of its etymology: Turner suggests that this coinage may have
close association with More’s experience in Lincoln’s Inn (which he entered in 1496).
More’s father and grandfather served in Lincoln’s Inn as butlers, and More himself was
there as a Reader. Here the meals were eaten together in a communal hall where members
were seated on benches. Senior members were referred to as Benchers.388 Phylarch is the
combination of phule (tribe) and archos (chief, ruler);389 protophylarch – with the prefix protos
387 Turner 119. 388 Turner 118. 389 Turner 118.
128
– denotes the first tribal master. There already exists a divide in the languages used in the
storyline; that is, the official titles are presented in the ancient and the modern Utopian
tongues. The old and modernised names of the island – Abraxa and Utopia – serve as a
preview of the languages in parallel. On this textual peculiarity, Heiserman comments:
“More’s invention of a double set of names for offices, places, and personages, and his
mention of Egyptian visitors to Utopia, perhaps reflects Plato’s invention of double names,
which are Solon’s translations of Egyptian versions of Atlantean names.”390 Curiously, even
though the modernised names are provided in this Utopian discourse, they are mentioned
only once and, as Hythloday’s account proceeds, he refers to the officials only by their old
names, syphogrant and tranibor. Marina Leslie brilliantly observes of this act of naming:
“[Hythloday’s] insistence on using the old language allegedly not in use is, doubtless, a
reflection on the humanists’ defence of the study of Greek and Hebrew and the value of
original texts.”391 This device of naming that travels back and forth from modernised to
ancient Utopian languages, recalling the humanists’ defence of the study of old languages,
is absent in the Mandarin editions, because the meanings camouflaged behind the name
construction can barely be reproduced through transliteration, let alone reflect the
humanists’ defence of classical study.
Editions Syphogrant Tranibor Phylarch Protophylarch
Liu, 1935 里長
li zhang
鄉長392
xiang zhang
村長
cun zhang
N/A
Dai, 1956 攝護格朗特
she hu ge lang te
特朗尼菩爾
te lang ni po er
飛拉哈
fei la ha
首席飛拉哈
Chief fei la ha
Liu, 1957 村長
cun zhang
鄉長
xiang zhang
N/A N/A
Guo, 1966 里長
li zhang
鄉長
xiang zhang
族長
zu zhang
首席村長
Chief cun zhang
Liu, 1978 亭長
ting zhang
區長
qu zhang
里長
li zhang
N/A
390 Heiserman 171. 391 Leslie 69. 392 In Liu Linsheng’s version, tranibor is written as “tranibore”.
129
Dai, 1982 攝護格朗特
she hu ge lang te
特朗尼菩爾
te lang ni po er
飛拉哈
fei la ha
首席飛拉哈
Chief fei la ha
Song, 2003 「智叟」
zhi sou
崔倪伯
cui ni bo
族長
zu zhang
總族長
Chief zu zhang
Wu, 2005 瑟菲格蘭特
se fei ge lang te
特蘭尼玻爾
te lan ni bo er
菲勒哈
fei le ha
首席菲勒哈
Chief fei le ha
Wang, 2007 攝護格朗特
she hu ge lang te
特朗尼菩爾
te lang ni po er
飛拉哈
fei la ha
首席飛拉哈
Chief fei la ha
Hu, 2007 &
2012
攝護格朗特
she hu ge lang te
N/A 飛拉哈
fei la ha
首席飛拉哈
Chief fei la ha
Tang, 2011
攝護格朗特
she hu ge lang te
特朗尼菩爾
te lang ni po er
飛拉哈
fei la ha
首席飛拉哈
Chief fei la ha
Sun & He,
2013
Styward
斯蒂沃德
si di wo de
Bench-eater
賁慈特
ben ci te
District
Controller
管片員
guan pian yuan
Senior District
Controller
高級管片員
Senior guan pian
yuan
Li, 2016 攝護格朗特
she hu ge lang te
下級長官(5)
junior officer
特朗尼菩爾
te lang ni po er
高級長官(5)
senior officer
飛拉哈
fei la ha
首席飛拉哈
Chief fei la ha
For the ones that use transliteration, I provide Romanisation immediately after the translated name.
For the ones that adopt official titles familiar to target readers, I leave out Romanisation.
Dai Liuling’s and all editions published since the twenty-first century apply transliteration
to these official titles.393 In the earlier editions, on the other hand, 里長、村長、鄉長、
族長、亭長 and 區長 are used to refer to those official titles. Logically speaking, they are
393 Song’s rendition of syphogrant is an exception. In addition, Li Lingyan, while using transliteration in the main text, refers to syphogrant and tranibor as “junior [or literally “inferior”] officer” and “senior officer” in her preface.
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adopted for the sake of convenience and for familiarity to target readers. However, one
problem arises with this kind of rendering. These titles do not necessarily translate to the
corresponding administrative systems. 里長 can be defined as the precinct chief, 村長 as
chief of a village, 鄉長 as chief of a town, 族長 as master of a tribe, and區長 as head of
a district. Three translations render Tranibor with 鄉長 , which indeed is larger in
administrative terms than either 里長 or 村長 . However, the latter two are not used
interchangeably in real life. Nor does 族長 hold corresponding power as 村長 or 里長 –
the way Liu’s (1935) and Guo’s (1966) editions translate syphogrant and phylarch,
respectively. Additionally, Liu Lihua’s version of syphogrant (or Styward to be precise) is 亭
長, which is a bizarre title, unheard of.
A curious exception is that none of the 1935, 1957, or 1978 editions includes
protophylarch in the core text. Furthermore, Liu Chengshao’s 1957 version even omits both
modernised titles, phylarch and protophylarch. One potential explanation of this exclusion lies
in the translators’ interpretation of the text; that is, they did not consider it necessary to
translate the modernised names on the basis of equivalence. Or rather, they deemed it
redundant to include both, which reflected their failure to grasp the intricate humanist jest
behind More’s carefully designed names and, in this specific case, failed to participate in
Hythloday’s humanist defence.
Song Meihua’s 2003 edition distinguishes itself among all other translations that
either opt for transliteration or recognisable administrative titles. Instead, Song creates a
name for – or a way of addressing – syphogrant that is both familiar to Mandarin speakers
and applicable to the original meaning. The noun construction 智叟 is a conflation of 智
[zhi, “wisdom”] and 叟 [sou, “an elder”], which naturally recalls wise old men. Song
provides a footnote specifying the Greek root of syphogrant is “sophos [wisdom] +
gerontes [old man]”;394 by rendering it 智叟, the Mandarin equivalent fundamentally serves
a function similar to the original – that is, the meaning of the term is manifest in decoding
and/or conflating the two significations that constitute the term. Song Meihua translates
these four official titles on the basis of contextual equivalence. Through this contextual
equivalence, in this case in particular, Song reduplicates the scenario in which the
394 Song 65.
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reportorial More introduces the titles in both their ancient tongue and in their modernised
Utopian tongue. The way she attempts to reproduce this contextual equivalence is that she
literally translates syphogrant and transliterates tranibor, followed by modernised, easily-
associated administrative titles to represent phylarch and protophylarch.
Most of the invented names in Utopia are of the “Hythlodaeus” type, designed to
be immediately intelligible. Turner’s renditions of Hythloday (Nonsenso) and Anyder
(Nowater) successfully duplicate this effect. However, Liu Lihua’s and the Penguin
Mandarin edition, whose reference text is Turner’s, fail to convey that same effect. The
same goes for most of the Mandarin translated names. Of the nomenclature schemes
examined so far, the general pattern is that translation is taking place on the level of
proximity to sound. There are cases where transliteration is ruled out but we are provided
with a name that falls into the target context; for instance, Song’s 智叟 – wise old man –
for syphogrant. The fact that this is a rare case indicates the huge gap between the source
language (be it Latin or English) and the target language, Mandarin. Target readers,
however, are still able to appreciate this canonical work exactly because translation is
happening – despite the degree or aspect – during the linguistic transferal and this is what
makes a cross-cultural narrative like Utopia meaningful and transcendental.
2.4 ETHNOLOGICAL NAMES
The largest group of coinage by More is the ethnologic names designating non-Utopians:
three appearing in Book One (Polylerites, Achorians, Macarians); and four in Book Two
(Anemolians, Nephelogetes, Alaopolitans, Zapoletes). Instead of writing up an analysis of
each name translated in each of the Mandarin editions, I focus on the Polylerites as an
analysis of overall patterns.
Polylerites means “the People of Much Nonsense”, a conflation of polus (much)
and leros (nonsense). 395 They are the people Raphael Hythloday encounters during his
Persian travels, who are self-sufficient, with abundant resources, paying tribute to the
Persian king while maintaining self-governance. Unlike the volatile dichotomy of Utopian
self-negation and non-Utopian ethical implications that James Simmonds propounds, the
Polylerites do not fit easily into either category. Setting up a counterexample for the
395 Cambridge Utopia (1995) 71n37.
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English society that treated theft and murder as crimes of equal severity, the Polylerites
punish criminals with strenuous labour, distinguishing them with a cut in the tip of one ear,
a distinctive colour of outfit, and a special badge, among other measures. These measures
that the Polylerites adopt are carefully evaluated and implemented, and have had positive
results; for instance, “never a year goes by in which some are not pardoned as a reward for
submissive behaviour” (75). Polylerites, in this context, can in no way be dismissed as
“People with Much Nonsense”. In fact, to ridicule More’s contemporaneous English
society, the Polylerites ought to be deemed contrary to what their name suggests, that is,
People with Much Sense, because they have had the insight of attempting to destroy the
root of all evils by making thieves bondslaves, serving as a sardonic contrast to More’s
society, which easily prosecuted thieves to death. In this case, even though this invented
proper noun does not identify any prominent ethical or moral feature of the ethnologic
group that it represents, it satirises English society, the counter mirror of this entire
Utopian discourse.
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The translation strategy in rendering Polylerites fits the general pattern: transliteration with
proximity to pronunciation, with minor variations. The very first edition (Liu, 1935)
translates the first syllable of Polylerites – po – suffixing it with the character 人 that
primarily signifies “people”. By rendering Polylerites as “People of Po”, the 1935 Liu
edition reduces this Greek connotation that highlights nonsense into a mere signification
of ethnology, distinguished by 人. This way of presenting a nationality or ethnological
name by abbreviation was not uncommon, and is to be found in this same edition as well
as non-literary sources elsewhere. As in other places in Liu Linsheng’ edition, when More’s
coinage is translated, Liu includes the original name in parentheses, often alongside a
Editions Polylerites Romanisation
Liu, 1935 婆人(Polylerites)(假設的) po ren (Polylerites)
(hypothetical)
Dai, 1956 波利來賴人 bo li lai lai ren
Liu, 1957 Polylerites 設想的 Polylerites (imagined)
Guo, 1966 波族人 bo zu ren
Liu, 1978 塔拉斯托利亞 ta la si tuo li ya
Dai, 1982,
1997
波利來賴塔人 bo li lai lai ta ren
Song, 2003 「頗多無識」 「Po duo wu shi 」
Wu, 2005 波利拉瑞特人 bo li la rui te ren
Wang, 2007 波利來賴塔人 bo li lai lai ta ren
Hu, 2007 &
2012
波利來賴塔人 bo li lai lai ta ren
Tang, 2011 波利來賴塔人 bo li lai lai ta ren
Sun & He,
2013
Tallstoria
陶斯陶瑞亞
Tao si tao rui ya
Li, 2016 波利人 bo li ren
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definition, also in parentheses. The case of the Polylerites is no exception: “婆人(Polylerites)
(假設的)”. “假設的” in the second parenthesis contains Liu’s definition of the Polylerites,
meaning “hypothetical”. Curiously, the definition Liu provides is nothing close to the
etymological explication of polus and leros. Instead, “hypothetical” is used to define the
Polylerites, downplaying the Greek nomenclatural play embedded in this name and yet at
the same time underlining the make-believe nature of the coinage.
Liu Chengshao’s 1957 edition, published two decades later, makes a slight
adjustment to, though not an improvement on, this rendition. Conceivably Liu Chengshao
has referenced, or copied, Liu Linsheng’s translation: this 1957 edition takes up the
presentation format of the original name, with a definition, yet leaves out the Mandarin
translation of the proper noun. The definition resembles and differs from Liu Linsheng’s
version in an intriguing way: whereas 假設 means hypothetical, 設想 – with one character,
設, in common – designates “envisaged or imagined”. This definitional adjective may have
implied an important feature of Utopia and Utopian names, but it is nowhere close to what
Polylerites indicates. At best, it reinforces the fictional characteristic without being able to
stir an analytical response to deciphering this exotic name. Guo’s rendition, on the other
hand, is a three-character rendition: 波族人. With the proper name mark underlining 波,
we understand that it refers to the name, Polylerites. 族人 refers to people of the tribe;
with the three characters combined together, “People of bo” is thus denoted. Despite the
same strategy in transliteration, the character 波 [bo] that Guo adopts differs from Liu’s in
written form, pronunciation, and meaning. Meaning, in this case, is less relevant, as both 波
and 婆 do not carry particular signification and could have easily been replaced by other
characters with proximity to pronunciation.
Dai Liuling’s three editions give us the first complete transliteration of the
Polylerites: 波利來賴人[bo li lai lai ren] (1956) and 波利來賴塔人 [bo li lai lai ta ren]
(1997). What is to be pointed out here is that the explanatory notes suggest a different
interpretation of the priority of the source text. Dai’s 1956 edition points out precisely that
Polylerites is a conflation of Greek roots, polus (much) and leros (nonsense). The note ends
with the translator’s comment that More is probably trying to suggest, via this coinage, that
if we were to believe that such people did exist, it would be ridiculous. 396 This
396 Dai (1956) 161.
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interpretation is removed from Dai’s later editions, giving way to a much more general
definition: “a coinage made of Greek components, signifying ‘complete nonsense’”.397 It is
clear here that these two editions are devoid of the etymological explication that was made
specific in Dai’s first translation. This change in explanatory notes also indicates the priority
of the text as seen by the translator: Dai had the liberty in his re-translations to modify the
notes, but he chose to simplify this definition. While the first version highlights a thorough
interpretation etymologically and semantically, the later versions seem to have been aimed
at a wider audience, for whom the general definition is provided.
Dai’s transliteration was the model followed by Wu (2005), Wang (2007), Hu (2007
& 2012), and Tang (2011). Wu Lei’s transliteration of the coinage (波利拉瑞特人 [bo li la
rui te ren]) is not exactly identical to Dai’s; yet the parenthetical note inserted into the main
text reveals a trace of duplication. Wang Jin, on the other hand, simply adopts Dai’s
translation of Polylerites without supplying the original name or explanatory note. The
2013 Penguin edition transliterates this ethnological name as well. What distinguishes it,
like the rest of invented names appearing in the Penguin edition, is a result of the chosen
reference-text, namely Paul Turner’s translation. Turner anglicises and renders Polylerites as
Tallstoria, with a footnote signifying the original coinage Polyleritae and its etymology. Sun
and He transliterate Tallstoria as 陶斯陶瑞亞 [tao si tao rui ya], without any further
explanation. Even with cross-referencing the English text in the same volume, readers
would merely grasp that it is a transliteration. All that is intended to be conveyed through
Polylerites, or the People of Much Nonsense, is unreservedly misplaced in Sun and He’s
collaboration. The earlier edition by Liu Lihua (1978) modelled on Turner’s text also
transliterates Tallstoria, again with minor variation: 塔拉斯托利亞 [ta la si tuo li ya]. This
edition comes with ample endnotes, thirty-four in Book One and thirty-one in Book Two.
However, without including Turner’s glossary in which More’s coinages are made
intelligible, she participates in the fun only halfway.
Song’s rendition of Polylerites distinguishes itself among all the others that adopt
transliteration. Hers is proximity to both sound and meaning: 頗多無識 [po duo wu shi].
The first two characters stand for “pretty” and “many” respectively, altogether reflecting
what polus, whose Greek root “polys” meaning “many”, signifies. 無 , as appeared in
397 Dai (1982) 25; Dai (1997) 59.
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Zhuangzi’s無何有之鄉 (wu he you zi xiang), designates “none”. The fourth character, 識,
like the majority of the Chinese characters, has multiple meanings. Combined with 知 (to
know), it means knowledge; conflated with 常 (often), it means common sense. In either
case, a cognitive element is strongly embedded in the character 識 – “pretty much non-
sense/no-knowledge” – drawing Song’s rendition closest to the original intended meaning.
In Li Lingyan’s 2016 edition, Persia is given an explanatory note, whereas
Polylerites is not explicated. The transliteration of Polylerites is “bo li ren”. Using the same
character 波 [bo] for Persia and Polylerites, readers may instinctually associate the two
together, without realising that these are two separate groups of people only inhabited
adjacently. What is intriguing is that footnotes are not scarce in this edition; in most cases,
toponyms and historical figures are sufficiently defined. Li’s choice of annotating Persia but
not Polylerites shows that More’s naming scheme does not register in her interpretation
and that historicity appears to have outweighed fictionality in Li’s translational priority.
3 PERORATION: “RATHER WISH THAN HOPE”
Ironic statements are present in places both obvious and subtle in Utopia. Unironic
statements are to be found as well, the most prominent one being the peroration. Ward
Allen suggests that More is plain and direct, “speaking in his own voice” in the beginning
and the concluding scenes of Utopia.398 The concluding remarks by the persona More
reveal the author’s (dis)belief about the ideal commonwealth just portrayed, when viewed
unironically. It is “the most dramatic moment in all of Utopia”, as it is when readers are to
discover whether Hythloday’s portrayal of the Utopian Commonwealth has successfully
won over the approbation of his audience, More and Giles.399 Whether Thomas More
really believed in the practicality and possibility of the Utopian Commonwealth remains
open-ended. More had taken time and effort to not just compose the book, but also
398 See Ward Allen, “The Tone of More’s Farewell to Utopia: A Reply to J. H. Hexter”, Moreana 51 (1976): 117. Quoted in Thomas White, “Festivitas, Utilitas, et Opes: The Concluding Irony and Philosophical Purposed of Thomas More’s Utopia”, Albion 10 (Supplement, 1978): 136. 399 See Elizabeth McCutcheon, “Thomas More, Raphael Hythlodaeus, and the Angel Raphael”, Studies in English Literature 9 (1969): 21-38; and Astell 306.
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solicited commendatory epistles and verses from his humanist coterie. It would have
seemed natural that he took faith in the practicality of Utopia, and the paratextual materials
intending to make readers believe in it seemed to have confirmed as much. Why would the
reportorial More have overthrown it at the closing of Utopia by saying, “[m]eantime, while I
can hardly agree with everything [Hythloday] said […], yet I freely confess that in the
Utopian commonwealth there are many features that in our own societies I would like
rather wish than expect to see” (111)? The sentence alone leaves room for interpretation,
and the translation of it further generates speculative space. The table below shows each
translator’s reading of the peroration.
Editions Mandarin translations Reverse translation
Liu, 1935 祇好希望我們城鎮中,拿這些
東西,做參考罷了。
I can only hope that our town
will take some of these things as
references.
Dai, 1956 烏托邦國有許多事物,我雖願
意英國有,但不能希望英國
有。
There are many things in Utopia
that I am willing for England to
have, but I can’t hope for it to
have them.
Liu, 1957 只好希望我們的社會,能拿這
些當參考就好了。
I can only hope that our society
can take these as references.
Guo, 1966 我希望烏托邦有許多制度在將
來可以在我們的國家裡實行。
I hope many of the regimes in
Utopia can be carried out in our
nation in the future.
Liu, 1978 我不敢奢望,但我的確希望能
夠見到烏托邦共和國的許多制
度,有朝一日能夠在歐洲實
現。
I’m afraid to make any wild
wishes, but I do hope to see
many of the regimes in the
Republic of Utopia being
established in Europe one day.
Dai, 1982 烏托邦國家有非常多的特徵,
我雖願意我們的這些國家也具
有,但畢竟難以希望看到這種
特徵能夠實現。
The nation of Utopia has many
traits. Although I wish our
countries would have them, it is
rather difficult to hope for the
actualisation of these traits.
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Song, 2003 我雖然衷心期盼,但不敢奢
望,烏托邦國的許多特色會在
我們自己的社會裡實現。
Although I truly long for many of
the characteristics of Utopia to
come to be in our society, I
cannot expect them to.
Wu, 2005 我希望自己的國家也有這些優
點,然而這個想法卻是不太現
實的。
I wish my own country had these
qualities, and yet the thought of it
is unrealistic.
Wang, 2007
There are many things in the
Commonwealth of Utopia that I
rather wish, than hope, to see
followed in our government.
烏托邦的很多特徵,我希望我
們的國家也能具有,但也僅僅
是希望而已。
Utopia possesses a lot of
characteristics I wish our country
could have, but I also wish they
would stay as wishes.
Hu, 2007 &
2012
我情願承認,拉斐爾的所有描
述都是真實的,烏托邦國家有
非常多的特徵也都是真正存在
的,因為這是我希望我們這些
國家也同樣具有的東西,甚至
希望我們的國家會是另一個烏
托邦。但心底又有個聲音在
說,遙不可及的現實只能永遠
是個夢,畢竟難以看到這種特
徵會成為現實。但我寧願相信
這份寧靜和陶然的生活,就存
在於這個世界的某個角落。
I would rather admit all of
Raphael’s depiction to be true for
many traits found in the nation of
Utopia truly exist, and I want our
countries to have the exact same
things. I even hope that our
countries may be another Utopia.
However, deep down in my heart,
there is a voice saying that in
reality it is out of reach, and it can
only stay as a dream. After all, it is
hardly possible for these traits to
come to be reality. However, I
would rather believe that this
tranquil and contented style of
living exists somewhere in the
corner of this world.
Tang, 2011 There are many things in the
The nation of Utopia indeed has
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Commonwealth of Utopia that I
rather wish, than hope, to see
followed in our governments.
烏托邦這個國家確實有著很多
優點,我不只是希望,而且願
意看到這些東西在我們的政府
裡出現。
a lot of excellent qualities. I don’t
only hope, but am also willing to
see them in our government.
Sun & He,
2013
There are many features of the
Utopian Republic which I
should like – though I hardly
expect – to see adopted in
Europe.
烏托邦共和國的許多特徵—我
希望歐洲也能採用—可是我很
難指望這能夠實現。
The United Republic of Utopia
has so many traits – I hope
Europe adopts some of them –
but I can hardly have faith for it
to come true.
Li, 2016 烏托邦共同體中確實有許多東
西是我但願(與其說是希望,
不如說是但願)能看到我們的
政府仿效的。
The united community of Utopia
possesses many things that I am
willing (instead of hoping, I
would rather use willing) to see
our government take references.
A sense of “knowing its impracticality” is delivered in the majority of the Mandarin
editions, with two major exceptions. Guo Xiangzhang’s 1966 edition unveils only the
positive take on the Utopian narrative (“I hope many of the regimes in Utopia can be
carried out in the future”), whereas Tang Yi’s 2011 edition mistakenly stresses More’s
willingness to see Utopia’s features being implemented (“I don’t only hope, but am also
willing to see them executed in our government”). Guo’s and Tang’s versions fail to render
the sense of “rather wish than expect to see”, therefore making an originally negotiable
opinion to be a straightforward, definitive conclusion, that More is positive about its
implementation.
The rest of the translations do render the unrealistic vibe, differing in degree. Both
Liu Linsheng’s (1935) and Liu Changshao’s (1957) used the term “reference”, or more
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precisely, taking Utopia as a model to aspire to. Interestingly, however, with a few changes
in syntax, the 1935 edition reveals a tone of passivity, whereas the 1957 edition expresses a
veiled sense of faith in Utopia.
Dai Liuling uses “cannot hope” in his first rendition (1956), and modifies this to
“difficult to be hoped” in the later editions. Hu Fengfei’s translation expands from the
original text, making an originally simple statement into a short passage avowing the
author’s vision:
I even hope that our countries may be another Utopia. However, deep down in my heart, there is a voice saying that in reality it is out of reach, and it can only stay as a dream. After all, it is hardly possible for these traits to come to be reality. However, I would rather believe that this tranquil and contented style of living exists somewhere in the corner of this world.
Hu’s addition clarifies the ambivalent attitude towards Utopia. Firstly, it does not deny the
impracticality of the Utopian traits. It admits but simultaneously downplays the pejorative
connotation, ending up with a slightly repressed hopeful note. Thomas More, represented
here in Hu’s translation, would rather believe that Utopia does exist because he would want
his country to be another Utopia. However, Hu’s understanding of Utopia, as manifest in
his expanded translation, reveals his misreading and the common association with the
Chinese archetypes of an ideal realm that is often an idyllic representation. Tranquillity
seems to be an instinctual qualification of a utopian realm; More’s Utopia, however, is not
immune from warfare. In fact, men and women alike are to receive military training. While
they do not initiate war unless necessary, the Utopians hire mercenaries to fight for them,
in a way considering the latter’s lives less worthy of their own. Hu’s addition reflects his
level of understanding of Utopia, and possibly his own perspectives of what Utopia ought
to be like, an idyllic representation closer to Peach Blossom Spring. All those seemingly logical
add-ons, however, betrays the authorial intention, making Hu’s rendition more of a
rewriting, or refraction, of Utopia.
4 CONCLUDING REMARKS
No new translations were produced in China during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976),
whereas Guo Xiangzhang’s edition was sponsored by the UN and published in Taiwan,
both of which make evident the influence of what Genette terms factual paratext. After the
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opening policy of the Chinese government since 1977, there has been a spring of Mandarin
Utopias in China, whereas the re-translation of Utopia has been relatively less popular in
Taiwan, having only seen the production of one in the twenty-first century. This
phenomenon will later find resonance in Utopia’s afterlives, especially in how utopia is
being appropriated: More’s Utopia is popularised and utilised as a propaganda in China by
the Chinese Communist Party, whereas in Taiwan, Utopia itself has received less attention
than its subgenres such as science fiction that have appropriated this sixteenth-century
neologism.
In this phase of the Utopian sojourn, we have delved into each standalone
Mandarin translation from 1935 to 2016. It began with Liu Linsheng’s abridged edition,
followed by Dai Liuling’s translation two decades later, modelled on a 1953 Russian text.
Dai’s was the first scholarly translation of Utopia and a more systematic attempt to place
this canonical work in context. With many of his own words being passed off as the
original, Liu Chengshao’s self-published volume appears to be a free adaptation, love-
oriented, especially in view of his dedication – an intimate paratext in Genette’s
terminology – to Ms Chang Yixuan. Guo Xiangzhang’s 1966 edition comes with a preface
translated from the Japanese scholar Shūkotsu Togawa while his main text follows an
English source. Liu Lihua’s 1978 translation was the first to reference the Penguin 1965
edition and, like Paul Turner’s English equivalents of More’s coinages, Liu Lihua attempted
their Mandarin equivalents, “拉斐爾・無稽” as Raphael Hythloday being the prime
exemplar. Dai Liuling worked on a retranslation of Utopia in the 1970s and published two
versions in China and Taiwan, in 1982 and 1997 respectively, with the latter appending non-
authorial illustrations as well as minor shifts in paratexts. The twenty-first century saw
seven more translations: while the 2003 one was published in Taiwan with the most
complete authorial paratexts, the other six were released in China, with Wu Lei’s (2005) and
Hu Fengfei’s (2007 and 2011) translations being the most distinguished in terms of how
they steered off from More’s original Utopia through their own refractions, which aptly
transformed them into adaptations, or “the ‘freest’ form of translation”.400 Wu Lei’s is
coloured with additional, and often irrelevant, iconic paratexts, whereas Hu Fengfei’s is
painted with his own illustrational portrayals of various scenes in Utopia, which befits
Hutcheon’s reconsideration of adaptation as “creative interpretation/interpretive
400 Newmark 46.
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creation”.401 We also have the more “plain” editions such as Tang Yi’s (2011) and Li
Lingyan’s (2016), in terms of translational quality and a lack of authorial paratexts. The
translation history suggests that Mandarin Utopias have blossomed in a relatively short
period of time (compared to English ones) in terms of the number of editions, and that
they have been refracted through fairly diverse lenses, even though during recent years
those lenses appear to have been less thoroughly examined from a paratranslational
standpoint.
Linda Hutcheon’s A Thoery of Adaptation begins with a quotation from the
American playwright Alfred Uhry: “Adapting is a bit like redecorating”.402 The book ends
with her analogy with storytelling: “We retell – and show again and interact anew with –
stories over and over; in the process, they change with each repetition, and yet they are
recognizably the same. […] In the working of the human imagination, adaptation is the
norm, not the exception”. 403 Of the Mandarin Utopias that qualify as adaptation, Liu
Chengshao’s imagination demonstrates itself in the additional passages disguised as the
author’s original words, envisaging what love entails and the qualities that an ideal society
encompasses. Wu Lei’s imagination, on the other hand, is manifested in those pictorial
additions. In Hu Fenghei’s edition, in which he has de facto retold a story resembling a travel
narrative, we see a heightened sense of human imagination at work, again reaffirming
Hutcheon’s assertion that the act of adaptation “always involves both (re-)interpretation
and (re-)creation”.404 In this case, the translator is an adaptor and a commentator: fidelity
criticsm does not apply in adaptive translations that are, in Hutcheon’s words, “taking
possession of another’s story, and filtering it […] through one’s own sensibility, interests,
and talents”.405 The intriguing intersection of adaptation and translation of Utopia emerges
here: that adaptation entails a level of imagination, and translating Utopia (to whichever
target language) is, as McCutcheon postulates, a creative process. Such an intersection
encourages dialogues that go beyond the printed text into a heterocosm inspiring
alternatives to be conceived. More’s Utopia, travelling across linguistic and cultural
borderlines, is transformed by its (re-)translations and is itself an active player that
transforms how modern-day readers utilise this term.
This chapter has also delved into More’s invented names and the peroration as case
401 Hutcheon 18. 402 Hutcheon n.p. 403 Hutcheon 117. 404 Hutcheon 8. 405 Hutcheon 18.
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studies for translational comparison. All the Utopian names that are rendered into
Mandarin reflect the translation strategies regarding foreign names and at the same time
show a less systematic use of explanatory notes on the nomenclature; in other words,
More’s coinages do not receive the attention that they deserve. In some cases, the names
are reduced to being less important than biblical references or toponyms; whereas in other
cases, their meanings are silenced without further attention. I selected Polylerites for
discussion as an epitome of the translational pattern for the Utopian ethnologic names.
Two general points are to be summarised: firstly, transliteration has been the strategy
adopted in the main when it comes to rendering the Utopian names, not limited to
ethnologic names. There is a slight exception in Song’s rendition: while she renders
Polylerites with proximity to both sound and meaning, her other invented names fit the
general pattern of transliteration. There are a few subtle variations but they do not suffice
to form a pattern. Secondly, the Penguin bilingual edition (2013) transliterates those foreign
names as well; but it differs from the rest because of its reference text, which invents
anglicised equivalents (as opposed to the general pattern of retaining the original invented
names). That along with the fact that it is a rendition without explanatory notes or glossary
(unlike its reference text, Paul Turner’s 1965 Penguin English edition), makes it an exotic
rendition.
Lyman Sargent notes that the overlooking of the wordplays by translators has
resulted in a simpler Utopia than the one that was published five centuries ago.406 Most of
the Mandarin Utopias have indeed walked right into this blind spot, with More’s coinages
transliterated without further handling. However, what has truly resulted in a simpler Utopia,
I believe, is less about the wordplays but much more about overlooking the whole
paratextual apparatus. The intrinsic differences of the source and target languages make
rendering invented names gruelling; yet whether to include the authorial paratexts is an
option, a judgment call by the mediating agents that marks a level of comprehension and
refraction. The next phase of the Utopian journey shall further bring readers to the
Utopian paratexts, the textual periphery of Utopia proper, the significance of which is by
no means marginal.
406 Sargent (2016) 184-85.
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CHAPTER FOUR.
FRAMING UTOPIA: MORE’S PARATEXTS IN MANDARIN
The fourth phase of our Utopian textual journey focuses on commendation, the primary
part of Utopia’s initial paratextual apparatus. With the funding of the team project
Dislocations: Practices of Cultural Transfer in the Early Modern Period, Terence Cave edited the
volume Thomas More’s Utopia in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts (2008), devoted
specifically to the study of paratexts of Utopia’s early modern editions. The contributors
aimed at piecing together an integral picture of “how Utopia moved by means of
translation from culture to culture and of the ways in which particular versions offered
themselves to their readers”. When different paratexts are chosen, and their order and
arrangement played with, the same thing happens to the reading experience. What Cave
offers through this volume is a re-examination of the editions published between 1516 and
1643, to allow readers to re-create Utopia in their own ways. Five years before Cave’s edited
collection, the leading utopian scholar Elizabeth McCutcheon had already published an
essay discussing the ancillary materials of the first four Latin editions of Utopia – this time
using “parerga” to refer to paratexts. McCutcheon was not the first scholar who noted the
intriguing role that paratexts have occupied in the publication and re-publication of Utopia.
Peter Allen and Warren Wooden, for instance, contributed some pivotal discussions on the
subject in the 60s and 70s.407 Both the Yale edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More
(volume IV) and Allen’s essay initiated a scholarly interrogation of paratexts from the 60s
onwards, whereas in earlier times the prefatory letters were reprinted, in Allen’s words,
merely “as literary curiosities” rather than as having any serious contribution to the reading
of Utopia.408 What McCutcheon did, instead, was to highlight the changes in the paratextual
materials, both content and order, among the four editions published between 1516 and
1518, hence calling attention to how the changing paratexts had shaped the reading of
Utopia. More recently, Csaba Maczelka’s doctoral thesis (2013)409 investigates paratextuality
and dialogicity in early modern English utopias, with More’s Utopia naturally being his first
407 Peter Allen, “Utopia and European Humanism: The Function of the Prefatory Letters and Verses”, Studies in the Renaissance 10 (1963): 91-107; and Warren W. Wooden, “A Reconsideration of the Parerga of Thomas More’s Utopia”, A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 10 (1978): 151-60. 408 P. Allen 91. 409 Csaba Maczelka, “Poetics in the Paratextual Poems of Thomas More’s Utopia”, PhD Thesis (Szeged: University of Szeged, 2013).
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case study. Such a project with regard to Mandarin Chinese, however, has never been
attempted; discussions of More’s paratexts have been at best mentioned in passing in
review articles of Utopia. In investigating how Utopia’s textual legacy has blossomed, as it
were, in Mandarin, this chapter aims to explore this compelling yet under-researched field
by offering a close reading of the anthumous paratexts, each followed by an examination
of whether – and how – it is rendered in Mandarin. After examining the anthumous
paratexts, this chapter shall take a deeper look inside the Mandarin Utopias. The last two
parts – paratextual and visual – tackle Utopia’s immediate afterlives, meaning those paratexts
printed in the same volumes. The paratextual deals with prefaces written by the translators,
also known as allographic paratexts in Genette’s terminology, whereas the visual looks into
book covers and illustrations, with the aim of seeing how Utopia has been repackaged and
refracted through those intermediating factors, textual and otherwise.
1 AUTHORIAL PARATEXTS OF THE MARCH 1518 EDITION
When put together, the authorial paratexts form a strong, intricate frame for Utopia, also
creating a delicate ruse for the unwary readers who fail to grasp the rhetorical design
encasing – and at the same time embedded in – Utopia, which aimed at creating “sham
historicity”.410 This complex prefatory machinery is a collaborative effort by More’s and
Erasmus’s circle of friends. In addition to serving purposes common to paratexts such as
endorsement and commendation, they – both the contributors and contributions – work
towards one aim, that is, to present Utopia in a serio-comic, half solemn, half jeu d’esprit
kind of frame, adding tension and layers of reading to a book that seems on the surface to
be a simple travel account. The whole of the paratextual apparatus, authored by various
names, is of immense value in terms of both research and jocularity because, as Allen
notes, “[t]he illusion is a sort of humanistic conceit or extended metaphor which, since all
the commentators understand its real meaning, they can play with at great length, adding
further facets to the quasi-realistic world More has invented”.411
Since the March 1518 edition published by Johannes Froben in Basel is, by
consensus, the most authoritative edition, the one that scholars tend to adopt as source text
410 Baker-Smith (1991) 76.
411 P. Allen 101.
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or point of reference, a list of the paratexts printed in this volume will be given here, in the
order in which each appeared:
1. Epistle from Desiderius Erasmus to Johannes Froben
2. Epistle from Guillaume Budé to Thomas Lupset
3. Hexastichon written by Anemolius
4. The new Utopian map (now called tabula instead of figura)
5. The Utopian alphabet, Utopian tetrastichon, and its Latin translation
6. Epistle from Peter Giles to Jerome Busleyden
7. Epistle from Thomas More to Peter Giles (titled “Prefatio”)
8. Epistle from Jerome Busleyden to Thomas More
9. Hexastichon by Gerard Geldenhouwer
10. Hexastichon by Cornelis de Schrijver
In addition to a close reading of the above, I will also examine More’s second epistle to
Giles, which was printed only in the 1517 Paris edition, and yet contains More’s own red
herrings about the fictitious nature of Utopia. I start by giving an overview of the authorial
paratexts, and continue by laying out their importance and function in the early modern
context, as well as discussing the double-appeal of the serio-comic nature that is so
essential to a reading of Utopia. The chapter then examines each paratextual item against
the Mandarin versions, to see how much has been included, how it has been translated, and
how far the translated paratexts work in terms of carrying across More’s intent.
2 SERIO LUDERE
Genette indicates how paratexts aim to “ensure for the text a destiny consistent with the
author’s purpose”.412 Utopia is a book replete with paratexts. Even within the first four
Latin editions published between 1516 and 1518, in which Thomas More had a hand, the
paratexts’ content and order are not always the same. In order to understand how paratexts
412 Genette 407. Quoted in Chloë Houston, New Worlds Reflected: Travel and Utopia in the Early Modern Period (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) 2.
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have shaped the reading of Utopia in Mandarin, it is necessary to first understand the
functions and the importance of paratext in the Latin editions, before investigating the
roles that they take on during the process of linguistic and cultural transferal.
The first evident function of Utopian paratexts is, as a dust jacket works in modern
book printing, to endorse the book and its author for better marketability and reception.
Instead of merely being simple endorsements, however, Utopian paratexts were a display
of “self-praise” such as were commonly seen among the early modern humanist coterie, “a
vast mutual-admiration society”.413 Such praise was and is not uncommon, but the degree
of the indiscriminate commendation in the Utopian paratexts is unusual. Wooden uses the
terms “hyperbolic” and “blanket endorsement” to depict this phenomenon in the early
editions of Utopia.414 In addition to suggesting an analytical reading of a text that should
not be taken at face value, this seemingly uncritical adulation creates an irresolvable
paradox, often aiming at complicating the boundary between the fictive and the real.
The ancillary supplements took up around a quarter of Utopia as a printed
product.415 The proportion and the nature of the original Utopian paratexts makes Utopia a
collaborative cultural artefact born in a culture of epistolarity, and the status of the
Utopian paratexts has been emphatically linked to the reading of Utopia. As a work
complemented and completed by its paratexts, Utopia is a brilliant example of how the
reading of a work with and without those auxiliary items renders dynamic reading
experiences possible; a reading of Utopia without its authorial paratexts inevitably leads to a
fragmentary grasp of the work.
All this shifting of perspectives along with perplexing real and fictive dimensions
reinforced through paratexts is intended for a more general outlook, that is, to have readers
think critically and not simply take the text as it is. R. C. Elliott maintains that “the meaning
of the work as a whole is a function of the way those voices work with and against each
other”.416 Wooden suggests that the reading of Utopian paratexts should indeed be as
sensitive as that.417 Indeed, reading Utopia, especially along with its original paratexts, is like
witnessing a heated and yet amicable argument, in which viewpoints are brought up,
expanded, refuted, and unsettled. What differentiates this Utopian debate is that all the
413 Wooden 158. 414 Wooden 152-53. 415 J. C. Davis (2010) 36. 416 Elliott 31-32; quoted in Wooden 153. 417 Quoted in McCutcheon, “More’s Utopia and its Parerga (1516-1518), 1997”, Moreana Special Issue 51.201-02 (2015): 153, only that Wooden adopts the term “parerga” instead of “paratexts”. Hereafter McCutcheon (2015).
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absurdities and contradictions embedded in the Utopian paratexts constantly add layers to
the reading, making it—as McCutcheon calls it—a creative process: “there is a strikingly
witty correspondence as his fictions, ‘lies,’ evasions and paradoxes create their own
ontological status: he has turned an unstated debate over the status of a work of art into a
creative process.”418
What, then, makes “those voices work with and against each other”, and why? It is
indicated, although often overlooked, especially in Mandarin translations, in the book title.
While almost all translations provide only the three-syllable neologism Utopia as the book
title, the title page of the most authoritative Latin edition (March 1518) reads:
De optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia, libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, clarissimi disertissimique viri Thomae Mori inclutae civitatis Londinensis civis et Vicecomitis
[On the Best State of a Commonwealth and on the New Island of Utopia, a Truly Golden Handbook, No Less Beneficial than Entertaining, by the Most Distinguished and Eloquent Author Thomas More Citizen and Undersheriff of the Famous City of London] (2-3)
Quentin Skinner asserts that Utopia should be read in the context and the genre of the
Renaissance political theory treatise, 419 especially so because the book title—De optimo
reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia—suggests that “[More’s] concern […] is not merely
or even primarily with the new island of Utopia; it is with ‘the best state of a
commonwealth’”. 420 Indeed, this line places the work in the political writing and
philosophical tradition of Plato’s Republic and Laws as well as Aristotle’s Politics.421 Skinner is
not alone in stressing the political seriousness of Utopia. George M. Logan contends that
the Lucianic spirit is incompatible with the solemnness of this grand book, and alerts
readers that “despite the wit and indirection of its manner, [Utopia] is a serious work of
418 McCutcheon (1983) 42. 419 Skinner is one among many who argue that Utopia should be read in the context of political thought. Robert M. Adams, who wrote the introduction to the 1995 Cambridge edition, asserts that Utopia needs to be understood “by setting the book in its contexts in More’s life and times, and in the history of political thought”. See Cambridge Utopia (1995) xvii. 420 Skinner 123, quoted in Ginzburg 1. 421 Cambridge Utopia (1995) xxii. Furthermore, the hexastichon written by Anemolius and the epistle from Giles to Busleyden both directly praise Utopia as having excelled Plato’s Republic. In the second letter from More to Giles, More also defends the book by pointing out that like all the ideal states described by philosophers, Utopia cannot be entirely perfect for everyone. See P. Allen 102.
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political philosophy”.422
While not dismissing Skinner’s emphasis on the political aspect of Utopia, Ginzburg
points out an obvious element that is overlooked: “Skinner starts his contextualizing
strategy with Utopia’s title, but his quotation is curiously incomplete.”423 Skinner, knowingly
or not, quotes only the first part of the original book title to sustain his argument. This
part of the book title draws attention to the gist of Utopia, that is, about the best state of a
commonwealth. Yet the second half of the title—libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam
festivus [a Truly Golden Handbook, No Less Beneficial than Entertaining]—is no less crucial in
forming a double-layered reading of Utopia. Let us for now focus on the second half of
the title, in which the two keywords unveil a trace of Lucianic influence: salutaris and festivus.
While salutaris means helpful, useful, or beneficial, a celebratory and festive connotation is
made explicit with festivus, often rendered as playful and entertaining. Whereas there are
scholars such as Skinner, Logan, and Peter Allen who focus on the salutaris dimension of
Utopia, Ginzburg notes C. S. Lewis’s assertion that possible misinterpretation “lies with
those modern readers who take the book au grand serieux”.424 Ginzburg further departs from
Lewis’s argument, bringing up the question of how Utopia is meant to be read by drawing
readers’ attention to festivus, but at the same time arguing that highlighting festivus in the
book title alone does not mean that he overlooks the serious side of Utopia. In fact, as C. R.
Thompson raises rhetorically in Translations of Lucian, “Why can’t we have it both ways?”425
Similarly, Ginzburg is encouraging readers to interpret it both ways in reading Utopia,
namely, to take in the serio-comic double focus of this piece of literary brilliance.426
Expanding from the Dutch humanist Geldenhauer’s verse, in which he emphasises
that the Utopian island abounds in the pleasant and the profitable,427 Schoeck argues that
the jeu d’esprit and the sense of urgency are not and should not be mutually exclusive, as
long as readers do not give weight to one side over the other. The same goes for what
Schoeck remarks in the opening of the same essay, that the deep sense of angst in More
422 Logan (1983) 7. 423 Ginzburg 1. See Skinner 123. 424 C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954) 167. 425 Quoted in Ginzburg 21. 426 That said, in this essay Ginzburg is not discussing “both ways” but is primarily investigating the festivus via the paratextual items of Utopia. 427 J. C. Davis argues that the topics of profit, interest, and advantage are a leitmotif that operates throughout Utopia. See Davis (2010) 36.
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should not negate the fact that Utopia is loaded with festivitas.428 Similarly, McCutcheon
suggests that the ancillary items “emphasize the double appeal of the title page to the
festivum and the salutaris”. 429 Wooden re-emphasises both humour and seriousness, and
Schoeck argues that Utopia does have a serious purpose but that it must be read “through
an ironic structure”.430 Comparably, while interrogating the philosophical traditions behind
the composition of Utopia, Ginzburg recognises the influence of Republic on Utopia, but
further argues that “[More’s] Plato was filtered through Lucian”.431 Branham’s critique of
“artificial interpretative dichotomies” echoes Thompson’s appeal to read Utopia both
ways.432 Utopia has been translated and received in Mandarin in a similar manner; that is, the
festivitas dimension is largely overlooked. Not only is the naming in puns not rendered, but
the translator’s prefaces in general stress the political influence Utopia has had, while only
five editions (2016, 2013, 2007 & 2012, 2007, 2003)433 mention the fictional nature that
bears elements of jocularity.
Let us return to the book title before interrogating the relationship between
paratexts and the said double appeal. The partial title where the two key words appear in
both the 1516 and 1518 editions—nec minus salutaris quam festivus—was non minus utile quam
elegans in the 1517 Paris edition.434 Whether it is salutaris/festivus or utile/elegans, both cases
point to the Lucianic tradition of serio ludere, “to play seriously”, presenting serious points
in the form of jokes, that must not be dismissed.435 Together with Erasmus, More had
translated several of Lucian’s works. The fact that the 1519 Florence edition of Utopia was
appended to an edition of Lucian’s writings generates a direct association between the two
authors. Ginzburg substantiates this point by referring to the preface to Lucian’s Alexander,
seu pseudomantis. Perfunctorily or not, Erasmus used the same adjectives—utilis, festivus,
elegans—that appeared later in the early editions of Utopia.436 All this suggests a link among
428 Schoeck (1969) 19. 429 McCutcheon (2015) 139. 430 Schoeck (1969) 19. Of these commentaries on Utopia’s double appeal, I find Schoeck’s closest to home. 431 Ginzburg, 16. 432 Branham 25. 433 Guo Xiangzhang’s 1966 edition mentions the keyword “fiction”, but in the context of an enquiry as to whether Utopia ought to be read as a fiction or as an opinion, without the translator leaning towards either side. 434 The 1518 book title returned to the original one. See Ginzburg 2. 435 Cambridge Utopia (1995) xxv. 436 Ginzburg 12. Ginzburg suggests that similar traces can be found in their translations of Lucian’s writing, in which two of the preface addressees are Johannes Paludanus and Jerome Busleyden.
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these three humanists. Whereas Lucian was a Syrian satirist born in the second century,
More and Erasmus belonged to the early modern period, born in 1478 and 1466,
respectively. What then, did Lucian mean for these two Renaissance humanists? Lucian was
a key figure in developing the literary tradition of serio ludere; or what Bakhtin calls
“spoudogeloion” that points to a conflation of the serious and the laughable.437 Closely
linked to such ludic convention, this carnivalesque laughter shall be brought to the fore
here. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin discusses three antique sources for the Renaissance
conception of laughter: Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Lucian, the satire of the latter
highlighted carnivalesque laughter. 438 While Lucian’s influence on More is potent, the
quality of humour in Utopia differs from the Rabelaisian carnivalesque described by
Bakhtin. Carnivalesque highlights the grotesque, in which the grotesque body becomes an
arena where power reversal and subversiveness intersect, and where a different world finds
a ludicruous materialisation. Indeed, for Bakhtin, grotesque is a concept that “discloses the
potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of life.”439 On the
other hand, More’s Utopia mocks the institutional and humours the unwary; his playful
irony does not single out laughter, but an avid sense of the reversal is conveyed in his
language, word play, and the whole paratextual arrangement. Both aim at the reversal of
the current order: one via the grotesque and one via words. Reading Utopia without taking
in the Lucianic complexity therefore cannot be taken as a holistic reading; likewise,
translating Utopia without being sensitive to the double appeal means it loses the
transcendental profundity that is embedded in the entire narrative. “The complexities of
interpreting Utopia don’t, on the whole, derive from intricacies of languages; they are
matters of attitude and levels of ironic reversal.”440 This is perhaps the best reminder of
what a faithful translation of Utopia ought to be, which enquires into the cultural
transference of Utopia’s Mandarin translations and their paratexts.
These two humanists, incidentally or not, contributed prefatory letters and verses to the early editions of Utopia. See Ginzburg 13. 437 Katelis Viglas, “The Placement of Lucian’s Novel True History in the Genre of Science Fiction”, Interlitteraria 21.1 (2016): 160. 438 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 66, 70. 439 Bakhtin 48. 440 Cambridge Utopia (1989) xxxi.
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3 NOTES ON AUTHORIAL PARATEXTS
3.1 A NOTE ON ERASMUS’S EPISTLE TO FROBEN
The epistle from Erasmus to Froben first appeared in 1518 and “leads off the [third]
edition”.441 Unlike most other Utopian paratexts that engage themselves with ambiguity,
this short epistle is relatively simple and plain, mainly to achieve the effect of endorsement.
Yet it is important that this short epistle “leads off the [third] edition”. To begin with, this
edition was under the imprint of Johann Froben, the addressee of the letter. It begins with
Erasmus’s praise of More’s merit, their close relationship, and how the well-educated
shared his high esteem for More. It places these two humanists in the same coterie, but at
the same time defends them from any possible questioning that may have dismissed
Erasmus’s adulation of More as tinted with personal favour because the others “see more
deeply into his merits” (5). Despite its short length, this epistle deserves attention not only
because of both the addressor’s and addressee’s fame or of the textual position in which
this letter is placed, but mainly because Erasmus was no longer just behind the scenes.
Erasmus’s engagement with Utopia started from the very beginning. In a letter from More
to Erasmus dated 20 September 1516, More requested that Utopia “be handsomely set off
with the highest recommendations, if possible, from several people, both intellectuals and
distinguished statesment”.442 Erasmus complied with More’s request. Together with Peter
Giles, Erasmus meticulously prepared the production of Utopia, both in seeing it into print
and more importantly in soliciting commendations for the volume. Giles’s active role is
manifest on two fronts: firstly as one of the three interlocutors in Utopia; secondly as a real
historical character who contributed to the Utopian paratexts as well as seeing Utopia into
print. To be precise, in the 1516 edition, Giles’s name was involved in three epistles: one
from Giles to Busleyden, one from Paludanus to Giles, and the first epistle from More to
Giles. Yet unlike Giles, whose name already shows up in the first edition of Utopia—a
result of More “[making] Giles an integral part of his Utopian fiction”443— the 1518 Basel
editions mark the first direct appearance of Erasmus, in this prefatory epistle authored by
himself.
There was a strong bond between Erasmus and Froben; not only were these two
close associates, but Erasmus was godfather to Froben’s son.444 This was not the only
441 McCutcheon (2015) 144. 442 Quoted in Cambridge Utopia (1995) 5. See also McCutcheon (1983) 75n46. 443 McCutcheon (1983) 15. 444 As indicated in the title and the closing sentence of the epistle, “the little son we share in common”. See Cambridge Utopia (1995) 5, 7.
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reason that Erasmus wrote to Froben. Froben’s printing house in Basel was held in superb
regard among humanist intellectuals and Basel was then the leading centre of book
publishing. It was also, as Terence Cave reminds us, “where Erasmus and More’s views on
religious questions and education were widely disseminated”,445 making Basel an excellent
place for the third edition of Utopia. Along with this epistle, Erasmus enclosed More’s
Utopia and his translation of Exercises (Progymnasmata), beseeching Froben to have those
works published under his imprint. To have a book printed and published by this high-
ranking publisher was an alternative endorsement by action, not just in terms of its wider
circulation but also of the commendation that comes with the prestige of the publisher.
This, in Genette’s taxonomy, belongs to the implicit context, a kind of factual paratext that
influences the reception of a work.
Song Meihua is the only translator to include this prefatory epistle. Her
translational preference for a polished literary style is discernible from the outset. The
simple line “As a youth, he toyed with epigrams” is rendered as “他在髫齡之時以寫警句
自娛”.446 Song adopts the idiom “髫齡之時” [tiao ling zhi shi]—the time of childhood—
to signify youth. The origin of 髫齡 comes from 髫齔 [tiao chen], indicating the age when
a child’s teeth begin to fall. This is a poetic phrase whose first documented appearance is in
Records of Grand Historians of Han China, used mostly in poetry and classical literary (wen yen)
script, but rarely in daily conversation or correspondence. For less learned readers this
phrase may not be immediately recognisable. In rendering a simple term, “youth”, as “髫齡
之時”, Song adds a polished layer of classical literary reading, but at the same time
foregoes More’s preferred flavour of simplicity. While it is not my intention to discuss
every single instance of over-translation, this particular case certainly prepares readers for
the style Song’s translation is cast in.
3.2 A NOTE ON BUDÉ ’S EPISTLE TO LUPSET
This lengthy epistle—the longest of the Utopian paratexts—first appeared in the 1517
445 Cave (2012) 3. 446 Song 2. Emphasis added.
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Paris edition. It was written by the foremost French humanist Guillaume Budé (c.1468-
1540), “a humanistic scholar second only to Erasmus in the European world of letters”,447
whom J. H. Hexter praises as “the shrewdest and most perceptive commentator of the
book at its time of publication”.448 Thomas Lupset, though the youngest among all the
humanist scholars who contributed to the prefatory epistles and verses, was involved in the
publication of the 1517 edition of Utopia as well as the printing of the translation of
Galen’s manuscript. 449 This epistle comes immediately after the hexastichon allegedly
written by Hythloday’s nephew Anemolius. Budé’s epistle for Lupset was, accordingly,
placed in a very pivotal position of the volume—the second of all the ancillary items in
this edition—only after Anemolius’s hexastichon. Its content as well as its textual position
both testify to why Erasmus called it an “elegant preface” to Utopia.450
This prefatory epistle begins with Budé thanking Lupset for introducing him to
Utopia, “an extremely amusing and profitable book” (7). This line is a direct reflection on
the original title of Utopia, whose partial subtitle reads A Truly Golden Handbook, No Less
Beneficial than Entertaining, and is perhaps Budé’s intention of highlighting the double focus
of the book. It reinforces the two features that readers should bear in mind during the
process of reading—beneficial and entertaining, or “amusing and profitable”, discussed
previously in the section on serio ludere. The serio-comic nature of the book is designed to
be clear from the very beginning in the 1517 edition (as well as the latter editions that
include this magisterial letter), since a reader’s first impression usually comes from the title
page, making it one of the initial elements that guides readers into the whole narrative that
he or she is about to experience. McCutcheon suggests that readers of the 1516 edition
may not have gotten the jest, thus more red herrings for the jocular aspect—as manifested
in this epistle—are added to the following Paris edition: “It appears that the first edition
had succeeded so well and some of More’s early readers needed more help.”451 Similarly,
commenting on the seriousness or usefulness of Utopia, Allen proposes that readers of the
1516 edition “would not have the help of Budé in determining Utopia’s moral purpose”.452
447 Schoeck (1969) 20. Writing separately but with shared humanist conviction, Budé, Erasmus, and More published their works in 1516: Erasmus’s The Education of a Christian Prince, Budé’s On the Education of the Prince, and More’s Utopia. See Alistair Fox (1993) 8. 448 CW xlviii; quoted in Wooden 157 and Schoeck (1969) 20. See P. Allen 97. 449 P. Allen 97. 450 Quoted in Cambridge Utopia (1995) 7n. 451 McCutcheon (2015) 140-41. 452 P. Allen 101n.
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What is the primary qualification of a happy place? “Happiness” may be the
instinctual answer. Factors constituting happiness are discussed in Utopia, though often
subsumed within Utopia’s political message. Budé already draws reader’s attention to this
aspect in his epistle to Lupset. He thanks Lupset’s generosity for lending him the
translations of Galen’s On Protecting One’s Health. Budé speaks very highly of Galen, the
Greek physician of the second century, considering him the man who “comprehends the
entire science of medicine” and stating that if all his works were translated into Latin, “the
medical profession would then not need to know Greek”.453 To include More’s Utopia as a
“supplement to [this] former gift”, Budé places Utopia and More almost on the same level
as Galen, before he moves on to praise More in explicit terms: “a man of the keenest wit,
the most agreeable temper and the most profound experience in judging human affairs” (9).
All this is to acclaim Utopia; yet there is an often-overlooked point here that I believe
should not be taken as a simple coincidence. More’s Utopia is about the best state of a
commonwealth, but it is also about the well-being of people living in this commonwealth.
It is about the best way to live a good life and about the pursuit of happiness. “All or most
human happiness consists of pleasure” (159), Hythloday comments in the section
discussing Utopians’ moral philosophy. The Utopians divide true pleasures into different
classes, some of the mind and some of the body. “Among the pleasures of the body, they
give the first place to health”, notes Hythloday. Budé’s prefatory epistle and the passages in
Book Two explaining how health is crucial to happiness all reflect this true pleasure of the
body that is the foundation of a good life in the eyes of the Utopians. An implicit link
between Utopia and its endorsement is thus forged tactically here.
Budé further specifies that greed and the accumulation of personal wealth are a
common appetite of and parasite on the whole of humanity, who are under the spell of
private property. There Budé endorses Hythloday’s viewpoints by referring to the
Pythagorean rule of “mutual charity and community property”, which is one of the core
elements of Utopia (13). Following this reference to Pythagoras, who once advocated
communal living, Budé brings up the three divine institutions that the Utopians conform to
dearly so as to maintain the order of Utopia. These three divine institutions are: “equality
of all good and evil things among the citizens (or, if you prefer, full and complete
453 Cambridge Utopia (1995) 7. Towards the end of the epistle, Budé also applauds the translator Thomas Linacre (c.1460-1524) as “that pillar of the British name in all that concerns good learning”
(17). This is an indication of how On Keeping Oneself Healthy – the work that is mentioned in parallel
to Utopia in this epistle – was produced and reproduced/translated by scholars.
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citizenship for all); a fixed and unwavering dedication to peace and tranquillity; and utter
contempt for gold and silver” (13). They sum up what makes a just and felicitous society
possible, what holds up the Utopian order as it were. It serves as a guide to accessing this
Utopian narrative, especially when this epistle is placed prior to the main text of Utopia.
In this epistle, the other name of Utopia—Udepotia—is mentioned, and several
other synonyms of the ideal world are also raised. “Udepotia” was coined from the Greek
oudepote, meaning “never land” (13).454 Marin argues that “the name of the utopian island, in
its turn, is going to be named, inscribed and erased in terms of the displacement of the
letters that compose the name: Outopia, Eutopia, Oudepotia – three names […] where the
permutation of a ‘p’ and a ‘t’ (potia/topia) makes time and space equivalent”.455 This
neologism plays the language game of metathesis here. A No-Where Land that is at the
same time a Never Land—a strong sense of non-existence is revealed with this neologism.
Its first appearance was in the second edition of Utopia (1517). However, its only
appearance in the Mandarin translations to date is in the 2003 Song edition. A sense of
fictionality is evinced by Udepotia; yet it is further accompanied with a more practical
outlook. By mentioning that he hears Utopia is also called Udepotia, Budé imparts a sense
of actuality to the island of Utopia by implying that he is not the only person who is aware
of its existence. A strong mixture of non-actuality and actuality exists in this passage.
Those who refer to it as Udetopia effectively become participants in this game. What is
being invoked with the mention of Udepotia is a tension between the real and the fictional,
a paradox that confirms its existence but at the same time invites readers to question its
ontological status.
This Greek compound coinage, when rendered into Mandarin, loses its double-
sided meaning of Nowhere/Never Land. In her 2003 edition, Song Meihua transliterates
this neologism as “烏地波西亞” [wu di bo xi ya], with a footnote indicating that the
original name is Udepotia.456 However, unlike most other footnotes to More’s coinages in
Song’s edition, it does not provide a definition or an etymological root. This curiously
succinct footnote simultaneously plays down and strengthens the festivus part of Utopia. It
tones it down in the sense that Song translates this epistle that includes the anecdote of an
outsider having the knowledge of this island known as Udepotia, while reinforcing the ruse
454 In some versions of Utopia, Udeoptia is spelt as Oudepotia. Here I adopt the one from the 1995 Cambridge edition. 455 Louis Marin, “The Frontiers of Utopia”, Utopias and the Millenium, ed. Krishan Kumar & Stephen Bann (London: Reaktion Books, 1993) 16. 456 Song 5.
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in the sense that no further information is given on “wu di bo xi ya”, a five-character
transliteration whose first character alone insinuates nothingness and yet whose characters
combined carry no particular substance. Without further explanation, “wu di bo xi ya”
could well pass off as an invented name that often shows up in fiction, especially so
because names are commonly rendered in transliteration.
Varying in degree, a sense of paradox is thus conveyed in both the original and the
Mandarin translation of Udepotia. The level of paradox is further complicated with Budé’s
futile investigation of the location of Utopia:
I have discovered, after investigating the matter, that Utopia lies outside the bounds of the known world. Perhaps it is one of the Fortunate Isles, near neighbour to the Elysian Fields. […] Though it is divided into a number of different cities, they are all united or confederated in a single society named Hagnopolis, a nation content with its own customs and possessions, blessedly innocent, leading a celestial life. (13)457
This passage starts out with a sense of actuality, in Budé’s personal attempt at retrieving the
Utopian island and concluding that it lies outside the known world. Exactly in which realm
is Utopia situated? Is it knowable or unknowable? From here the tension between reality
and fiction is further bolstered. Budé posits that the Utopian island is one of the Fortunate
Isles, even pinpointing it to be close to the Elysian Fields. All these analogies make Utopia
seem real, an actual space locatable in the sea. Elysium—in Sargent’s taxonomy belonging
to the myth of the afterlife—was a “death-free, comfortable retreat for selected heroes in a
place that is neither Olympus nor Hades”,458 that is, a place other than the home of the
gods or the dead souls. This analogy between Utopia and classical locations leads readers
from a sense of locatable authenticity back to the imaginative, a constantly shifting paradox
where, when (early modern) readers feel as if they have reached a final point, they begin to
realise the path to the finality has yet again diverged, leaving them confused as to which
way to take. Nicole Pohl explains that “Medieval and Renaissance maps (mappae mundi)
inserted the speculative geographies of Eden, the Island of the Blessed […] into their
457 In addition, Carlo Ginzburg senses the Lucianic influence behind this passage, and reminds readers that the “description of the Elysian Fields forms the core of the second part of Lucian’s True Histories, a narrative describing a journey into a multitude of strange worlds”. See Ginzburg 15. 458 Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979) 75.
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navigational charts, destabilising the boundaries of the world”.459 Likewise, Marina Leslie
argues that this “classical reference adds a double temporal location to Utopia as well”.460 It
is as if Budé foresees what his contemporaneous readers might have associated Utopia
with and intends to offer a reference point for them. It is also designed to give a relatively
concrete presence to Utopia by ball-parking its geographical location as somewhere near
the Elysian Fields, or Elysium. Yet how concrete is Elysium, a toponym that belongs to the
myth of the afterlife where heroes spend eternity, a realm unreachable by human touch or
rationality? These toponyms, geographical- or mystery-wise, all contribute to the blurring
of the real and the fictive.
In Song’s edition, this passage is rendered as follows:
According to my own investigation, the geographical location of Utopia lies outside our known world, in one of the Fairy Islands of Penglai, near the Elise Fairy Realm. More said, Hythloday did not tell people where the actual location is. Utopia is divided into many cities, but each is united and collaborated together, forming a whole called the “City of the Holy People”. They are confident in their own customs and the resources that they possess; they are innocent and lead a celestial life.461
The sense of paradox is indisputably still detectable here; what is intriguing is how Song
translates these classical references of the ideal world. The Fortunate Isles become “Fairy
Islands of Penglai”. Penglai is a toponym in Chinese mythology where the Eight Immortals
live and where elixir and immortality are to be found. The more commonly used toponym
for Penglai is Mount Penglai or Fairy Mountain Penglai. Some believe that Mount Penglai is
the current Mount Fuji in Japan, while there are others that claim Penglai to be Formosa,
the name given by the Portuguese to the island of Taiwan in the sixteenth century. The
Elysian Fields, on the other hand, become a compound word that begins with
transliteration and ends in a mythical tone: “Fairy Realm Elise” or “Fairy Bound Elise”.462
459 Nicole Pohl, “Utopianism after More: The Renaissance and Enlightenment”, The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 53. 460 Leslie 157n. 461 Translation is mine. The original reads: 根據我自己的調查,烏托邦的地理位置在我們已知
的世界之外,在蓬萊仙島其中一座之上,靠近依麗絲仙界的地方。摩爾說,希適婁岱沒
有告訴大家確切的所在。烏托邦分隔成許多城市,但彼此團結合作,構成一個整體,稱
為「聖潔人之城市」,對於自己的習俗和掌握的資源抱持信心,純真無邪,過著天堂般的
日子。See Song 6.
462 “Elise” is a convenient translation that I adopt for Song’s use of “依麗絲” (to render Elysian),
which is pronounced as “Yī Lì Sī”.
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In both cases, the translation of these two classical references has a mythical flavour,
differing in that “the Fortunate Isles” is recast with localisation and “the Elysian Fields”
with foreignisation.463 A footnote is provided for these two terms:
Reverse translation: Fairy Island Penglai (the Fortunate Isles) and Fairy Bound Elise (the Elysian Fields) are both where the souls of heroes and saints go after death in mythical tales. They are symbols of an eternal happy land.464
This footnote briefly explains the two classical references, even though the English and
Mandarin translated names do not necessarily correspond. What is interesting, however, is
that the localisation is even more pronounced here. The direct translation of 樂土 [le tu] is
“happy land” or “happy soil”. As noted above, this term first appeared in the poem “Big
Rat” in the Book of Poetry, the earliest Chinese poetry collection, whose authors were often
anonymous. Zhang Longxi claims this poem is the earliest documented Utopia in Chinese
literature, 465 and Song adopts this term to translate “Eutopia” as it appeared in the
hexastichon allegedly written by Anemolius. The fact that only the 2003 Song edition
includes this epistle is an editorial decision that is complementary to the purpose of the
project, Translating and Annotating Classics, initiated by the National Scientific Council of
Taiwan. In addition to the relative paratextual completeness, Song Meihua’s volume is a
scholarly product, intended to be read with a critical eye. It is intriguing to note Song’s
preference for localisation in her translation and annotation, which complements the
source text via domestic intelligibility but at times may cause confusion because of the
differences in cultural understanding, as demonstrated in her rendering of the Fortunate
Isles.
Another point worthy of our attention in this epistle comes from Budé’s analysis
of greed. After discussing how the greed for accumulating wealth is “a hidden parasite
463 Localising (or domesticating) and foreignising are two common translation strategies. There are also free, literal, dynamic, and formal translations, among others. See Lawrence Venuti, ed. The Translation Studies Readers (London, New York: Routledge, 2000). 464 The original reads: 蓬萊仙島 (the Fortunate Isles) 和依麗絲仙界 (the Elysian Fields) 皆為神
話中英雄和聖賢死後靈魂所居之地,為永恆樂土的象徵。See Song 6. The translation and
the emphasis are mine. 465 Zhang Longxi 181-82. Based on the differences in form and content, I disagree with Zhang’s argument. This poem could at best be taken as an articulation of the pursuit of a blissful land; but it in no way falls into the genre of utopian literature. If we were to broaden the scope and qualification of the articulation of utopia, this poem would also not be first in line for consideration.
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[that] preys on the whole human race” (9), three long passages from the original epistle are
missing in Song’s translation. She states in a footnote that Budé’s epistle is of considerable
length, and that the deleted part is an exposition of Budé’s own arguments that aims at
showing humanist rhetoric and eloquence without having direct relevance to the main
topic.466 However, a close reading of these three long passages indicates otherwise. The
omitted passage discusses how justice, true equity, and gold are perceived subversively in
countries under the prey of this human parasite. In those countries, justice is controlled in
the hands of “exponents of a perverse, confused and unjust justice” (9); for instance, those
who are skilled in finding loopholes in the law, or in contriving fraud and contracts, among
others. Another major point raised in the third omitted passage is that modern law derives
from what is called “the law of nature”, the result of which is that “the stronger a man is
the more goods he should have, and the more goods he has the more authority he should
exercise over his fellow citizens” (11). This creates a vicious cycle, making society a fixed,
unjust hierarchy. This is also the social malady that More, speaking via Hythloday,
condemns in Book One of Utopia. In fact, in analysing Budé’s attack on vice as
complementary to that in Utopia, Wooden suggests that this is an “[emphasis] through
imitation, the sincerest of compliments”. 467 How, then, can these three passages be
dismissed on the grounds of merely being an exposition of Budé’s argument and irrelevant
to the main theme? They contribute to clarifying More’s observations and substantiating
his viewpoints by alluding to Christian ethics. Attributing this excision to cost-cutting or
reducing the number of pages is also not satisfactory, because the translated version of
these three passages would take up no longer than two additional pages. It is not my
intention to look into the grounds for this deletion. We can simply conclude that Song’s
translational intervention has taken a strange turn: her decision to include this epistle
makes available what some would call “a guide to our interpretation of the whole of
Utopia”;468 yet her curious omission of three important passages that she dismisses as “not
too relevant to the main theme” effectively subverts the depth of this guide to our
interpretation. However, this omission can be justified on the grounds of quality. J. C.
Sager comments that, while he does not encourage the kind of omission that often occurs
due to “translators’ negligence, forgetfulness or deliberate avoidance of difficult passages”,
simple omission can in some circumstances improve the quality of a translated product for
466 Song 4. 467 Wooden 158. 468 McCutcheon (1997) 142.
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the reader. 469 Song’s Utopia is aimed at an academic audience, who would indubitably
benefit from the three passages in terms of the depth of the content. Song’s reason for
leaving out the three passages is perhaps best understood as not because they are, as she
calls them, irrelevant, but because they have low priority in Utopia.
3.3 A NOTE ON UTOPIA’S EPIGRAMS
There are four epigrams in the early editions of Utopia: the hexastichon written by
Anemolius, Utopia’s own tetrastichon, and two verses by the Dutch humanists Gerard
Geldenhouwer and Cornelis de Schrijver. In the very first edition, nothing follows the main
text, meaning all four epigrams are placed as preliminary materials. In the second edition
published in 1517, the quatrain written in the Utopian language is removed from the
volume, leaving only three epigrams: the Dutch humanists’ two commendatory verses are
switched to after the main text, as an exit from Utopia. The Utopian tetrastichon is retrieved
in the 1518 edition: like Anemolius’s hexastichon, both are placed in a preliminary position,
while the other two commendatory verses remain as the exit point.
The Utopian tetrastichon is a composite of the Utopian alphabet, a quatrain in the
Utopian language plus its transcription, followed by a literal translation of the verses. All is
attributed to Peter Giles, who claims the authorship in his letter to Busleyden.470 Baker-
Smith likewise suggests that the epigram was composed by “someone intimate with More’s
scheme”.471 It should also be recalled that because all three are printed on one page, they
are often considered one paratextual item. Studies show that the Utopian alphabet has
affinities with Greek and Latin, and is carefully designed so that it has its own inner
consistency.472 McCutcheon even suggests that the evolving formation of the alphabet
from circular to rectangular is a projection of the symmetry of the Utopian island.473 All
this is a reinforcement of the pretended authenticity of Utopia, because the existence of
the island and this Utopian narrative are bolstered by and visualised into alphabets as well
as a map. For early modern European readers living in an era when Amerigo Vespucci’s
expedition had only recently taken place, Utopia was presented and read sometimes as a
469 Sager 33. 470 Cambridge Utopia (1995) 27. 471 Baker-Smith (1991) 116. 472 Cambridge Utopia (1995) 27n. 473 McCutcheon (1997) 139.
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documentation of Raphael Hythloday’s genuine travel account. However, for readers of
the 1517 edition, from which the alphabet and map had been removed, the effect of reality
was inevitably lessened. McCutcheon argues that whether the reduction was due to cost
factors or editorial intervention, the festivus part of the narrative was necessarily thinned out
as a result.474
This Utopian tetrastichon and map were brought back in the 1518 edition, and
have been included in most subsequent editions as well as translations. However, of
Utopia’s fourteen standalone Mandarin editions, only those by Song Meihua and Dai Liuling
include the Utopian tetrastichon in their editions. What needs to be considered is firstly
how and where the tetrastichon is presented in Dai Liuling’s three editions, and secondly
how Song Meihua translates this quatrain. In Dai’s 1956 edition, the Utopian tetrastichon is
situated in the epistle from Erasmus to Ulrich von Hutton.475 To be precise, it is placed
following a passage that illustrates how More has been immersed in classical literature from
a very young age, and is followed by a description of his surpassing intelligence in law and
in theology, in particular how he lectured on St Augustine’s City of God.476 These passages
are not directly involved with the Utopian language; in fact, this epistle is irrelevant to
endorsing or interpreting Utopia in general. The decision to place the Utopian alphabet and
tetrastichon here may have been either a random decision, or a conscious one, inspired by
its indirect association with the discussion of More’s profound knowledge.
In Dai’s second edition of Utopia (1982), this paratextual item is switched to Book
Two, among the portrayal of the Utopians’ mastery of Greek and More’s conjecture that
the Utopian ancestry may have descended from Greece because of their similarity in
languages.477 This time, the textual location of the Utopian quatrain is justifiable, appearing
against the page where the Utopian language (as well as its affinities with Greek and
Persian) is mentioned. This (para)textual arrangement thus serves as a visual aid,
crystallising what could only be imagined into something concrete and material. While the
caption of this tetrastichon reads “Chart of Utopian Alphabets” in Dai’s first two editions,
it is captioned “Quatrain of the Utopian Common Language” in Dai’s third edition (1997).
Without any mention of the quatrain in the caption, the Utopian language may have
474 McCutcheon (1997) 140. 475 This epistle is not among the original paratexts. Appendix One of Dai’s 1956 edition is comprised of Erasmus’s seven letters. This is the last among the seven, numbered 999. See Dai (1956) 132-42. 476 Dai (1956) 136-37. 477 Dai (1982) 81-83. This also explains the foundation of decoding More’s neologism, which often involves Greek compound words.
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remained a mere abstraction for readers of these two Mandarin editions, because they
would not have had the faintest idea that this language is supposed to have been practiced
and materialised into an actual, readable verse. The sense of salutaris—originally intended
to be conveyed via the presentation of Utopian quatrain—is thus diluted. In the third
edition, moreover, this item is inserted among a collection of illustrations and portraits,
most of which do not appear in the original Latin editions.478 Fundamentally, this four-page
collection is to imbue Dai’s third edition with some visual elements and to contextualise
Utopia in the original milieu in which it was first published. However, in all three of Dai
Liuling’s renditions, they—the Utopian alphabet, Utopian tetrastichon with transcription,
and its Latin translation—are reprinted merely as a visual paratext without any further
elucidation. No Mandarin translation is provided for this quatrain, depriving readers of
knowing its practical content and hence of any further critical analysis.
Song Meihua’s edition, on the other hand, includes a facsimile of this ancillary item
and provides a translation on a different page, separated by the epistles by Erasmus and by
Budé. Song places her translation of Anemolius’s hexastichon and the Utopian tetrastichon
side by side, titling them “The Two Commendatory Verses of Utopia”.479 The quatrain
spells out in its first-person perspective that Utopia was built by Utopus from scratch, and
that it is the only philosophical city in the whole world. It is happy to share with the world
what it has, and is also humble enough to accept what is better. This verse is therefore like
a condensed reading guide, pinpointing the spirit of sharing the common good that
perpetuates the whole narrative. Without this four-line translation, Mandarin readers would
have no clue as to what the tetrastichon is about. The meaning of this paratext would have
been reduced—as in Dai’s renditions—to a mere visual presentation, a cluster of signifiers
without the signified.
As for the other three epigrams, none of them are included in the Mandarin
editions except for Song’s. While the two verses by the Dutch humanists are “specifically
addressed to general readers”, all three draw attention to different major features of
Utopia.480 For instance, the concept of the New World is made manifest in the beginning of
Cornelis de Schrijver’s verse when he states that readers are about to read something “from
the world new-found” (257). It is not my intention to undertake a close reading of each
verse; an examination of the parts that bring to the fore the quality of serio ludere (as
478 The 1516 and 1518 maps of the Utopian island, however, are included in this collection. 479 Song 8-9. 480 Astell 304.
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displayed in Anemolius’s hexastichon and the verse by Gerard Geldenhouwer) will be my
approach to reading these epigrams.
The hexastichon allegedly written by the poet laureate Anemolius, Hythloday’s
nephew on his sister’s side, is of particular importance because it is the only place the
alternative name of Utopia—Eutopia—appears. 481 The self-contradiction of the term
‘Utopia’ lies in its double-sided reference: a Eutopia that is at once an Outopia, a good and
happy place that is no place. The very first English translation by Robinson renders the last
line as “My name is Eutopie: A place of felicity”. 482 The authoritative Logan-Adams
Cambridge edition, however, chooses to translate the name literally: “‘The Good Place’
they should call me, with [right] cause” (19). Song Meihua does not opt for the common
translational practice of transliteration with proximity to sound, nor does she render it with
a direction translation that corresponds to Logan-Adams’ version: “好地方”, a good place.
Instead, “樂土”, literally “happy soil”, is how Song renders ‘Eutopia’. As examined
previously, 樂土, one of the earliest utopian articulations in classical Chinese texts, is taken
from a short poem in the Book of Poetry. It is poetic, but at the same time it is also a
straightforward signification of Eutopia. In its own peculiar way, Song’s adoption of this
poetic phrase reflects a direct translation and also infuses this term with a sense of
domestic intelligibility, making the Eutopic connotation distinct. The ‘Eutopic’ side of
Utopia is, regrettably, not available to Mandarin readers of the other editions that exclude
this verse.
While this hexastichon sheds light on the double layering of Utopia via its name,
the commendatory verse by the Dutch humanist Gerard Geldenhouwer (1482-1542) also
explores the double-sidedness, this time via singling out the two features that echo the
book title. The first two lines of the poem read: “If pleasure [dulcia] you seek, good reader,
it’s here; / If profit [utile], no book is more suited to teach” (256-57). The mention of
481 In fact, the alleged authorship also calls attention to the paradoxical nature of Utopia. Thomas More provides a few ‘factual paratexts’, as Genette would call them: that Anemolius is a poet laureate and is Hythloday’s nephew by his sister’s side adds to the authenticity (and endorsement) of Utopia. However, how authentic is a figure whose name means ‘windy’ and whose identity is related to the nonsense peddler Hythloday? Modern readers are informed that the real author of
this verse is untraceable. See Cambridge Utopia (1995) 19n. However, this hexastichon and how it – as well as its authorship – is framed invokes a strong sense of paradoxicality that is discernible almost everywhere in this heavily ironic work. 482 See Sacks 206. The Latin original reads: “Eutopia merito sum vocanda nomine”. See Cambridge Utopia (1995) 18.
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‘pleasure’ and ‘profit’ immediately directs readers back to the book title, which partially
reads “A Truly Golden Handbook, No Less Beneficial than Entertaining”. Again and again,
we find More as well as his humanist coterie ushering readers towards the serious
playfulness—or the jocular practicality—of Utopia, sometimes through direct reference,
sometimes via subtle insinuation. Here the keywords dulcia and utile are the clear signpost
intended to raise readers’ awareness of the multi-layered reading.
3.4 A NOTE ON GILES’S EPISTLE TO BUSLEYDEN
This epistle by Giles was written at the request of Erasmus, 483 serving both as an
endorsement and a suggestion of its paradoxicality. It appears in all four early Latin
editions but is included only in the 2003 Song translation. Peter Giles exalts More’s ability
in making the portrayal of Utopia come alive, and also compares Hythloday to Ulysses,
considering this Portuguese traveller “a man with more knowledge of nations, peoples and
business than even the famous Ulysses” (25). The qualities from both More and Hythloday
make Giles to be “so affected by them that I sometimes seem to be living in Utopia itself ”
(25). It is an endorsement of both the two figures and the book; it further gives a general
sense of Utopia being so vivid that not only does the narrative seem to be a real
documentation but the readers are actually experiencing Utopian life.
This confirmation of authenticity is followed by an anecdote that triggers immense
ambiguity. The location of the Utopian island is not known. It is not because Hythloday
cannot specify it, but because this piece of information is drowned out by someone’s
unfortunate coughing. The whole anecdote is meant to affirm the actuality of Utopia, with
several people being present at the conversation as witnesses. However this actuality is
interrogated with an enquiry regarding its exact location which, in Baker-Smith’s words,
serves as “a parody of the ontological issue raised by Socrates’ ideal city in the Republic”.484
As Louis Marin argues, “If the island’s space is erased by the passage of air, it is perhaps
because it had no other reality than breath itself, the resonance of Raphael’s words, a
resonance such that it is caught and stabilised in a text that, in turn, presents and brings it
483 Erasmus wanted this epistle addressed to Busleyden rather than himself. See McCutcheon (1997) 139. 484 Baker-Smith (1991) 119.
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to light”.485 What has been raised here is the tension between factuality and abstraction, a
retelling of fact that has been made inaudible—hence challenged—via unexpected noise.
The mention of this coughing scene adds an ironic layer to Utopia’s authenticity, without
which the depth of reading is significantly reduced. The fact that only Song translates this
epistle is a sign of the Mandarin editions’ lack of serio ludere, which will become gradually
clearer as we examine the whole paratextual apparatus.
However, there is one important paragraph in this epistle that is obscurely left out
in Song’s translation:
For the rest, I can add nothing to what he has written. Only I did see to it that the book included a quatrain written in the Utopian tongue, which Hythloday showed to me after More had gone away. I’ve prefixed to it the alphabet of the Utopians, and also added to the volume some marginal notes. (27)
This passage comes after Giles’ appraisal of More’s language, judgment, and intelligence. It
is important because here Peter Giles identifies himself as the author of the marginalia and
the Utopian tetrastichon.486 It is not as if Song attempts to hide such information. In fact,
in one of the footnotes in the epistle from More to Giles, Song Meihua states that the
marginal glosses of this epistle and the whole volume of Utopia were putatively added by
Giles. 487 There is no substantiated reason to explain Song’s deletion of this important
passage; I am more inclined to attribute it to a simple oversight. This leads us to another
curious omission in Song’s edition. This time Busleyden is also involved; but instead of
being an addressee, he is the addressor of this epistle.
485 Marin 86. 486 However, Adams points out that the title page of the 1517 edition attributes the marginalia to Erasmus. It is unclear whether the marginal glosses are a collaborative effort or if the 1517 title page is inaccurate. See Cambridge Utopia (1995) 27 and footnote. The Yale Complete Works of St. Thomas More credits both Erasmus and Giles as co-contributors to the marginal glosses. McCutcheon, however, with her lifelong devotion to the study of Utopia, believes that More also played a major role in the marginalia, given how they are “so carefully, albeit deviously, adjusted to the text”. See McCutcheon (1983) 80n. 487 Song 15. It should be noted that the marginalia start with the first epistle from More to Giles (also entitled “Prefatio”); the other prefatory epistles do not contain marginalia.
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3.5 A NOTE ON BUSLEYDEN’S EPISTLE TO MORE
Busleyden’s epistle to More, placed prior to the main text in the 1516 edition, and switched
to succeeding it in the following 1517 and 1518 editions, does not appear in Song Meihua’s
translation, which claims to comply with the original paratexts included in the March 1518
edition. Busleyden (1470-1517), the wealthy patron of northern humanists who had a
grand house in Mechlin 488 and who was “a leading figure in the new mos gallicus of
jurisprudential scholarship”,489 wrote this letter in 1516, at the solicitation of Erasmus.490
Unlike other prefatory epistles that partake in the ambiguous game of authenticity,
Busleyden only sees, or at least only stresses, the salutaris side of Utopia. His letter displays
two functions of Utopian paratexts: that of endorsement and of a reading guide.
Busleyden praises More’s learning and experience, a man not “born for [himself] alone, but
for the whole world” (251), possibly an echo of the debate of whether or not to enter a
king’s council in Book One of Utopia. Allen notes Busleyden’s claim that “we can only save
ourselves from chaos by precisely imitating the Utopian commonwealth”, thus interpreting
Utopia as a blueprint for social reform.491 This Luxembourgish patron of learning refers to
the four cardinal virtues in maintaining ‘a perfect commonwealth’ that he believes are
manifest in Utopia: “What is needed is prudence in the rulers, courage in the military,
temperance in the private citizenry and justice in all”.492 By saying that Utopia is built upon
the four cardinal virtues, Busleyden further praises the communal quality there that makes
“every action and each decision […] aimed solely at upholding one uniform rule of justice,
equality and community solidarity” (253). This forceful endorsement of Busleyden’s is
suggestive of Utopia “[containing] the cure for all the diseases that afflict Europe”, again
treating Utopia as a concrete guidebook to socio-political reform.493 All this highlights the
grave side of Utopia, thus providing a different layer of reading, in the sense that it is a
488 See P. Allen 93. More was so impressed with Busleyden’s house, immense book collection, and musical instruments that he wrote epigrams on these subjects. For more information, see Nan C. Carpenter, “St. Thomas More and Music: Busleiden’s Organ”, Comparative Literature Studies 15.1 (1978): 17-22; and “A Song for All Seasons: Sir Thomas More and Music”, Comparative Literature 33.2 (1981): 113-36. 489 Schoeck (1969) 21. 490 Cambridge Utopia (1995) 251n. 491 P. Allen 106. 492 Adams points out that by referring to the cardinal virtues, Busleyden effectively sums up the argument of Book IV of Republic. See Cambridge Utopia (1995) 253n. For more information on the four cardinal virtues in relation to Utopia, see R. W. Chambers, “The Rational Heathens”, in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Utopia, ed. William Nelson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968) 17-32. 493 Wooden 152.
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fixed interpretation unlike most other Utopian paratexts that are permeable enough to
allow the serio ludere quality stand out.
It is not clear as to why Song’s translation includes all but this one paratextual item.
She does not offer an explanation, like she does in the footnote for the three-passage
omission in another epistle. It is also not an irrelevant epistle that deserves to be passed off
lightly, either from its shrewd content or the prominence of both the addressor and
addressee. One possible inference is that this obscure omission is from an oversight, given
the precedent that Song Meihua leaves out one short yet important paragraph in the epistle
from Giles to Busleyden (that discusses the authorship of Utopia’s marginalia and
tetrastichon). The exclusion of this epistle from Song Meihua’s translation deprives one
solemn layer of reading that falls wholly on the serious dimension of Utopia. The result of
this is that, unless they had access to this epistle in other languages, Mandarin readers
would be entirely cut out from a shrewd interpretation offered by a great patron of
Renaissance humanists that sees Utopia’s socio-political excellence being built upon a solid
moral foundation.
3.6 A NOTE ON MORE’S FIRST PREFATORY EPISTLE TO GILES
Among all the original Utopian paratexts, Thomas More contributed two prefatory epistles
to Peter Giles. Whereas the second epistle was only published in the 1517 Latin edition, the
first epistle, entitled “Prefatio”, was included in the first four editions. It is not the longest
among the ancillary items, but its profundity is so grand that Elizabeth McCutcheon
dedicates a book-length study to this epistle,494 and Harry Berger calls it the first of the
“three movements” of a complete work, equating the importance of this particular
paratext to Book One and Book Two of Utopia. 495 In addition to endorsement and
bolstering authenticity, McCutcheon maintains that “More has tailored his prefatory letter
to fit his Utopian fiction”.496 The frequency of this epistle’s inclusion in the Mandarin
editions is telling, especially so when the pertinence of Utopian paratexts has been largely
494 See McCutcheon’s My Dear Peter (1983). McCutcheon justifies her endeavour towards the end of the volume that “to work out the implications of this prefatory letter to Peter Giles with respect to
the larger Utopia – which is paradoxical in so many different ways at once – demands its own book” (68). 495 Berger 61, 71. Quoted in McCutcheon (1983) 10. 496 McCutcheon (1983) 34.
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overlooked in the Mandarin context. More’s first epistle to Giles is not merely an ancillary
item; it is part of the grander whole of Utopia, without which any appreciation is
incomplete.
The material covered in this first epistle from More to Giles is, according to
McCutcheon, “curiously selective”.497 Unlike Budé’s epistle to Lupset that could serve as a
guide to reading Utopia, this “Prefatio”, even though it does not comment on specific
subject matter raised in Utopia, is important in suggesting the standard for translating Utopia
and in getting readers more engaged in the “honest deception” game.498 By recounting how
this account of Utopia was narrated by Hythloday and transcribed by the reportorial More,
the latter comments:
Hence there was no occasion for me to labour over the style, since what he said, being extempore and informal, couldn’t be couched in fancy terms. […] so that my language would be nearer the truth, the closer it approached to his casual simplicity. Truth in fact is the only thing at which I should aim and do aim in writing this book. (31)
This passage appears to have worked as More’s self-defence of the seemingly simple style
that readers are about to read; it is also important on two other fronts. Firstly, it situates the
style of Utopia in the Ciceronian rhetorical tradition, explaining why More opts for a plain
style instead of harkening to his juridical upbringing, which could have easily made the
language more complex and sophisticated. Robert M. Adams notes the three levels of style
in rhetorical theory: the grand, the middle, and the plain, with the latter being most suitable
for philosophical writing.499 By placing Utopia in a larger current of the rhetorical tradition,
it further insinuates a general guideline of translating, or “transplanting”, Utopia into a
different linguistic-cultural soil. Regardless of whether Hythloday was an actual figure that
truly existed, his style of narrating his adventures in Utopia is of “simple, conversational,
everyday prose”;500 and such a style would have matched his verbal account of an everyday
497 McCutcheon (1983) 13. 498 I borrow the phrase “honest deception” from Elizabeth McCutcheon and Alistair Fox, who refers to the former’s study of More’s prefatory epistles as research into “the aesthetics of honest deception”. See Fox 22. 499 Cambridge Utopia (1995) 31n. In the textual introduction to Utopia’s interpretive contexts, Adams also indicates that “More’s book exemplifies the genus humile, the so-called ‘plain’ or ‘Attic’ style”, which reflects what Cicero believes to be characteristic of philosophical discussion. See Cambridge Utopia (1995) xxvi-xxvii. 500 Cambridge Utopia (1989) xxx. Adams, who wrote the “Note on the translation” in this volume, reminds readers that unlike how More’s contemporaneous readers (or most modern readers) understood it, Utopia was not written in elaborate literary language.
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experience. This epistle, appearing in the very first edition of Utopia, makes clear that the
closer the transplanted text was to Hythloday’s “casual simplicity”, the closer it would be to
the truth.
Of the Mandarin editions that include this prefatory epistle, six render truth as 真
實 [zhen shi], a compound word whose two characters both indicate real and true, and one
omits this sentence. Song’s 2003 edition, however, translates it as 忠實呈現 , literally
“faithful (re)presentation”, reflecting the terminology used in translation practice.501 In a
way, we may interpret this as reflecting Song Meihua’s reading of Utopia as a double
translation, from Hythloday’s verbal account to the version documented by the reportorial
More, and then from More’s words into a different language. By rendering “truth” as
“faithful (re)presentation”, Song effectively downplays the elements of lying, to be analysed
shortly. Leaving aside the question of whether the mention of “truth” is a strategic move
to buttress the authenticity of Utopia, this passage puts forward the standard of gauging
this “travelogue” and—possibly—More’ own wish of how his Utopia should be
disseminated, and how the source text should be recast, namely, that the translation should
reflect Hythloday’s original style, that of casual simplicity. Like the reportorial More,
subsequent translators are expected to bear this in mind while transferring Utopia either
verbally or textually.
The “curiously selective” content, on the other hand, brings readers’ attention to
the paradoxicality that is embedded in the whole of Utopia. More begins by dissociating
himself from actually authoring Utopia, claiming himself to be a mere note-taker, a scribe,
and that his hectic schedule in both public and family affairs makes it a wonder that he will
even have time to document Hythloday’s travel account. Keeping up the fiction that this
book is a scribal version of a “real” account, the epistle states that More has sent the
manuscript of Utopia along with this epistle to Giles, beseeching the latter to correct any
possible mistake caused by false memory, especially with regard to a specific number about
which More’s pupil John Clement had raised doubts:502
as I recall matters, Hythloday said the bridge over the Anyder at Amaurot
501 Song 13. 502 John Clement (d.1572) was a distinguished physician who once served as a servant and pupil in More’s household. More writes in this epistle that he “always [wants Clement] to be present at conversations where there’s profit to be gained”. See Cambridge Utopia (1995) 33. The mention of ‘profit’ here suggests the practicality of this conversation and is an implicit reflection of the double appeal of the book as well as its title. The section on serio ludere looks into this concern in detail.
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was five hundred yards long; but my John says that is two hundred yards too much […] If your recollection agrees with his, I’ll yield and confess myself mistaken. But if you don’t recall the point, I’ll follow my memory and keep my present figure. For, as I’ve taken particular pains to avoid having anything false in the book, so, if anything is in doubt, I’d rather say something untrue than tell a lie. In short, I’d rather be honest than clever. (35)
What More does here is to understate his involvement in this narrative, accrediting Utopia
to Hythloday’s recounting of it. He also claims to have endeavoured to present his readers
with the most accurate account, echoing the said assertion that “[t]ruth in fact is the only
thing at which I should aim and do aim in writing this book” (31). This plain fact-check
with concrete figures becomes one of the initial tricks that entraps early modern readers in
a paradox that constantly floats between the two poles of actuality and imagination.
Even if More were to say something untrue, he can attribute it to a memory lapse
or claim that he “is himself deceived or mistaken” by his source, the “nonsense peddler”
Hythloday. What is revealed here can be read on two fronts: the denial of authorship and a
play on authenticity. In various textual spaces inside the volume Utopia, More is dissociated
from authoring Utopia, either by himself or by his humanist coterie. “A paid scribe”, some
say.503 Since More only needs to repeat what he hears from Raphael Hythloday, without
worrying about the style—or the three steps of literary composition 504—any possible
discrepancy can thus be attributed to inaccurate memory. More is accrediting the
authorship to Hythloday alone, in terms of both content and style. This leads us to the
next level: the play of authenticity. Again, this is a game that has been played back and
forth: true and false, actual and make-believe, claiming and disclaiming. Undeniably, readers
will discover some doubtful points in the narrative; if so, those are from false memory,
claims More.
However, is Utopia really a fiction or a documentation of real events that have some
feigned moments caused by hazy memory? Modern readers like us read Utopia as a
Renaissance classic; early modern readers, however, might have taken it either too seriously
or too lightly. At this point in the epistle, More brings in the element of actuality,
requesting Giles to double-check the length of the bridge. All this generates a sense of
503 See, for instance, the epistle from Beatus Rhenanus to Willibald Pirckheimer (which serves as the preface to Epigrammata), printed in Cambridge Utopia (1995) 259. 504 Adams informs us that inventio, dispositio, and elocutio (“finding material, disposing them in the proper order and couching them in the appropriate style”) are the three steps of literary composition treated in classical textbooks of rhetoric. More claims that he does not need to labour over all this because he is merely repeating Raphael’s account. See Cambridge Utopia (1995) 31n.
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cautiousness to the narrative; however, at the same time, another anecdote surfaces. We can
almost hear More having a good laugh behind the scenes, in drafting this epistle. No one
knows exactly in which part of the New World Utopia is located, because no one asks
Hythloday; they only listen. Of those who are informed of Utopia and wish to explore it
themselves, there is one devout theologian who is desperate to go there “to foster and
further the growth of [their] religion” and “to be named bishop to the Utopians” (35). The
timeframe is brought back to the present moment, with a particular theologian who is so
taken in by the Utopian account that he endeavours to go there for a good cause. Adams
refers to a note in the 1624 translation that this theologian could be identified as Rowland
Phillips, Warden of Merton College in Oxford, but he also suggests that this identification
cannot be substantiated and this anecdote could well be a joke played on the reader, as
More enjoys doing throughout Book One of Utopia.505 Whether identifiable or not, readers
have to marvel at More’s rhetorical brilliance in incessantly pushing readers from one side
of the extreme to the other. Having this epistle titled “Prefatio” in the first four Latin
editions gives us a sense of how More has attempted to manoeuvre his contemporaneous
readers and how the trompe l’oeil quality of Utopia is manifest from the very beginning, both
textually and temporally.
3.7 A NOTE ON MORE’S SECOND EPISTLE TO GILES
The second epistle from More to Giles only appeared in 1517, among the four Latin
editions that received More’s authorial sanction.506 While More’s first epistle to Giles is
titled “Prefatio”, this second epistle is labelled “Impendio”, and it appears after the main
text and—as Edward Surtz calls it—“rightly so because it begins with a reader’s reaction to
the finished work”.507 More begins his epistle with a reader’s response to the ambiguity of
Utopia. As if to defend himself, More draws attention to the seemingly innocent trickery of
505 Cambridge Utopia (1995) 35n. 506 It also slipped many early scholars’ attention because this second epistle was not included until recent decades. For instance, Joseph Hirsh Lupton’s Oxford edition of Utopia fails to include this epistle, even though it is claimed that the additions to the 1517 edition “were included in that of 1518, and are reprinted below”. See Lupton, The Utopia of Sir Thomas More: in Latin from the edition of March 1518, and in English from the first edition of Ralph Robynson’s translation in 1551 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895) lxviii. See Ginzburg 10, 93. 507 Surtz cxcii.
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neologism and, as Edward Surtz observes, “alerts the reader to clues in the text which
disclose the nature of Utopia to be ‘truth under the guise of fiction’”:508
if I had merely given such names to the governor, the river, the city and the island as would indicate to the knowing reader that the island was nowhere, the city a phantom, the river waterless and the governor without a people, it wouldn’t have been hard to do, and would have been far more clever than what I actually did. If the veracity of a historian had not actually required me to do so, I am not so stupid as to have preferred those barbarous and meaningless names of Utopia, Anyder, Amaurot and Ademus. (269)509
More claims that if he had been writing about a commonwealth, he would have added
connotative elements in the name for learned readers to pick up on the insinuation. Yet this
is exactly what More does—he is talking about a commonwealth, and he is using the
“barbarous and meaningless names” which nonetheless skilfully signify a nowhere island, a
phantom-like city, a waterless river, and a people-less governor. More is having fun double-
deceiving his readers; or as Ginzburg observes: “This time he does it [playfully deceiving
his readers] by telling them, through a hypothetical sentence implying something unreal, the
plain truth: not only what he did, but what he meant to do”.510 A sophisticated, subtle joke
is being played here, likely entrapping many unwary readers. Yet if this epistle contributes
immensely to the ironic layering of Utopia that is essential to understanding More’s intent,
why was this epistle included only in the 1517 edition? Allen puts it well when he concludes
that “perhaps it was remembered that jokes lose their savor the more they are explained”.511
Allen’s observation about a sixteenth-century work is, unsurprisingly, not applicable in
Mandarin editions. A practical look into the general phenomenon of Utopia’s Mandarin
paratexts reflects a straightforward reason: that the majority of Mandarin translations do
not include complete original paratexts, hence the exclusion of More’s second epistle seems
inevitably a natural reflection of the editorial intervention.
It is, however, interesting to note its paratextual position as well as the frequency
with which this epistle appears: it is placed immediately after the main text of Utopia and
508 Surtz 322. Quoted in Astell 304. 509 Song translates this passage as follows (132):
我必定會在命名的技巧上大作文章,使得用心的讀者會注意到島名叫「烏
有之邦」,城市名為「無明」,河流意為「無水之流」,君王則是「無民之
君」。這樣做法一點不費力,各詞之意正是此處所否認的「烏有之邦」、
「無明」、「無水之流」和「無民之君」。 510 Ginzburg 10. 511 P. Allen 101.
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only appears once in the early Latin editions. Unlike More’s first epistle to Giles that is
titled “Prefatio” and is placed prior to Book One of Utopia, this second epistle’s “delayed”
appearance is suggestive of More’s desire “to exert some control over our responses to the
work—in marked contrast to the openness of the first edition”. 512 Indeed, if we take
More’s first epistle as a moderate play of authenticity via checking the bridge’s length over a
waterless river, this second epistle is a direct challenge to readers’ interpretation of Utopia,
in particular via its self-contradictory neologisms. How are those Greek compound names
rendered into Mandarin, then? How much is preserved or lost is one key to reading the
translation of Utopia. The only available Mandarin version of this epistle is by Song Meihua,
whose translation of Utopia is more scholarly, literary, and sometimes poetic than the others.
This quality is reflected in these names.
Original Translation Romanisation Literal meaning
Utopia 烏有之邦 wu you zhi bang A nation of nothing /
A nation of nowhere
Anyder 無水之流 wu shui zhi liu A river of no water
Amaurot 無明 wu ming Without brightness
Ademus 無民之君 wu min zhi jun A ruler without people
Corresponding to More’s coinages are Song Meihua’s adaptations of classical idioms into
almost symmetrical phrases that require no further decoding from Mandarin readers. In a
word, they are self-explanatory. All four names begin with either 烏 [wū] or 無 [wú], the
pronunciation of which differs only in intonation (first and second tone). 烏, the same
character as appeared in the book title Utopia 烏托邦, denotes black, dark, or none, among
other meanings. 無, on the other hand, is a straightforward term denoting ‘none’. However,
by being self-explanatory, these corresponding Mandarin names also fail to retain the
512 McCutcheon (1997) 142. It should also be recalled that no paratextual items are appended after the first edition.
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playfully deceptive ambiguity conveyed in Utopia, Anyder, Amaurot, and Ademus. It
should be noted that these names are not rendered as such in the main text of Song’s
version of Utopia. Rather, they are transliterated—烏托邦 [Wu Tuo Bang] as Utopia, 焉你
得河 [Yan ni de he / Yan ni de River] as Anyder, 艾默若 [Ai Mo Ruo] as Amurot, and 亞
戴默士 [ya dai mo shi] as Ademus—all of which are supplied with footnotes explicating
their etymological roots and definition.
Reading the main text alone without explanatory notes, Mandarin-speaking readers
would not have the slightest sense of what is behind the naming construction. These
transliterations would perhaps be mirrored in More’s ironic statement about “barbarous,
meaningless names”. It is only in this passage of the second epistle that the hidden
meanings are revealed directly from the translated names. It is thus evident that while Song
renders only the pronunciation of More’s neologisms in the main text, she translates their
meaning without proximity to sound in the epistle. Why would she not adopt the literal
translation in the main text? Readers would certainly have easier access to each reference.
Perhaps Song Meihua aimed to preserve the foreignness of an early modern text; perhaps
she was aware that providing the same neologism with transliteration and literal translation
in two separate textual spaces allows for a double experience in a text that is so intricate in
its naming design; or perhaps she also remembered that a literal translation of More’s
neologisms would effectively ruin the jest that is so embedded in a narrative whose
eponymous genre is already a self-contradictory paradox.
4 PARATEXTUAL AFTERLIVES: ALLOGRAPHIC PREFACES
“The preface is a unique textual space, one that demands a very particular kind of rhetoric
because of its generic constraints and yet allows ample room for an author’s manipulation
and creativity.”513 Modern prefaces may not possess the same objectives as those from the
early modern period, such as to seek financial help, to compliment a patron, and in Anne
Larsen’s words, “to negotiate a place for the work, and its author, in the public realm”514;
513 Julie A. Eckerle, “Prefacing Texts, Authorizing Authors, and Constructing Selves: The Preface as Autobiographical Space”, Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, eds Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) 97. 514 Anne Larsen, “‘Un honneste passetems’: Strategies of Legitimation in French Renaissance Women’s Prefaces”, L’Esprit Createur 30.4 (1990): 12. Quoted in Eckerle 97.
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but the fundamental functions hold true: they introduce and endorse the text as well as its
author, providing the basic context for the ease of readers. Often the prefatory authors, in
this case the translators, instil their own voices in the space of “‘pre’ text”,515 making this
textual location an arena where voices other than that of the author emerges. I read each
translator’s preface as a way not just of influencing the actual reader’s reception – namely a
translational intervention – but more importantly, as a way of demonstrating reader
response on the level of translators, whose interpretation and guide ultimately constitute
the lens through which Utopia will be refracted. While some allographic prefaces have been
partially discussed in the publication history of Mandarin Utopias, here I examine them
thematically, with regards to the following questions: 1) whether and how the two narrative
devices, fiction and dialogue, are discussed; 2) whether More’s use of paratexts is
mentioned; 3) which Chinese archetypes of the ideal worlds are adopted to analogise
More’s Utopia.
Allographic prefaces that mention “fiction” or related terms include those of Guo
(1966), Song (2003), Wang (2007), Hu (2007 & 2012), Sun and He (2013), and Li (2016).
Among these, Guo phrases it in a question, asking whether Utopia is an opinion or a
fiction. The other five translators present this term in the context of travel literature, with
Hu Fengfei specifying it as a mystery tale abroad (海外奇譚), therefore highlighting its
obscurity, the ou- feature of Utopia, as well as drawing Utopia closer to, for instance, the
fairy island of Peng Lai that the German missionary Wilhelm Lobscheid defined Utopia
with in the 1860s. That less than half of the Mandarin prefaces bring up fiction is
unexpected; even more surprising is the small number of times dialogue is discussed. Being
the other distinct generic presentation no less, dialogue is referred to in merely three
editions: Song (2003), Sun and He (2013), and Li (2016), with Li Lingyan emphasising that
the dialogue in Utopia is manufactured. The concept of paratext, even less so, is only
brought up in Song Meihua’s edition, in which she refers to as parerga, or附文, literally
“attached texts”.516 Yet the fact that she excludes the Utopian alphabet and maps from this
line of consideration indicates that her understanding of paratexts is strictly limited to
textual items. Dai Liuling does not refer to the specific concept of paratext, though this is
to be expected, given Genette’s study on paratexts did not see its light until 1987 in French
and 1997 in English. Yet Dai’s 1997 edition discusses Utopia’s compositional order and
515 I borrow this portrayal of preface – “pre” text – from Eckerle. See Eckerle 97. 516 Song xv.
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More’s correspondences, both of which are important factors of the paratextual apparatus.
That the compositional order is not commented upon in his earlier two editions (1956,
1982) indicates Dai’s improved understanding of Utopia’s original context. All this suggests
an unfortunate – though not unanticipated – phenomenon, reflected in the scant
discussion of Utopian paratexts in Mandarin to date. A fuller grasp of Utopia is brought to
fruition with the appreciation of paratexts; by contrast the Mandarin Utopias have
regrettably been primarily refracted through a fragmentary lens, a lens without the fringe
that is More’s paratexts.
Since Utopia is a “catch-all label for all forms of ideal society”,517 to understand
how this concept and the work have been transferred into Mandarin requires a look into
the Chinese representations of the ideal realm that may have predisposed certain ideas – or
lenses – through which readers filter their readings of Utopia. The Chinese archetypes most
frequently alluded to are what I call the pastoral counterpart, Peach Blossom Spring, and
Zhuangzi’s Wu He You Zhi Xiang, the first character of which partially constitutes the
rendition of the term utopia into Wu Tuo Bang. Peach Blossom Spring is brought into
comparison in five editions: Liu Lihua’s (1978), Dai Liuling’s latter two editions (1982 and
1997), Wu Lei’s (2005), and Wang Jin’s (2007); this archetype is curiously missing from
Song Meihua’s preface. Song’s allusion to Wu He You Zhi Xiang, Lei Tu (happy soil),
Cockaygne, and Saturnalia reaffirms that her edition is the most comprehensive, especially
so with the paratextual frame that all other Mandarin Utopias fall short of. The lack of
reference to Peach Blossom Spring in her preface, therefore, becomes an unforeseen
omission. Peach Blossom Spring appears in derivative terms in Dai’s two editions: 桃源仙
境 [Tao Yuan Xian Jing] in 1982 and世外桃源 [Shi Wai Tao Yuan] in 1997; Wu Lei, who
modelled his version a great deal on Dai’s translation, likewise adopts Shi Wai Tao Yuan,
literally peach blossom beyond this world. While Dai’s 1982 rendition stresses that this
archetype is a fairy realm [xian jing], his 1997 preface drops the last two characters but
retains the fairy-like element by referring it to as beyond the terrestrial realm, Shi Wai.
Wu He You Zhi Xiang, likewise, appears in five editions: those of Liu Linsheng
(1935), Dai Liuling (1956 & 1982), Liu Chengshao (1957), Song Meihua (2003), and Hu
Fengfei (2007 & 2012). Song adopts the derivation of Wu You Zhi Bang, the last character
of which is the same as bang (topos) in Wu Tuo Bang. The political archetype Da Tong, on
the other hand, is mentioned in two prefaces and one subheading: Liu Lihua (1978) talks
517 Davis (1981) 17.
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about the society of Da Tong in the allographic afterword, whereas in Dai Liuling’s 1997
rendition, Da Tong Shu (instead of the Confucian Da Tong), from the work of the late Qing
intellectual Kang Youwei, is touched upon in passing.518 Da Tong Shu, or The Book of Da
Tong, spells out Kang’s vision of what the great unity entails: overcoming the boundaries of
nations, families, races, and classes, to name just the obvious. One of the most
controversial points is eliminating the system of families, for Kang believed that it was the
only way to be rid of private property. Da Tong Shu does not come up in Dai Liuling’s first
rendition (1956); rather, Da Tong is made explicit in the subheading of the two Books of
Utopia: “Da Tong Heyday” (大同盛世). This phrase, however, is replaced with “Ideal
Heyday” (理想盛世) in Dai’s later two editions.
Rather than a preface, Liu Lihua’s 1978 edition comes with an afterword. While
analogising Utopia with both the Chinese pastoral and political counterparts, Liu brings up
yet another mythical, though much less discussed, representation of the ideal realm, “夢遊
天姥吟” [A Departing Song of Travelling to Tianmu in a Dream] by the Tang poet Li Bai
(701-762).519 Yingzhou, one of the ten continents in Chinese mythology, where fairies and
gods reside, is placed in the beginning of the first stanza. Liu Lihua further highlights that
Yingzhou has long signified the ideal country for the Chinese. Quoting from The Ten Islands
in the Inner Seas, Liu specifies Yingzhou’s geographical location and that the fairy grass and
spring water there are to grant people immortality. 520 Alluding to Li Bai’s poem, and
specifically highlighting Yingzhou, Liu Lihua reads Utopia via a lens of the pastoral, but
even more so this pastoral lens is coloured with a brush of the celestial, where immortality
is presented as a likelihood and a goal. This indicates that, while Liu Lihua does a fine job
in translating Utopia, especially so in brilliantly rendering some of More’s invented names,
her afterword possibly manoeuvres unwary readers into a misconception of Utopia being a
fantasy story, downplaying the importance of human factor in More’s narrative.
518 See “Da Tong Shu”, Chinese Text Project <https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&res=306261> 16 June 2017. 519 For the complete poem and its English translation, see “Translation: ‘A Departing Song of Travelling to Tianmu in a Dream’ by Li Bai” <https://eastasiastudent.net/china/classical/li-bai-mengyou-tianmu/> 25 Oct 2018. 520 For more information, see Hainei shizhou ji 海內十洲記 [The Ten Islands in the Inner Seas], 10
Dec 2010 <http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Novels/haineishizhouji.html> 30 Aug 2018.
“洲” refers to continents; here it is rendered both as continents and/or islands. The Ten
Islands in the Inner Seas is a collection of mystery stories writing by the Taoist master
Dongfan Shuo around the turn of the first century. It is also called 十洲三島記, which
can be directly translated as The Account of the Ten Continents and Three Islands.
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5 VISUAL AFTERLIVES
5.1 BOOK COVERS
Book covers of the Mandarin Utopias started off as plain covers with only the title,
deprived of any visual impact. From Dai Liuling’s 1997 edition onwards, there began to be
some diversity in terms of the cover art. It is no longer just a nearly-blank cover on which
words are printed, but visual elements are introduced to either enhance the book’s
presentation and marketability or to reflect on the content. In Dai’s third edition published
in Taipei, the middle part of the triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by the Dutch
painter Hieronymus Bosch (c.1452-1516) is chosen as the cover, possibly because of its
association with the celestial. From left to right of the triptych are the representations of
Eden, the garden of earthly delights, and Hell. While More’s Utopia is not a religious piece,
this choice of book cover suggests the editor’s generalisation of Utopia, the umbrella term
for an ideal world, to be heaven-like. Song Meihua’s 2003 edition goes in a slightly more
conventional direction, in that the book cover is a reprint of the Utopian map from the
1518 edition. It is, however, the first time that a relevant book cover appeared in Mandarin
Utopias.
Dai Liuling’s book cover (1997) Song Meihua’s book cover (2003)
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Valerie Pellatt points out that it has been a common phenomenon to find a dust jacket that
“in no way reflects the content of the book but is simply sensational and sexy”.521 This
phenomenon of irrelevant sensation is clearly seen in Wu Lei’s and Wang Jin’s translations.
Wu’s 2005 edition distinguishes itself from all other editions in terms of its visual
presentation, and its book cover is the most illustrative, striking readers with its fanciness as
well as delicate expressiveness. The painting used, called “The Baleful Head” (1887), was
created by Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), a British artist closely associated with the
pre-Raphaelite movement. This painting depicts a scene in which “Perseus shows
Andromeda the head of Medusa mirroring in the well”. Unlike the other later editions
whose book covers often carry More’s portrait or the map of the Utopian island, this
painting of “The Baleful Head” frustrates a direct association with Utopia. One possible
interpretation is that the reflection from the well is like a mirror image, or as C. S. Lewis
observed, Utopia is located “not in the history of political thought so much as in that of
fiction and satire”; thus, it serves as a “satiric glass to reveal our own avarice by contrast
and is not meant to give us directly practical advice”.522 I do not suppose that the editorial
team who designed the cover art had Lewis’s comment in mind when they opted for this
painting, but the idea of using Utopia as a mirror image is not uncommon; after all, a
literary utopia ultimately aims to present an alternative and to have its intended readers
reflect upon the society they reside in. Another explanation for such a stretched connection
is that this illustration was also used in the epic poem “The Earthly Paradise”, composed in
the 1860s by William Morris, who was noted, among many other achievements, for his
utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890). This novel is indeed of the genre of utopian
socialism, but the content is not quite the same as More’s early modern English Utopia.
This oversimplification of Utopia and utopian literature in the editorial decision regarding
the choice of cover art and the inclusion of a number of un-authorial paratexts could
serve as a clear case study of how the mutability of the book cover alone may have
reshaped and appropriated the Morean Utopia in the Mandarin context.
521 Valerie Pellatt, ed., Text, Extratext, Metatext and Paratext in Translation (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013) 3. 522 Bruce Edwards, ed., C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2007) 148.
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Wu Lei’s book cover (2005) Wang Jin’s book cover (2007)
The cover art on Wang Jin’s edition, on the other hand, is similar to the one appearing on
Wu’s in that neither generates a direct association with Utopia or the image of a blissful
land. It is a painting by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912), a Belgium-born British
painter who was noted for his illustrations of the sumptuousness of the Roman Empire
and of classical antiquity.523 The reproduction of this painting, called “A Coign of Vantage”
(1895), portrays three Roman women looking on from a high vantage point as their loved
ones return home in galleys. It is rather far-fetched to make any connection between this
illustration and utopian worlds in general, let alone the very specific paradigm of More’s. I
phoned the publishers of both Wu Lei’s and Wang Jin’s translations: whereas People’s Daily
Publishing stated that there is no record to trace it nor is it possible to provide me with
Wu’s contact information, Shaanxi Renmin Publishing commented that the choice of cover
art has less to do with Utopia but with the consistency of the book series. This overview of
Mandarin Utopias’ book covers demonstrates how Utopia is liable to be refracted through a
pictorial lens that, even though not written, carries no less weight than its textual
neighbour, both of which help form a paratranslational angle for reading Utopia.
523 For more information, see the official website dedicated to Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema <http://www.alma-tadema.org> 23 Jan 2015.
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5.2 ILLUSTRATIONS
Dai Liuling’s 1997 edition and Wu Lei’s 2005 edition are the only two translations that
create iconic paratexts of their own. Dai’s visual paratexts can be divided into two parts:
the first group is a collection of photographs relevant to Thomas More’s life, such as his
study and the Tower of London, where he was executed, as well as several original
paratexts such as Utopian maps and alphabets; the second group is made up of illustrations
interspersed throughout the main text. There are eleven illustrations, four in Book One and
seven in Book Two. Of the eleven, only one is a reproduction of the original paratexts: a
woodcut of the garden scene depicting the dialogue between Giles, Hythloday, and More
that first appeared in the 1518 edition. This latter group is in conformity with the book
series and publisher: 新潮文庫 is known for its illustrations. A phone conversation with
the editor, Zhang Liqing, merely confirmed that there has not been a second print because
of its low sales, whereas their choice of iconic paratexts—both book cover and
illustrations—is beyond verification.
Left: the fourth page of the collection of illustrations prior to the main text of Utopia (1997).
Right: an illustration portraying the scene in which a man and a woman inspect each other’s bodies
before marriage.
Wu’s 2005 edition, on the other hand, is a case in point in terms of delving into iconic
paratext in a way that over-represents an original work. Wu Lei adds a great many
seemingly irrelevant illustrations, such as a painting from the year 1385 portraying the souls
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of Dante and Virgil in the eighth circle of hell, a painting of a Portuguese ship on the
Japanese sea in the sixteenth century, and a reprint of a nineteenth-century pre-Raphaelite
painting illustrating young women as sexual objects, among many others.
Left and middle: illustrations and synopsis of Book Two of Wu Lei’s Utopia (2005)
Right: the passage on how Utopians are punished, with two illustrations, one of a stone
object on which the scene of a man and a woman flirting is embossed and one of a
painting portraying sexual intercourse in the wilderness.
Despite their obvious irrelevance, all these illustrations and images nonetheless carve out a
potentially unorthodox reading of Utopia. Arbitrary or not, this conspicuous tangentiality
of the iconic paratexts may appear to buff up the volume’s sheer visual impressiveness,
without adding substantial literary value. Indeed, what and how do all those reprints of
images from classical times to the nineteenth century relate to Mandarin readers of Utopia?
How is More’s Utopia presented, or staged, under such a newly-fashioned textual and visual
framing? There is no longer a centrality of meaning nor a centrality of More as we
understand him. The removing, adding, and shifting of textual as well as visual
components in Utopia engenders multiple lenses through which Utopia is refracted, urging
readers to question the issues not just of translation but of authorship; or rather, how
strong a role the translator plays as a mediator. It is in this sense that whether Utopia is read
paratextually renders different results—that each version of Utopia invites readers to
challenge the transferability of the Morean canon into an utterly varied cultural context. It
may frustrate the need to fix in place a final meaning, but it encourages readers to take on
an active role as co-author of this Morean heritage.
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There is yet another intriguing presentation in Wu Lei’s rendition. While one of the
major factors for the authorial paratexts was to buttress the illusion of authenticity of
Utopia, such an issue with authenticity no longer exists in modern times. Yet there emerges
a new dimension of authenticity with this fancy edition of Wu Lei’s. The volume ends with
a lengthy epistle from Erasmus to Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523), in which a detailed
biographical sketch of More is provided. Like the previous pages, this epistle is presented
with several illustrations, the last of which is of particular interest here:
The caption reads that it is a facsimile reprint of the Latin manuscript of Utopia. Yet the
earliest evidential documentation known to be extant is the 1516 printed volume; the
manuscript itself has not survived.524 This specific case makes us question not just the
editorial intervention, but the issue, or criteria, of authenticity—has the translator or editor
tried to make this edition appear “higher”, “nobler”, or more sophisticated, by falsely
introducing an image that claims to be of the Latin manuscript? With a text whose nature is
so protean and whose meanings travel back and forth in each edition across linguistic as
well as cultural boundaries, it begs the question of whether an authentic reading actually
exists. Multiple layers of reading may suggest that there is a true or truer meaning, whereas
524 Cambridge Utopia (1989) xxx.
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other layers are waiting to be purged. However, a polysemic text like Utopia invalidates such
a definitional limitation; there is no finalisation of one certain reading. Through the
multiple lenses that are result of the shifting of paratexts, a reading multiplies itself.
6 CONCLUDING REMARKS
Thus the appended material shares in the deliberate ambiguity of Utopia itself; it draws out, expands, and illustrates Utopia’s double, humanistic purpose of delightful instruction and by doing so teaches the reader both to enjoy the fiction and to understand its basic didactic purpose.525
The intricacies of translating Utopia lie not just in its language, but in its levels of ironic
reversal. These are most clearly manifested in the authorial paratexts that encased the four
early Latin editions (1516-1518). As far as authorial paratexts are concerned, except for
Song’s edition, the Mandarin translations have generally under-represented the pivotal
relevance of authorial paratexts in contributing to the multi-layered interpretational
potential of Utopia. More’s first epistle to Giles, perhaps because it was originally entitled
“Prefatio”, has been the most frequently included authorial paratext, appearing eight times,
except in the three early editions ranging between the 1930s to the 1960s, and in 2005, 2011,
2016. Following that, the Utopian map has been reprinted in five editions (1956, 1982,
1997, 2003, 2005),526 and the Utopian alphabet plus tetrastichon in four (1956, 1982, 1997,
2003). As for the other authorial paratexts included in the 1518 Basel editions, they are only
found in Song Meihua’s 2003 translation. Therefore, Song’s publication marks a new stage
in the reading of Utopia, as it is the first time since the 1930s that the importance of the
Utopian paratexts is called to Mandarin readers’ attention, as demonstrated by the inclusion
of the authorial paratexts as well as Song’s critical introduction to the volume. However,
Song’s rendition, while scrupulous in so many ways, leaves out the epistle from Busleyden
to More, the passage in which Giles claims to have contributed the marginalia, and the
525 P. Allen 101. 526 It should be noted that only the 1997 and 2003 editions contain both the 1516 map (figura) and the 1518 map (tabula).
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Utopian quatrain, 527 creating a curious turn in her effort to produce a faithful
representation of More’ Latin Utopia.
This chapter then looked into allographic prefaces thematically: whether and how
fiction, dialogue, paratext, and Chinese archetypes of utopian worlds are brought into
discussion. Examining whether fiction, dialogue, and paratext are delineated (or not) in the
allographic prefaces has enabled me to understand each translator’s approach to the text,
whose interpretation becomes the lens through which readers experience Utopia. The
meagre appearance of these three factors, especially paratexts, which only appear in one
edition, suggests that these are overall plain interpretations of Utopia, therefore insinuating
a possible direction for future work. Moreover, the frequency with which Peach Blossom
Spring and Wu He You Zhi Xiang have been adopted and appropriated reaffirms how these
two tropes have become “part of contemporary cultural memory”, 528 which often
predisposes readers towards a certain image of an ideal world before their real exposure to
More’s Utopia.
I would like to return to one of the major concerns of this project: the relation
between translation and paratext. While Genette does not stress translation in his seminal
study on paratexts, his taxonomy of the five paratextual features has offered a valuable
application for the reading of Utopia, especially so when Utopia’s manuscript, early editions,
and the many translations that followed have presented much varied volumes. The five
paratextual characteristics Genette raised, as discussed in Introduction, have been applied
in all the discussions of Mandarin Utopias. With the two most fundamental distinctions –
spatial and temporal – I focus on peritexts that are either anthumous or posthumous. With
the substantial status, I analyse both textual and iconic paratexts, the latter including book
cover and illustrations that have sometimes taken acute readers by surprise with their
marginal relevance to Utopia — and in one particular case in a 2005 edition, the
substantially added illustrations have made the volume an adapted work loaded with the
translator’s own creative interpretation. With pragmatic dimension, authorial and
allographic paratexts have been investigated, and there is one intimate paratext (1957) that
is better understood alongside with the translator’s appropriation of the source text — a
passage on love and creation. The functional dimension of paratexts, on the other hand,
527 Song also deletes three long passages from Budé’s letter. This was a conscious decision, however, as stated in the footnote. 528 Douwe Fokkema, Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011) 6.
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manifests itself throughout the dissertation, not just with paratexts but also with
translations. That paratexts are “dedicated to the service of something other than itself ”529
singles out the irreplaceability of paratexts — whose mode of existence could be footnotes
and allographic prefaces, among others, which might or might not lead to twisting of
More’s intentions. For instance, equating Utopia with the Tang poet Li Bai’s “Departing
Song of Travelling to Tianmu in a Dream” has effectively, though erroneously, painted a
utopia informed by the idea of progress with a brush of the celestial and pastoral. Yet
another raison d’être of paratexts that is specific to Utopia is that they are what reinforced
the ambiguity and the serio-jucolarity of More’s text. If the equivalence of effect is to be
reproduced, it is this conflation of seriousness and playfulness that needs to be re-created,
which cannot be achieved without the inclusion of authorial paratexts. In Utopia, the
concern with fidelity to linguistic and semantic units is diluted; it is not language that
complicates but, as previously discussed, “matters of attitude” that are highlighted,530 and
such matters of attitude are the ironic reversal built upon language, word play, and the re-
packaging of paratexts.
529 Genette 12. 530 Cambridge Utopia (1989) xxxi.
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CONCLUSION: UTOPIA’S RECENT AFTERLIVES
At the beginning of this dissertation, I briefly discussed my work placement at Casa da
Música, along with the Utopia500 programme. All the commenmorations prove that
utopian thoughts have not ceased to be productive and far-reaching, as exhibited through
large-scale movements of resistence to local projects of social inclusion that I have
experienced in my cooperation with Casa da Música. Recognising the ubiquity of the
utopian impulse, the concluding phase of this Utopian voyage travels into the present,
perusing Utopia’s recent afterlives as manifested in titles and theses, as well as dissertations,
published in China and Taiwan in the years 2016-2018 with the words “utopia”, or “wu tuo
bang”, appearing in book titles or synopses, aiming to see how far and wide the concept of
utopia has traversed. Since any articulation of a particular ideal can be considered “utopian”
in its own right, it is not my intention to take into account all the titles that border on the
expression of or the desire for an ideal.531 I limit the scope of my investigation to books,
MA theses, and PhD dissertations with the word “utopia” [wu tuo bang] appearing either in
the title or in the abstract, or under subject headings in library catalogues and databases.532
While the target groups are all displayed in textual form, I categorise the MA theses and
PhD dissertations as strictly academic afterlives. Books, on the other hand, are to be
generalised as textual afterlives, especially so when some titles under discussions are
intended for general readership. This means that they do not necessarily contain any
allusions to or comments on More’s Utopia; the focus here is on how this “term of
common parlance” has taken on a life of its own and has been utilised to various ends. 533
531 For instance, there were 43,489 books (with ISBNs) published in Taiwan alone in 2016. While I do not dismiss the possibility of surveying all the titles that possessed a utopian inclination, I consider it more effective to examine Utopia’s textual afterlives solely in works that explicitly
contain the term in English (or the three characters 烏托邦 [wu tuo bang], in the case of Mandarin
Chinese). 532 I exclude the translations (irrespective of whether they are reissues or new ones) of utopian and dystopian classics such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, We, and Brave New World, as well as translations of critiques such as Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, among others. I also exclude essay collections from symposia and conferences. Therefore, those titles that do not fall into these excluded groups offer a brief overview of thematic categories and demonstrate how the idea of utopia is maintaining its textual legacy. 533 In explaining the etymological root, Davis comments that utopia “is a word which, overcoming its Latinized-Greek origins, has taken on a life of its own. Versions of it exist in all major languages.
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1. TEXTUAL AFTERLIVES
Cross-referencing various databases and library catalogues renders a simple result: since
2016, twenty-two books on this subject have been published in China, and six books have
been published in Taiwan.534 To begin with the list from Taiwan, the first book located is
about the dislocation of Tibetans and their search for a free Tibet. Written by Yin Wenhui,
謎途:流亡路上的烏托邦 (Puzzling Routes: The Utopia on the Way of Exile)535 implicitly
conveys loaded sentiments to which only exiled Tibetans can relate. The second was
published in June 2016, entitled 自由文化地球國 (Freedom, Culture, Earth, Nation).536 The
author, Zeng Guomin, attempts to express his ideals by resorting to philosophical theories
and the socioeconomic system, arriving at his ultimate aspirations: a republic of free culture,
a free culture area, a passion-based economy, and a global republic of free culture. While
these two books focus on the present and the future, the third, authored by He Guoqing,
looks back to the past. Challenging the common view that the Emperor Wanli of the Ming
dynasty caused China to experience a “dark age”, He Guoqing offers a different historical
standpoint by illustrating how the cultural pinnacle of Ming China was comparable to the
Renaissance for the sixteenth-century European missionaries who set foot in China.537
Thus, these three utopia-related titles published in Taiwan between 2016 and the first half
of 2017 can be viewed as their authors’ utopian visions, factual or otherwise, ranging from
the past to the future. The second half of 2017 saw the publication of two books adopting
“utopia” as part of their titles: A Utopian Artist: Illustration Portfolio of Ko Hungto,538 and Whose
It has become a term of common parlance, its linguistic complexity lost to most of its users.” See Davis (2010) 29. 534 The primary library sources are the National Central Library in Taiwan and the National Library of China. The Hong Kong Academic Library Link has provided immense help in locating these resources, including access to journal articles and newspaper articles published in China and Taiwan. 535 Yin Wenhui尹雯慧, Mi tu: Liu wang lu shang de wu tuo bang 謎途:流亡路上的烏托邦 [Puzzling
Routes: The Utopia on the Way of Exile] (Taipei: Tai wan tu bo zhi you hui, 2016). 536 Zeng Guomin 曾國民, Zi you wen hua di qiu guo 自由文化地球國 [The Earth Nation of Free
Culture] (Taipei: Lie hai ren, 2016). The translation is mine, and I adopt a literal translation. Instead of being in the title, the word “utopia” appears in both the abstract and as a keyword during the catalogue search. 537 He Guoqing 何國慶, Wan li jia dao: Duo yuan kai fang chuang yi de wen hua sheng shi 萬曆駕到:多
元·開放·創意的文化盛世 [The Royal Arrival of Emperor Wanli: The Cultural Heyday of the
Dynamic, the Receptive, and the Creative] (Taipei: Yuanliu, 2016). 538 Ko Hungto 柯鴻圖, Wu tuo bang de yixiangjia: Ko Hongtu huihua zuopinji 烏托邦的藝想家:柯鴻
圖繪畫作品集 [A Utopian Artist: Illustration Portfolio of Ko Hungto] (Taipei: Daji wenhua, 2017).
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Utopia? Reflections and Dialectics in 500 Years.539 As is evident from the title, Ko Hungto’s
volume is a collection of his watercolour paintings, primarily of nature and plants. Known
as the Utopian Artist, Ko is concerned with delivering a sense of tranquillity and aesthetics
through his works. The fact that he is credited as a Utopian Artist reflects how utopia is
being appropriated in a modern context – that of the pursuit of undisturbed tranquillity
and harmony. Whose Utopia?, on the other hand, is an homage to the publication of Utopia,
coordinated by the National Normal Taiwan University and Hong Kong Baptist University,
and covers a wide range of themes including human rights, Taiwan nativist literature, and
the labour movement, to name just a few. Only one book that incorporates the term
“utopia” into its title was published in Taiwan in 2018: Utopia, Dystopia, Heterotopia: Selected
Essays of Chan Koonchung. 540 Chan is a Hong Kong intellectual, who has published
extensively on politics and social observation. This collection of essays includes his
critiques and reflections since the 1980s on the tension between China, Hong Kong and
Tibet, as well as on the current situation with regard to technology and the economy.
Chan’s 2018 work was understandably not published in China; only one title
adopting the term wu tuo bang saw the light there in 2018: a critical study of Theodor
Adorno’s aesthetic theory and Marxism.541 The other twenty-one titles published in China
before 2018 cover a wider range of disciplines. The first two, published in 2016, deal with
the utopian spirit of ethical values and the critique of a writer considered to be utopian.542
The other nineteen books touch upon the topics of utopianism, utopian novels, Marxism,
the nostalgia for homelands, aesthetics, gender issues, and travel. There are overlaps and
the two most frequently covered topics are utopianism and critiques of authors or their
539 Chen Dengwu, Wu Youneng 陳登武, 吳有能, eds, Shui de Wu tuo bang? 500 nian lai de fansi yu
bianzheng誰的烏托邦? 500年來的反思與辯證 [Whose Utopia? Reflections and Dialectics in 500
Years] (Taipei: Shida chuban zhongxin, 2017). 540 Chan Koonchung 陳冠中, Wu tuo bang, er tuo bang, yi tuo bang: Chan Koonchung shidai wenpingji 烏托
邦、惡托邦、異托邦 : 陳冠中時代文評集 [Utopia, Dystopia, Heterotopia: Selected Essays of Chan
Koonchung] (Taipei: Maitian chuban, 2018). 541 Xie Changfei 谢昌飞, Xiandaixing pipan de shenmei changyu yu wutuobang de zhongjian现代性批判的
审美场域与乌托邦的重建 [The Aesthetic Field of the Critique of Modernity and the Reconstruction of
Utopia] (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 2018). 542 The first, titled 乌托邦精神的伦理价值 (The Ethical Values of Utopian Spirits), was the outcome
of a project called “Chinese Traditional Utopian Thinking and Its Archival Research”, funded by Huaqiao University in 2016. The second book looks into Andrei Platonov’s writing during the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on the artistic expression of utopianism and the pursuit of individual survival..
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works. 543 These titles suggest a relatively serious or audience-specific appropriation of
Utopia.544 Among the twenty-two titles, three are directed toward a general readership: one
is travel-related while the other two are works of fiction. Instead of an uninterrupted
narrative, the former is composed of multiple entries suggesting tourist attractions as well
as offering advice almost exclusively to locals only. The book is entitled 跨国界乌托邦:
理工男 100天环游北美 (Crossing-Boundary Utopia: A Polytechnic Boy’s 100 Days Around North
America).545 For informed readers, the extent to which the concept of utopia is appropriated
here may appear to be far-fetched. However, instead of viewing it as an unexamined
misappropriation, Cross-Boundary Utopia finely exemplifies J. C. Davis’s assertion that utopia
“has taken on a life of its own”,546 for it has truly traversed beyond the range of common
parlance and expanded into general readership.547
In Taiwan, discussions spinning off from the sixteenth-century neologism are
numerous, primarily in science fiction, and the art- and entertainment-related industries,
whereas More’s Utopia has not received due investigation. Even in the collection of essays
commemorating the quincentenary of Utopia (co-published by Taiwan Normal University
and Hong Kong Baptist University), the articles are on diverse sub-themes, ranging from
543 Such authors include Lianke Yan (b.1958), a professor of literature who is known for his highly satirical works; David Harvey (b.1935); the Chinese Jew Klara Blum (1904–1971); and Kenji Miyazawa (1896–1933), a noted Japanese writer of children’s literature and a social activist. 544 For instance, Wang Jie’s work 寻找乌托邦:现代美学的危机与重建 (Searching for Utopia:
Crisis and Reconstruction of Modern Aesthetics) reflects Wang’s critique of modern aesthetics and
anthropology. On the other hand, Zhang Kongzhi’s 总体性与乌托邦:人本主义马克思主义的
总体范畴 (Totality and Utopia: A Perspective on Humanitarian Marxism) is explicitly meant for a
readership with pre-existing knowledge of Marxism. This translation is provided in the entry found from the library catalogue search. 545 Jiang Yu 蒋瑜, Kua guo jie wu tuo bang: Li gong nan 100 tian huan you bei mei 跨国界乌托邦:理工
男 100 天环游北美 [Crossing-Boundary Utopia: A Polytechnic Boy’s 100 Days Around North
America] (Beijing: Zhong guo ren min da xue chu ban she, 2016). 546 Davis (2010) 29. 547 I should add that, in addition to the books, the filtered search results also listed six translated works published in China (which include “utopia” in their title or abstract) and four in Taiwan since the beginning of 2016. The six published in China have varied subjects: the entertainment industry, well-being and government, utopian socialism, human rights, a drawing book based on science-fiction style, and a memoir about the war on Chinese Americans. The four translated works published in Taiwan cover the themes of architecture and city planning, social structure and technological advancement, philosophy and the pursuit of freedom, and a drawing book titled Birtopia. It is interesting to see that in both China and Taiwan, so-called light reading matter (drawing books and colouring books) with titles containing the term “utopia” are being published, thus indicating manifold levels of appropriation. I should also add another translated work that did not appear in the library catalogue search. It is a graphic novel adaptation of X-Men, authored by Brian Michael Bendis, illustrated by Muamud Asrar, and translated by Red-Shielded Chief Chris (pseud.). This graphic novel is titled All New X-Men: The Utopians, a translation of which was published in China in 2017.
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Taoist worship to anarchist movements, but none of them are about More’s Utopia. This is
not to devalue the academic debates around utopia conducted in Taiwan, but it reflects that
the study of Utopia itself is wanting. In contrast to this, a series of articles were published
between 2016 and 2018 on Utopia in China. What is more interesting is that wu tuo bang has
often been adopted and quoted in various discourses, particularly of the political kind, to
such an extent that it reeks of ideological exploitation. Articles by Gao Fang, an emeritus
professor of the first university founded by the Chinese Communist Party, demonstrate an
ideologically-oriented application of More’s text, leaving aside the direct references to
Utopia in several of Xi Jinping’s speeches. This phenomenon perhaps best illustrates why
the most recent three Mandarin Utopias were published in China, where it appears to cater
to a purpose other than a literary one.
2. ACADEMIC AFTERLIVES
The academic afterlives of Utopia, likewise, demonstrate a variety of possibilities expanding
from the initial neologism and concept. The National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
in Taiwan lists eleven publications: two PhD Dissertations and nine MA theses published
between 2016 and 2018.548 As with book titles that include the keyword “utopia”, or wu tuo
bang, the majority of the theses are not about literary utopias; most of them appropriate the
term to indicate the ideal realm for a specific field of research. Both the PhD dissertations
were completed in 2017: while Chang Tien-Tai analyses Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia
and its application to education, Wu Hui-Ching uses the term “utopia” in her thesis title to
delineate her ideal healthcare system in the light of community policies and the capitation
system. Four out of the nine MA theses study utopian or dystopian narratives, indicating a
growing recognition of this literary genre.549 However, none of the discussions of literary
utopias touch on a Taiwanese work.
548 The National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations in Taiwan, or 臺灣博碩士論文加值
系統, is an open access repository where one can locate both the Chinese and English abstracts of the theses. However, access to the full text is limited to affiliated institutions only. I will provide the links to the abstracts of each thesis in the bibliography. All English titles are directly taken from the database, regardless of grammatical incoherence. 549 Jiang Meng-Syuan discusses the issue of freedom in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Fahrenheit 451; Liang Siang-Yun canvasses the utopian disillusion and recreation in Matched, a dystopian trilogy where youngsters are assigned a future partner at the age of 17; Liao Pei-Wun focuses on space in The Handmaid’s Tale, arguing how the use of space is central to shaping this dystopian society and
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The other MA theses appropriating the term utopia include a study of the political
poetics of the late Qing statesman Zheng Xiao-Xu; an environmental approach to a
coexistence shared by humans and pets; an exploration of the interplay between religion,
money, and living desires through the means of digital photography; a narrative criticism of
the Taiwanese rock band Mayday’s utopian view as expressed in the documentary Live in
Live; and a thesis whose English title is simply rendered as “Wooltopia” that applies wool
as the main means of the author’s creative outlet, which centres around imagination,
contradiction, and time. The application of the concept of utopia to the art industry is clear
in this overview.
Contrary to my expectations, there was only one PhD dissertation produced in
China during the time frame of my research. It is a study of the utopian quest in Herman
Melville’s Polynesian trilogy. As for the fourteen Chinese MA theses, unlike those in
Taiwan that tended to appropriate utopia, these can be divided into two categories: those
on literary utopias and those on utopian thought. As far as literary utopias are concerned,
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, William Styron’s Darkness Visible, Doris Lessing’s anti-
utopian narratives, Shakespeare’s comedies, and More’s Utopia are the topics of interest.
Those about utopian thought can be categorised into two sub-groups: one concentrates on
a particular thinker’s thought while the other analyses specific utopian phenomena. Of the
former, Ernst Bloch and Frederic Jameson are each studied twice. The second sub-group
covers utopian construction theory, the harmony of the occident and the orient, and the
utopian spirit in modern Chinese literature. This reflects Gao Fang’s observation, as
discussed in the Introduction, that there is a lack of MA theses and PhD dissertations on
Utopia, especially from a socialist angle. The only thesis on More’s Utopia looks at its
cultural origins.
In this overview of the MA and PhD works published in China and Taiwan, two
interesting phenomena are observed: while the total number of theses and dissertations
does not show a drastic difference (eleven in Taiwan compared to fifteen in China), if we
take into account the population that receives higher education across the Taiwan Strait,
the construct of utopia is more frequently applied in Taiwan. However, this overview
indicates that wu tuo bang is largely appropriated in Taiwan, whereas those studies from
China stay closely within the lines of literary and philosophical research.
simultaneously serves as a key to survival; while Yao Teng-Jie investigates the presentation of utopia in From the New World, a Japanese science-fiction novel by Yusuke Kishi.
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3. ARTISTIC AFTERLIVES
So far, a brief overview of the titles containing wu tuo bang has been provided. I will take a
short detour here to reflect on another level of utopia’s recent afterlives in the art and
entertainment industry. A pop song titled “Utopia” was released by a Taiwanese singer,
Hebe Tien,550 and a large-scale concert tour called “Utopia 2.0” by another Taiwanese
singer, A-Mei, has toured from December 2016 to December 2017.551 Another song called
夢托邦, literally “Dream-topia”, was released in February 2019 with “Utopia” as its official
English rendering. It is a love song, whose lyrics indicate that there is a utopia set in the
future where love will be realised. This appropriation of the term has yet again reaffirmed
“utopia”’s status as “common parlance”: in many circumstances it no longer carries the
political connotation found in More’s Utopia, but new takes with multifaceted meanings
have been built upon and adapted to this sixteenth-century neologism.
Besides the music industry, results from the Hong Kong Academic Library Link
indicate two film holdings that were released in 2017 in Hong Kong. One is a Japanese sci-
fi film called 和諧, or Harmony, satirising a Utopia built in the name of defying chaos but
actually based upon a grand hypocrisy. The other is titled 同流合烏, officially rendered as
Utopians. A play on words is exhibited in this title. It originates from the idiomatic phrase
同流合污, which signifies the act of wallowing in a mire with someone.552 However, the
last character found in the film title, 烏 , is an intentional typo, an adaptation of the
Mandarin rendition of Utopia, 烏托邦. The pejorative denotation and wordplay in the title
embody a deliberate move on the part of the director, daring readers to search for their
own utopia, their own truth. The film depicts the protagonist’s quest for truth, for art, and
for his sexuality. He is caught up in a mire in which he is tangled up with his girlfriend and
his Socratic mentor. The themes of homosexuality and polygamy that run throughout the
film have stirred some controversy (and the main actor’s contract with a sports
development foundation was terminated right after the release of the film, allegedly
550 The recording of Hebe Tien’s concert, If Only, released in 2016, appeared in the catalogue search because the song “Utopia” was in the program. 551 In addition to appearing in Taiwan, this “Utopia 2.0” concert tour reached China, Malaysia, England, Italy, Singapore, and Spain. 552 A literal reading of this idiomatic phrase would be “being in the same stream and in the same dirt”—which should help readers grasp the underlying meaning.
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because of the government’s disapproval).553 While no utopia-related video productions
have been released in Taiwan, there was a documentary on Taiwan’s human geography in
2016. Titled Postcards from Formosa, the three-disc documentary contains a section called
“The Last Utopia: The Ivalino Tribe and the Traditional Underground Houses on Orchid
Island”. Adopting “utopia” into its English subtitle, it reveals a bitter yearning for the long-
lost time when aborigines were able to enjoy their land without modern intervention, a
utopian vision of theirs that journeys back in time.
This detour has shown that the appropriations, or, rather, the formal variations, of
Utopia are not strictly textual. This dissertation has looked into the recent afterlives of
Utopia in multifarious respects, reflecting upon how this idea has been appropriated, as
well as how its life span has been prolonged and how it has flourished in dynamic fashion.
The appropriation of utopia has travelled everywhere: from relatively abstruse
philosophical works to critiques of aesthetics, from fictional narratives to such “light” texts
as drawing books. It also manifests itself in artistic events, video recordings, and many
more non-print media objects, which deserve essay-length discussions in their own right.
All this attests to what Fátima Vieira concludes in her review of French publications on
Utopia, that “More’s legacy seems, in fact, to be more visible at the instrumental level:
utopia as a tool for critically analysing society and for creatively imagining alternatives”.554
4. CONCEPTUAL AFTERLIVES
Utopia as a concept and as a spirit striving for betterness reincarnates itself. It is applicable
to various contexts, political and otherwise; it finds itself being appropriated in different
discourses, academic and elsewhere. The Lennon Wall in Prague was initially an outlet for
the Czechs to articulate their irritation toward the then Communist regime in the 1980s,
and has since become a landmark for the expression of freedom, liberty, and democracy. A
Lennon Wall covered with thousands of post-it notes against the totalitarian intervention
emerged in Hong Kong following their anti-extradition bill protests in 2019. An editorial
piece commenting on Hong Kongers’ ongoing demonstration entitled a sub-section as
553 See Ke Zhiyuan柯志遠, “‘Tong liu he wu’: Yun xiang, xing ai yi ti de ku hang seng”《同流合
烏》雲翔,性愛議題的苦行僧 [“Utopias”: Yunxiang, the Ascetics of the Sexual Issues], Now
News 01 Aug 2016 <https://www.nownews.com/news/20160801/2188585> 16 July 2017. 554 Fátima Vieira, “Utopia as a Tool for Change: A Review of Publications on Utopia in France (2016 and the First Semester of 2017)”, Utopian Studies 28.3 (2017): 633.
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“From Utopia to the War Zone” to illustrate the situations in which the Hong Kongers
find themselves.555 Economic prosperity was their utopia; it is now a dystopia infiltrated
with human rights violation and brutal suppression.
With a slight shift in the prefix, “utopia” generates diverse meanings that are
inherently paradoxical. A happy place could be an imaginary non-place; a non-place could
be an arresting nightmare that projects reality unto its literary representations. Are the
conflicting ideas mutually exclusive, though? Mao’s Cultural Revolution was based upon
his “utopian” projection, a projection that ultimately led to famine, the subversion of
family and traditional values, and millions of deaths, to name just a few consequences. Its
intention was hopeful and its name suggested a radical change common to utopian
impulses. The implementation of the People’s Commune, a practice familiar to the readers
of Utopia, was partly the half-way result of Mao’s blueprint for a better future. However,
the eventual outcome was diabolical. The saying, “One man’s utopia is another’s dystopia”,
finds its historical resonance there. On the other hand, Taiwan had also gone through a
despotic reign by the then-ruling Nationalist Party, whose schematised White Terror (1949-
1987) had caused unaccounted-for disappearances of dissidents, along with the suppression
and murder of civilians, to name but a few of its atrocities. There were utopian impulses
across the Taiwan Strait back then; there are utopian impulses now, still, on both sides.
What makes a difference is the acceptance or rejection of varying utopian desires, whose
utterances insinuate differences that depart from the status quo. No dissident views have
survived under the Communist Party of China; the Party’s utopian impulse has always been
the impulse that sees the light. In contrast, Taiwan has emerged from its dystopic past;
nowadays the voice of a recusant is able to be expressed and heard. An alternative world
order is not unfathomable to the Taiwanese: to me who grew up knowing that differences
are appreciated and their articulation is not penalised.
Ten years after Peter Fitting wrote that “the crucial first step in the modern study
of utopia was […] the definitional one”, this crucial first step at present should perhaps
not be focused on its definitional nebulousness but on recognising the inevitable evolution
and diversification of the concept of utopia, born from our innate need to envision
555 Luo Guan Cong, 羅冠聰 “luo guan cong kan fan song zhong :zou chu wu li de you gu ,
xiang gang ren cong xue he han xun zhao zi wo” 羅冠聰看反送中:走出無力的幽谷,香港人
從血和汗尋找自我 [Luo Guan Cong’s View on Anti-Extradition Bill: Out of the Valley of
Powerlessness, Hong Kongers Seek Self-Identity through Blood and Sweat] The Reporter, 15 June 2019 <https://www.twreporter.org/a/opinion-hong-kong-extradition-law-young-generation-identity> 12 August 2019.
197
something different, something better. Where caution is required is in the need to be
modest enough to retain space for flexibility. Here I shall go back to the contemporary
utopian mentality discussed earlier in this dissertation. Resorting to Dias de Carvalho’s
definition of philosophical utopia that highlights possibilities, Vieira offers a postulation
that clarifies the ambiguity embedded in this concept when applied to the contemporary
context:
Although it may incite us to define the nature of our horizon (our ideal), it does not force us to stick to the end of our idealization, as the ideal is informed by a surplus of desire, which provides us with space for a constant redefinition, and is ready to accept the notion of error, which it incorporates when reformulating its new horizon.556
Redefinition and reformulation are operative words here; or, rather, the prefix re- is the
defining feature of this contemporary utopian mentality. It brings us to the circularity
highlighted by Louis Marin: yet, instead of the dichotomic tension between ou- and eu-, the
new horizon is constantly under review, constantly being refined and renegotiated. It is this
emphasis on possibilities and flexibilities that sets utopia apart from its perilous
counterpart, dystopia, as well as from the conventionally understood utopia of the static.
And utopia moves forward. Translations enable contemporary readers to appreciate
the libellus; the libellus reclaims life through readers’ engagement with both the text and with
their own vision. While Vieira argues that the contemporary utopian mentality is “a
dialectical strategy that the author expects the reader to be involved with”, I suggest that
utopia gains validity when readers actively produce their own synthesis (of the two books
of Utopia) and hypothesis (of their own vision). As utopia has evolved into a common
discourse, I should like to end this dissertation quoting the award-winning sci-fi writer
China Miéville, in his introduction to a new edition of Utopia, part of the project Utopia
2016: A Year of Imagination and Possibility:
the fact that the utopian impulse is always stained doesn’t mean it can or should be denied or battened down. It is as inevitable as hate and anger and joy, and as necessary. Utopianism isn’t hope, still less optimism: it is need, and it is desire. For recognition, like all desire, and/but for the specifics of its reveries and programmes, too; and above all for betterness tout court. For alterity, something other than the exhausting social lie. For rest. And when
556 Vieira (2017) 67-68.
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the cracks in history open wide enough, the impulse may even jimmy them a little wider.557
My research on Utopia belongs to the academic discourse; the inevitability of the utopian
impulse is, on the other hand, everyday discourse. In the fall semester of 2019, I offered a
seminar on early modern utopian literature. My aim was to examine the multifaceted
utopianism in early modern Europe that tends to be overlooked in the Taiwanese higher
education curriculum. Students’ comments and questions, however, went beyond what I
originally considered to be “academic”. Whether we read Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing
World or Thomas More’s Utopia, what had often appeared in students’ discussions were
their reference to politics, and more recently, their reprimand of totalitarian suppression
masquerading as the sole political solution in Hong Kong. Seeing how students voiced their
concerns and how they made modern references to Utopia partly resolved my enquiries
from the outset of my doctoral journey. For a long time, I had trouble recognising the
importance or necessity of my project. I surveyed fourteen standalone Mandarin
translations of Utopia, which were crucial especially as they had filled in the gap of a
previously neglected aspect of utopian studies. Yet, “how is it relevant outside the groves
of Academe?” was my doubt. My research shows me how paratexts and adaptations have
consolidated the translator’s role in transmitting and re-writing Utopia, and that Utopia has
become a cultural product of the interpretive creation, catering to personal agenda or
otherwise. My seminar, on the other hand, has enabled me to observe students’ responses
to More’s text and taught me that the moral responsibility of Utopia’s translations should
no longer be fixated on its fidelity to the original text, but rather, on its potential to kindle
readers’ awareness of injustice of various kinds. Voicing his concerns on social maladies
was what drove Thomas More to compose his ideal realm on paper; engaging students in
and raising their awareness through the study of Utopia is, perhaps, the crucial next step
that shall be consciously planned into our curriculum in breaking students out of the ivory
tower.
557 Thomas More, Utopia. Introduction by China Miéville (London, New York: Verso, 2016) 6.
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MA Theses: China
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Lu, Juan 吕娟. “dong xi fang he xie zhi jing” 东西方和谐之境 [The Harmony of the
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Meng, Xiaoman 孟笑曼. “Zhan mu xun de wutuobang sixiang shulun” 詹姆逊的乌托邦
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Song, Ruirong 宋瑞荣. “Xinshiji xiaoshuo wutuobang xushi yanjiu” 新世纪小说乌托邦
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215
Wu, Wenqi 吴文琦. “Duo li si ·lai xin zhonghouqi xiaoshuo xushi zhong de fan wutuo
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Guangzhou University, 2016.
Yao, Siyu 姚思雨. “Xiandaixing shiyu xia Bu luo he wutuobang jingshen yanjiu” 现代性视
域下布洛赫乌托邦精神研究 [Research on Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia in the
Horizon of Modernity]. MA Thesis. Xi’an: Xi’an Technological University, 2016.
Yao, Yinuo姚一诺. “zhan mu xun wu tuo bang si xiang tan ya” 詹姆逊乌托邦思想探要
[A Brief Exploration on Frederic Jameson’s Utopian Thoughts]. MA Thesis. Wuhan:
Central China Normal University, 2017.
Zhan, Dan 詹丹. “Huan tuo bang, e tuo bang, yi tuo bang” 幻托邦,恶托邦,异托邦
[Disillusionment-utopia, Anti-utopia, Heterotopias]. MA Thesis. Hefei: Anhui
University, 2016.
Zhang, Chao Kun Peng 张超昆鹏. “Tuo ma si・mo er <wutuobang> sixiang wenhua
yuanyuan chutan” 托马斯·莫尔《乌托邦》思想文化渊源初探 [A Study of the
Cultural Origin of Thomas More’s Utopia]. Nanjing: University of Nanjing, 2017.
Zhao, Lihua 赵利华 . “Wutuobang jiangou lilun fenxi” 乌托邦建构理论分析 [The
Analysis of Utopian Construction Theory]. MA Thesis. Fuzhou: Fujian Normal
University, 2016.
MA Theses: Taiwan
Chen, Shi-Xuan 陳仕軒. “Shuqing、wutuobang yu ziwo jiyi: Zheng Xiao-Xu de zhengzhi
shixue” 抒情、烏托邦與自我技藝:鄭孝胥的政治詩學 [Lyric, Utopia and Self-
Techniques: A Study of Zheng Xiao-Xu’s Political Poetics]. MA Thesis. Nantou:
National Chi Nan University, 2017. Abstract available at
<https://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/cgi-
bin/gs32/gsweb.cgi/ccd=0F1qAR/record?r1=9&h1=0>.
216
Hung, Hui-Min 洪惠敏. huan jing jiao yu guan dian xia de ren lei yu chong wu gong cun
「wu tuo bang 」—kong jian rong ru shi chong wu jia ju zhi yan jiu“ 環境教育觀點
下的人類與寵物共存「烏托邦」—空間融入式寵物家具之研究 [Humanities
and Pets Coexist “Utopia” in the View of Environmental Education Research on the
Space-Incorporating Pet Future]. MA Thesis. Kaohsiung: Shu-Te University, 2017.
Abstract available at <https://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/cgi-
bin/gs32/gsweb.cgi/ccd=B0Ess4/record?r1=1&h1=1>.
Jiang, Fang-Tsun 江芳存. “Changyu yuwang wutuobang: yingxiang chuangzuo lunshu” 場
域 慾望 烏托邦:影像創作論述 [Field, Desire, Utopia: Exploration of the Image
Creation]. Taipei: University of Taipei, 2017. Abstract available at
<https://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/cgi-
bin/gs32/gsweb.cgi/ccd=0F1qAR/record?r1=6&h1=0>.
Jiang, Meng-Syuan 江孟璇. “Fan wutuobang zhi lu: <yi jiu ba si> yu <hua shi 451 du>
zhong jijikewei de ziyou” 反烏托邦之旅:《一九八四》與《華氏 451度》中岌岌
可危的自由 [Journeys to Dystopias: Infringements to Liberty in Nineteen Eighty-Four
and Fahrenheit 451]. MA Thesis. Kaohsiung: National Kaohsiung Normal University,
2018. Abstract available at <https://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/cgi-
bin/gs32/gsweb.cgi/ccd=0F1qAR/record?r1=4&h1=0>.
Lai, Yi-Ru 賴依汝. “Wu yue tian de wutuobang shijie: cong xushi piping guandian fenxi
<xian chang.zhan chang.meng gong chang> dianying jilupian” 五月天的烏托邦
世界:從敘事批評觀點分析〈現場·戰場·夢工場〉電影紀錄片 [Mayday’s Utopia:
A Narrative Criticism of the ‘Live in Live’ Documentary]. MA Thesis. Taipei:
National Taiwan Normal University, 2017. Abstract available at
<https://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/cgi-
bin/gs32/gsweb.cgi/ccd=0F1qAR/record?r1=3&h1=0>.
Liang, Siang-Yun 梁襄荺 . “Xi lun <wanmei shijie sanbuqu> zhong wutuobang de
huanmie yu zaisheng” 析論《完美世界三部曲》中烏托邦的幻滅與再生
[Utopian Disillusion and Re-creation in Matched Trilogy]. MA Thesis. Taitung:
National Taitung University, 2016. Abstract available at
<https://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/cgi-
bin/gs32/gsweb.cgi/ccd=0F1qAR/record?r1=8&h1=0>.
217
Liao, Pei-Wun 廖珮雯. “「Dai tianbu de kongjian」: <shinu de gushi> zhong de (fan)
wutuobang kongjian”「待填補的空間」:《使女的故事》中的(反)烏托邦空間
[“A Space to be Filled”: Utopian (Dystopian) Space in The Handmaid’s Tale]. MA Thesis.
Taipei: National Taiwan University, 2017. Abstract available at
<https://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/cgi-
bin/gs32/gsweb.cgi/ccd=0F1qAR/record?r1=7&h1=0>.
Tsou, Pao-Chen 鄒保禛. “Chujue wanxing lianxi—weixing wutuobang” 觸覺完形練習—
微型烏托邦 [Wooltopia]. MA Thesis. Tainan: Tainan National University of the Arts,
2017. Abstract available at <https://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/cgi-
bin/gs32/gsweb.cgi/ccd=0F1qAR/record?r1=11&h1=0>.
Yao, Teng-Jie 姚騰傑. “<lai zi xin shi jie> de wutuobang lunshu”《來自新世界》的烏托
邦論述 [Discussion about Utopia in From the New World]. MA Thesis. Taichung:
National Taichung University of Education, 2017. Abstract available at
<https://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/cgi-
bin/gs32/gsweb.cgi/ccd=0F1qAR/record?r1=10&h1=0>.
Works Published in China, 2016-2018
Chen, Qingchao 陈庆超. Wu tuo bang jing shen de lun li jia zhi 乌托邦精神的伦理价值 [The
Ethical Values of Utopian Spirits]. Beijing: She hui ke xue wen xian chu ban she,
2016.
Cui, Jingsheng 崔竞生. Cong chong jing dao kun jing: Ying guo wu tuo bang xiao shuo zhong de ke ji
zhu ti yan jiu 从憧憬到困境:英国乌托邦小说中的科技主题研究 [From
Anticipation to Frustration: On the Subject of Science and Technology in English
Utopian Novels]. Wuhan: Wu han da xue chu ban she, 2016.
Cui, Shaofeng 崔绍锋. Qing xie de wu tuo bang: Yan lian ke chuang zuo lun 倾斜的乌托邦:阎
连科创作论 [A Tilted Utopia: On Yan Lianke’s Creation]. Changchun: Ji lin ren
min chu ban she, 2016.
Duan Musong 端木松 . Mou sha wu tuo bang 谋杀乌托邦 [Murder Utopia]. Chengdu:
Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, 2017.
218
Huang, Ying 黄英. Gong ze xian zhi de wu tuo bang shu xie 宫泽贤治的乌托邦书写 [Kenji
Miyazawa’s Utopian Writing]. Beijing: Wai yu jiao xue yu yan jiu she, 2016.
Jiang, Yu 蒋瑜. Kua guo jie wu tuo bang: Li gong nan 100 tian huan you bei mei 跨国界乌托邦:
理工男 100 天环游北美 [Crossing-Boundary Utopia: A Polytechnic Boy’s 100
Days Around North America]. Beijing: Zhong guo ren min da xue chu ban she,
2016.
Li, Xiaojian 李小江. Nu xing wu tuo bang: Zhong guo nu xing/xing bie yan jiu er shi jiang 女性烏
托邦:中國女性/性別研究二十講 [Women’s and Gender Studies in New China
(Twenty Topics)]. Beijing: She hui ke xue wen xian chu ban she, 2016.
Lin, Jia 林笳. Zhong guo ji you tai yi nu shi ren zhu bai lan (Klara Blum) sheng ping yu zuo pin xuan
中国籍犹太裔女诗人朱白兰 (Klara Blum)生平与作品选 [Chinese Jewish
Poetess Klara Blum’s Life and Works]. Guangzhou: Zhong shan da xue chu ban she,
2016.
Qian, Houcheng 钱厚诚. Bian zheng de wu tuo bang li xiang: Da wei·ha wei kong jian li lun de wen
ben jie du 辩证的乌托邦理想:大卫·哈维空间理论的文本解读 [Dialectical
Utopian Ideals: A Textual Interpretation of David Harvey’s Space Theory]. Beijing:
Zhong guo she hui ke xue chu ban she, 2016.
Qui Jin 鬼金. Wo de wu tuo bang 我的乌托邦 [My Utopia]. Nanjing: Jiangsu fenghuang
wenyi chubanshe, 2017.
Song, Xiumei 宋秀梅. Wu tuo bang shi dai ge ti ming yun de yi shu bei wang lu: 1920–1930 nian
dai pu la dong nuo fu xiao shuo chuang zuo yan jiu 乌托邦时代个体命运的艺术备忘录:
1920-1930 年代普拉东诺夫小说创作研究 [An Artistic Memorandum of
Individual Destiny During the Utopian Era: A Study of Andrei Platonov’s Writings,
1920s-1930s]. Nanjing: Dong nan da xue chu ban she, 2016.
Wang, Jianghuo 王江火. Xian feng xiao zhen: Xin wen ming wu tuo bang 先锋小镇:新文明
乌托邦 [Pioneering Township: Utopia of the New Civilization]. Shanghai: Shang
hai san lian shu dian, 2016.
Wang, Jianxiang 王建香. Fan wu tuo bang 反烏托邦 [Anti-Utopia]. Beijing: Gao deng jiao
yu chu ban she, 2016
219
Wang, Jie 王杰. Xun zhao wu tuo bang: Xian dai mei xue de wei ji yu zhong jian 寻找乌托邦:
现代美学的危机与重建 [Searching for Utopia: Crisis and Reconstruction of
Modern Aesthetics]. Beijing: Ren min wen xue chu ban, 2016.
Wang, Yiping. 王一平. 思考與界定: “反烏托邦” “惡烏托邦”小說名實之辨 “The
Distinction between Anti-Utopian Fiction and Dystopian Fiction.” 四川大學學報
(哲學社會科學版 ) Journal of Sichuan University (Philosophy and Social Science
Edition) 2017 (208): 55-63.
Wu, Jianren 吳趼人. Xin Shitou Ji 新石頭記 [New Story of the Stone]. Shanghai: Gailiang
Xiaoshuo She, 1908.
Xie, Changfei 谢昌飞. Xiandaixing pipan de shenmei changyu yu wutuobang de zhongjian现代性
批判的审美场域与乌托邦的重建 [The Aesthetic Field of the Critique of
Modernity and the Reconstruction of Utopia] Beijing: People’s Publishing House,
2018.
Zhang, Kongzhi 张康之. Zong ti xing yu wu tuo bang: Ren ben zhu yi ma ke si zhu yi de zong ti fan
chou 总体性与乌托邦:人本主义马克思主义的总体范畴 [Totality and Utopia:
A Perspective of Humanitarian Marxism]. Beijing: Zhong guo ren min da xue chu
ban she, 2016.
Works Published in Taiwan, 2016-2018
Chan, Koonchung 陳冠中. Wu tuo bang, er tuo bang, yi tuo bang: Chan Koonchung shidai wenpingji
烏托邦、惡托邦、異托邦 : 陳冠中時代文評集 [Utopia, Dystopia, Heterotopia:
Selected Essays of Chan Koonchung]. Taipei: Maitian chuban, 2018.
Chen, Dengwu, and Wu Youneng 陳登武, 吳有能, eds. Shui de Wu tuo bang? 500 nian lai de
fansi yu bianzheng誰的烏托邦? 500年來的反思與辯證 [Whose Utopia? Reflections
and Dialectics in 500 Years]. Taipei: Shida chuban zhongxin, 2017.
He, Guoqing 何國慶. Wan li jia dao: Duo yuan kai fang chuang yi de wen hua sheng shi 萬曆駕到:
多元·開放·創意的文化盛世 [The Royal Arrival of Emperor Wanli: The Cultural
Heyday of the Dynamic, the Receptive, and the Creative]. Taipei: Yuanliu, 2016.
220
Ko, Hungto 柯鴻圖. Wu tuo bang de yixiangjia: Ko Hongtu huihua zuopinji 烏托邦的藝
想家:柯鴻圖繪畫作品集 [A Utopian Artist: Illustration Portfolio of Ko
Hungto]. Taipei: Daji wenhua, 2017.
Yin, Wenhui 尹雯慧. Mi tu: Liu wang lu shang de wu tuo bang 謎途:流亡路上的烏托邦
[Puzzling Routes: The Utopia on the Way of Exile]. Taipei: Tai wan tu bo zhi you
hui, 2016.
Zeng, Guomin 曾國民. Zi you wen hua di qiu guo 自由文化地球國 [The Earth Nation of
Free Culture]. Taipei: Lie hai ren, 2016.
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