Deviations as precursors: A spectral view of (re)translation

1.Introduction

This article argues that Specters of Marx (Derrida [1993] 1994Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge.) offers a distinctive way to engage with translation and its repetitions. In 1993, after the collapse of the USSR (1922–1991), a conference titled “Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective” was convened at the Center for Ideas and Society, University of California, Riverside, to discuss the demise of this communist power and the future of Marxism (Magnus and Cullenberg 1994Magnus, Bernd, and Stephen Cullenberg 1994 “Editors’ Introduction.” In Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, edited by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg, vii–xi. New York: Routledge.). Jacques Derrida delivered plenary sessions at the conference, which later led to the publication of Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Specters of Marx is Derrida’s 1993 response to the triumphalism of liberal capitalism over communist totalitarianism after the disintegration of the USSR. Liberal democracy seemed to be the future of global politics and ‘the end of history’ since few alternatives could be imagined (Fukuyama 1992Fukuyama, Francis 1992 The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books.). Derrida challenges this metaphysics of history, which prescribes a teleological progression of time and the absolute stability of the present, as inherent in Fukuyama, Hegel, and Marx. Derrida proposes inheriting a certain facet of Marxism in conceiving the time to come, what he calls the specters of Marx — the spectral presence that pluralizes any stable moment in time and preserves a prophecy for alternatives and changes, with the prophecy eliciting the present’s ‘non-contemporaneity’ with itself (Derrida [1993] 1994Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge.; Saghafi 2011Saghafi, Kas 2011 “ ‘A Certain Spirit of a Certain Marx’: Blanchot’s Revolutionary Return in Specters of Marx .” Philosophy Today 55 (Supplement): 183–191. ). He does this without endorsing Marxism as a philosophy or implementing communism through certain party states. Since the early 1990s, Derrida’s Specters of Marx has inaugurated a spectral turn in contemporary theory and criticism (Sprinker 2008Sprinker, Michael ed. 2008 Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. London: Verso.; Blanco and Peeren 2013Blanco, María del Pilar, and Esther Peeren eds. 2013 The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.). In recent years, global economic and political instability — caused by pandemics, conflicts, and other social issues — has undermined people’s vision of a liberalized and globalized future in the post-Cold War era. This period of instability may serve as a privileged moment to re-contemplate Derrida’s spectrality and explore how it can enlighten us about the future world through the study of translation.

The notion of the specter is usually understood figuratively as a metaphor in Translation Studies and Cultural Studies. According to the editors of The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, “[a]t the end of the twentieth century, a specific metamorphosis occurred of ghosts and haunting from possible actual entities, plot devices, and clichés of common parlance […] into influential conceptual metaphors permeating global (popular) culture and academia alike” (Blanco and Peeren 2013Blanco, María del Pilar, and Esther Peeren eds. 2013 The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. New York: Bloomsbury Academic., 1). This collection takes Derrida’s spectrality as the inception of and catalyst for the spectral turn that began in the 1990s. When an entity is described using a conceptual metaphor, it is made analogous to the metaphorical concept in a non-literal sense. However, this figuration implies that the entity (and in the case of this article, translation) is not to be taken literally as the word in the metaphorical domain (in this case, specter). Understanding Derrida’s specters as purely a metaphor would risk overlooking other relations between the specter and translation.

At the intersection of spectrality and the study of translation, scholars tend to metaphorize reading or translation as a spectral activity that resurrects the past in the present setting. This metaphorization is distinctive in the translation of classical texts, such as ancient Greek tragedies, which were made readable in modern languages through translation, first in ancient Rome and later in the Renaissance — a reemergence of antiquity akin to the resurrection of specters (Usher 2014Usher, Phillip John 2014 “Tragedy and Translation.” In A Companion to Translation Studies, edited by Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter, 467–478. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. ). Scholars studying the modern-era translation of Euripides observe his “‘in-betweenness’ as a playwright caught between antiquity and modernity” (Strawson 2022Strawson, Harry 2022 “Spectres of Euripides: Time, Translation and Modernism in H.D.’s Euripides.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 29 (1): 50–82. , 51). The tragedian was translated in such a way that the characters “shockingly step out of ancient time into the present” (Gregory 2019Gregory, Eileen 2019 “H.D. and Euripedes: Ghostly Summoning.” In The Classics in Modernist Translation, edited by Miranda Hickman and Lynn Kozak, 121–128. London: Bloomsbury. , 121). Beyond tragedies in translation, texts written in the past can be regarded as ghosts revived in the present through reading and translation (Washbourne and Cruz-Martes 2024Washbourne, Kelly, and Camelly Cruz-Martes 2024 “Text as Haunt: The Spectrality of Translation.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 19 (1): 1–20. , 13–14). As Simon (2012Simon, Sherry 2012 Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory. London: Routledge., 159) puts it, “Languages are forms of historical memory. They reanimate the ghosts of the past.” Sometimes, translators — elusive figures who wander between various concepts, languages, and cultures — are metaphorized as ghosts (Philippi 1989Philippi, Donald 1989 “Translating Between Typologically Diverse Languages.” Meta: Translators’ Journal 34 (4): 680–681. , 680–681; Emmerich 2013Emmerich, Michael 2013 “Beyond, Between: Translation, Ghosts, Metaphors.” In Translation: Translators on their Work and What it Means, edited by Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky, 44–57. New York: Columbia University Press.; Washbourne and Cruz-Martes 2024Washbourne, Kelly, and Camelly Cruz-Martes 2024 “Text as Haunt: The Spectrality of Translation.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 19 (1): 1–20. , 10–11). Metaphorization can hinder us from seeing translations as hauntological beings themselves. Distinct from these existing studies, the current article focuses not on the ghosts that can be reanimated via translation in a metaphorical way but on how the specter may contribute to our understanding of time, past and present, when we study (re)translation and how it can be literally spectral in a Derridean sense.

The Derridean spectrality directly challenges three areas of discussion in contemporary Translation Studies: the temporal hierarchy between the initial translation and its repetitions, the centrality of the translation’s immediate sociohistorical context for description and explanation, and the presumed human predominance in translation decision-making. This study finds that translation may signal and respond to the future by showing inexplainable deviations from its contemporaneous norms. Such deviations may be inevitable and beyond human control. The theoretical approach employed in this study is a binocular vision of Derrida’s spectrality (Derrida [1993] 1994Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge.) and his earlier notion of différance (Derrida [1967] 1997Derrida, Jacques [1967] 1997 Of Grammatology [orig. De la grammatologie ]. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Corrected edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press., 1982Derrida, Jacques 1982 Margins of Philosophy [orig. Marges de la philosophie ]. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ). This combination shows that the différantial text performance can delay sense-making in translation, thereby surpassing the restriction of normative reading and reaching the time to come. The case study presented herein is the translation of specters in Western modernist literature in the 1988 People’s Republic of China (1949–), immediately before the USSR began to disintegrate. Despite the strict Marxist control over the translation of modernist literature, to which the translational agents were subjected, the translation shows deviations from the normative materialist reading, a phenomenon hardly explicable in its immediate context. These deviations are found to have foretold the liberalized future in the 1990s and 2000s beyond human intentions.

2.Specters: Repetition and the first time

On the cover of the initial English version of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International ([1993] 1994Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge.), the Prince of Denmark and Marcellus the guard behold the specter of the Old King Hamlet in horror. The specter emerges in his armor from head to toe. The helmet and visor cover its identity. The ghost is stepping forward, pointing to the future, demanding revenge. Three nights earlier, this apparition had been repeatedly witnessed by the guards Marcellus and Bernardo, and Horatio the scholar. It was predestined to return, so that the prince himself could be invited to converse with it:

Hamlet:I will watch to-night; Perchance ’twill walk again.

Horatio:I warrant it will.

(Hamlet Act I, Scene 2)
(Shakespeare 2003Shakespeare, William 2003 Hamlet. Edited by Burton Raffel. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. , 26)

Steiner (1998Steiner, George 1998 After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press., 4) writes that “Shakespeare at times seems to ‘hear’ inside a word or phrase the history of its future echoes.” Drawing upon this ghostly scene in Hamlet, Derrida’s idea of a specter is the reappearance of the deceased, which is destined to repeat itself and return in the future. The Derridean specter contests the temporal singularity and stability of any single moment in history, suggesting that it should be both imbricated with the shadows of the past and subject to the precursors of the time to come, what Derrida ([1993] 1994Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge., 25) calls the “non-contemporaneity of present time with itself.” In other words, the progression of time and history is believed not to be subject to absolute periodization, and a single moment in the passing of time can be a conglomerate of the remnants of the past, traces of the present, and signs of the future.

A Derridean spectral existence does not refer to the presence of some grotesque or appalling ghostly existence in flesh and blood, nor is it any supernatural or paranormal phenomenon. Derrida’s ([1993] 1994)Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. theory of spectrality is in continuation of his earlier interrogation of metaphysics in Western philosophy, which is traditionally based on an absolute and essential understanding of being (Derrida [1967] 1997Derrida, Jacques [1967] 1997 Of Grammatology [orig. De la grammatologie ]. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Corrected edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.; Derrida [1993] 1994Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge., 92). The Derridean specters are conceptualized to question the seemingly stable ontology and suggest an alternative state of being — the spectral state, or in other words, the hauntology (Derrida [1993] 1994Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge., 10, 51, 161). The word ‘hauntology’ is a semi-homophone of ontology in French. The pronunciation of this coinage oscillates between the two sounds in a similar way that the specter, as the haunting agent, destabilizes and disrupts the presumably unchanging, unfluctuating, and singular state of being, rendering it vacillating between the present, visible, and substantial and the absent, ineffective, and invisible, yet refusing to settle down at either one of them (Derrida [1993] 1994Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge., 6–10, 12).

Accentuated in Derrida’s notion of hauntology is the specter’s relation with time. A specter promises to come back again and again: “The specter, as its name indicates, is the frequency of a certain visibility” (Derrida [1993] 1994Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge., 100; emphasis original). The spectral agent, which destabilizes the ontology, the hauntological state of being, would repeat itself, engendering a rate of occurrence. Importantly, instead of seeing the ghost as merely a reemergence of the deceased, the Derridean specter is more of a revenant that comes from the future. Hauntology is the “repetition and first time” (ibid.; emphasis original). First, there comes the repetition, and then it gives rise to a first-time appearance that signals the fulfilment of a future event. From the perspective of the first time, then, the specter is a promise for its future return (Adams 2007Adams, Jill Petersen 2007 “Mourning, the Messianic, and the Specter: Derrida’s Appropriation of Benjamin in Specters of Marx .” Philosophy Today 51 (Supplement): 140–147. ). In other words, the event that destabilizes the existing presence in the present can be the first-time signal that precedes its future repetition: “There are several times of the specter [….] no one can be sure if by returning it testifies to a living past or to a living future, for the revenant may already mark the promised return of the specter of living being” (Derrida [1993] 1994Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge., 99; emphasis original). The specter’s promise for the future is based on Derrida’s reading of Marxism, specifically The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx [1852] 1979Marx, Karl [1852] 1979 “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [orig. Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte ].” In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 11, 99–197. New York: International Publishers.) (Derrida [1993] 1994Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge., 112) and The Communist Manifesto (Marx [1848] 1976Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels [1848] 1976 “Manifesto of the Communist Party [orig. Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei ].” In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 6, 477–519. Translated by Samuel Moore. New York: International Publishers.) (Derrida [1993] 1994Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge., 37–40). As Eagleton (1985Eagleton, Terry 1985 “Marxism and the Past.” Salmagundi 68/69: 271–290., 271) puts it: “For Marxist thinking […] the most crucial tense of all: the future.” In the Manifesto, for example, Marx “predicts” and “prescribes” that the specter, that is, the specter of communism, which could only discretely destabilize Europe in the 1840s would one day become a reality, and then, the specter can be seen as a sign of the future early on (Derrida [1993] 1994Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge., 101).

More specifically, from a Derridean perspective, the first-time spectral occurrence does not prescribe a fixed date as to when it will return in the future. The sense of certitude is less strong than that of being a precursor. The notion of ‘future’ does not refer to a foreseeable tomorrow but what is yet to be generated and refused to be assigned at a certain time — a temporal state called the “future-to-come” (Derrida [1993] 1994Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge., xix). When the “future-to-come” appears for the first time in Specters of Marx, the English translator clarifies in a footnote that Derrida has changed the usual form of the French word for ‘future’ as follows:

Derrida writes “l’à-venir,” which spaces out the ordinary word for the future, avenir, into the components of the infinitive: to come. Wherever this insistence recurs, we will translate “future-to-come,” but in general one should remember that even in the ordinary translation as simply “future,” avenir has the sense of a coming, an advent.(Kamuf in Derrida [1993] 1994Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge., 177)

The “future-to-come” refers to something that is to happen in a temporally undefined tomorrow — “not something that is certain to happen tomorrow […] and thus the memory of that which carries the future, the to-come, here and now” (Derrida 1992aDerrida, Jacques 1992a The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe [orig. L’autre cap, suivi de la démocratie ajournée ]. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. , 78; emphasis original). In other words, something ‘to come’, as signaled by the specter, is the shadow cast by the future event that is yet to happen at an unknown date: “Turned toward the future, going toward it, it [the revenant] also comes from it, it proceeds from [provient de] the future” (Derrida [1993] 1994Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge., xix). In Section 6 I will show, with the notion of différance, how, on the textual level, the ghostly deviation in translation has circumvented the ideological constraint and foreshowed the future to come, the date of which, from the perspective of the initial translation, is only vaguely known.

3.A spectral intervention of (Re)translation Studies under descriptive conventions

Bringing Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx into contemporary studies of (re)translation may interrogate three areas of discussion: the teleological and linear temporal logic in the study of diachronic retranslation (Berman 1990Berman, Antoine 1990 “La retraduction comme espace de la traduction [Retranslation as a space of translation].” Palimpsestes 4: 1–7. ; Chesterman 2000Chesterman, Andrew 2000 “A Causal Model for Translation Studies.” In Intercultural Faultlines: Research Models in Translation Studies I: Textual and Cognitive Aspects, edited by Maeve Olohan, 15–28. Manchester: St. Jerome., 2004Chesterman, Andrew 2004 “Hypotheses about Translation Universals.” In Claims, Changes and Challenges in Translation Studies: Selected Contributions from the EST Congress, Copenhagen 2001, edited by Gyde Hansen, Kirsten Malmkjaer, and Daniel Gile, 1–14. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ; Koskinen and Paloposki 2015Koskinen, Kaisa, and Outi Paloposki 2015 “Anxieties of Influence: The Voice of the First Translator in Retranslation.” In Voice in Retranslation, edited by Cecilia Alvstad and Alexandra Assis Rosa, special issue of Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 27 (1): 25–39. ), the centrality of a translation’s contemporaneous socio-historical context in describing and explaining the translation (Toury 2012Toury, Gideon 2012 Descriptive Translation Studies — and Beyond. Rev. ed. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ), and the presumed predominance of human agents in translation decision-making.

Scholars tend to structure a translation and its repetitions in successive order based on their time of publication. This linear temporal sequence can be seen in the established definitions of diachronic retranslation in the past two decades. For example, retranslation refers to “a second or later translation of a single source text into the same target language” (Koskinen and Paloposki 2010Koskinen, Kaisa, and Outi Paloposki 2010 “Retranslation.” In Handbook of Translation Studies, volume 1, edited by Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, 294–298. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. , 294), and similarly, the “subsequent translations of a text, or part of a text, carried out after the initial translation which had introduced this text to the same target language” (Susam-Sarajeva 2003Susam-Sarajeva, Şebnem 2003 “Multiple-Entry Visa to Travelling Theory: Retranslations of Literary and Cultural Theories.” Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 15 (1): 1–36. , 135). Here, retranslations are temporally positioned in relation to the initial translation and are numbered and viewed as being later based on the time when they are produced. While the sequence has been established, the initial translation tends to be seen as the inception of a retranslation chain that later translations are bound to encounter. In other words, “all retranslators are forced to develop a stance towards the predecessor” (Koskinen and Paloposki 2015Koskinen, Kaisa, and Outi Paloposki 2015 “Anxieties of Influence: The Voice of the First Translator in Retranslation.” In Voice in Retranslation, edited by Cecilia Alvstad and Alexandra Assis Rosa, special issue of Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 27 (1): 25–39. , 25). The predecessor is conceived as being an acquiescent position to be handled. For example, a retranslation may validate the authority of previous translations or challenge existing ones to distinguish themselves (Pym 1998Pym, Anthony 1998 Method in Translation History. Manchester: St. Jerome., 83; Venuti 2003Venuti, Lawrence 2003 “Retranslations: The Creation of Value.” Bucknell Review 47 (1): 25–38., 26–27). This unidirectional response of retranslations, as proposed by scholars, has both disempowered the agency of the initial translation in that it is regarded as being passive, and diminished the power of the following translations, as they are seen as secondary and possibly derivative. This article suggests that an alternative temporal relationship exists between (re)translations to this linear hierarchy. Neither the initial nor the subsequent translations are passive or derivative. They can already converse with one another at the time when the initial translation is made; the initial translation may respond to a future retranslation that is yet to come, and the retranslation may include a repetition of the first-time signal, as entailed in the initial translation.

When there is a clear, unproblematic, linear sequence of diachronic retranslations, scholars tend to spontaneously conceptualize a teleological culmination. Since 1990, contemporary to Francis Fukuyama’s (1992)Fukuyama, Francis 1992 The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books. ‘end of history’ thesis, Translation Studies scholars have started to conceive the end of retranslations as the canonization of a great translation. Bensimon (1990)Bensimon, Paul 1990 “Présentation [Presentation].” Palimpsestes 4: iv–xiii. believes that retranslation is a process that gradually restores the quality of the source text, which is lacking in the initial translation. Berman (1990)Berman, Antoine 1990 “La retraduction comme espace de la traduction [Retranslation as a space of translation].” Palimpsestes 4: 1–7. suggests that the initial translation may contain imperfections that would be corrected by the upcoming retranslations until the appearance of a great canonical rendition. In the twenty-first century, this linear development has often been articulated as the Retranslation Hypothesis. The hypothesis maintains that later translations would draw closer to the source text so that they rehabilitate the foreign quality, which is likely to be compromised in earlier translations (Gambier 1994Gambier, Yves 1994 “La retraduction, retour et détour [Retranslation, return, and detour].” Meta: Journal des Traducteurs 39 (3): 413–533. ; Chesterman 2000Chesterman, Andrew 2000 “A Causal Model for Translation Studies.” In Intercultural Faultlines: Research Models in Translation Studies I: Textual and Cognitive Aspects, edited by Maeve Olohan, 15–28. Manchester: St. Jerome., 2004Chesterman, Andrew 2004 “Hypotheses about Translation Universals.” In Claims, Changes and Challenges in Translation Studies: Selected Contributions from the EST Congress, Copenhagen 2001, edited by Gyde Hansen, Kirsten Malmkjaer, and Daniel Gile, 1–14. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ). This hypothesis may have conceptually disempowered the agency of the initial translation even further. Moreover, in this conceptualization, the stages of retranslation do not imbricate on one another. They are arranged along a scale of gradation, and each phase of retranslation is unaffected by the traces of the previous and the signals of the following translations.

The Retranslation Hypothesis has been disputed since the early 2000s. Scholars find that retranslations can approximate the target text rather than the source text in the course of time, which is contrariwise to the hypothesis (Bywood 2019Bywood, Lindsay 2019 “Testing the Retranslation Hypothesis for Audiovisual Translation: The Films of Volker Schlöndorff Subtitled into English.” Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice 27 (6): 815–832. ; Gerber 2024Gerber, Leah 2024 “Fourth Time Lucky? Retranslations of Erich Kästner’s Emil und die Detektive .” Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice (advance online publication): 1–16.). They also find that the chronological order of translation does not define the closeness of translation to the source text, while contextual factors and the target audience can also exert an impact (Koskinen and Paloposki 2003Koskinen, Kaisa, and Outi Paloposki 2003 “Retranslations in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” Cadernos de Tradução [Translation notebooks] 1 (11): 19–38.; Brownlie 2006Brownlie, Siobhan 2006 “Narrative Theory and Retranslation Theory.” Across Languages and Cultures 7 (2): 145–170. ; Paloposki and Koskinen 2010Paloposki, Outi, and Kaisa Koskinen 2010 “Reprocessing Texts, the Fine Line between Retranslating and Revising.” Across Languages and Cultures 11 (1): 29–49. ). In this article, I intend to liberate retranslation from a linear temporal logic whereby one translation takes place after another, but instead see them as the “repetition and first time” (Derrida [1993] 1994Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge., 100; emphasis original). A retranslation may live in the shade cast by its predecessor and give signals to its reiterations in the future.

Interlacing with this unidirectional temporal linearity in retranslation research is the descriptive approach to Translation Studies. Descriptive Translation Studies, as envisaged by Toury (2012Toury, Gideon 2012 Descriptive Translation Studies — and Beyond. Rev. ed. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. , 9–10), aims to formulate laws of translation under “specifiable conditions” and thereby conceptualize regularities and patterns of translation behaviors in the contexts and cultures concerned. In other words, the descriptive approach probes into the translation’s ‘contemporaneity’ with its surrounding context and risks overlooking the possibility that the translation may converse beyond its immediate temporal surroundings. As Pym (1998Pym, Anthony 1998 Method in Translation History. Manchester: St. Jerome., 108) suggests, “one of the common shortcomings of historical studies — and indeed of contemporary translation theory — is the assumption that texts are wholly determined by their communicative contexts and immediate purposes.” Ever since the mid-1990s, in line with this descriptive, contextualizing method to retranslation exemplified by Toury (2012)Toury, Gideon 2012 Descriptive Translation Studies — and Beyond. Rev. ed. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. , researchers have segmented time in a string of (re)translations and described and explained how each translation performs according to the norms of the sociohistorical context within its corresponding segment (Du-Nour 1995Du-Nour, Miryam 1995 “Retranslation of Children’s Books as Evidence of Changes of Norms.” Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 7 (2): 327–346. ; Vanderschelden 2000Vanderschelden, Isabelle 2000 “Why Retranslate the French Classics? The Impact of Retranslation on Quality.” In On Translating French Literature and Film II, edited by Myriam Salama-Carr, 1–18. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ; Deane-Cox 2014Deane-Cox, Sharon 2014 Retranslation: Translation, Literature and Reinterpretation. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ; Cadera and Walsh 2017Cadera, Susanne M., and Andrew Samuel Walsh eds. 2017 Literary Retranslation in Context. Oxford: Peter Lang.; Albachten and Tahir Gürçağlar 2019Albachten, Özlem Berk, and Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar eds. 2019 Perspectives on Retranslation: Ideology, Paratexts, Methods. New York: Routledge.; Van Poucke and Sanz Gallego 2019Van Poucke, Piet, and Guillermo Sanz Gallego eds. 2019 Retranslation in Context. Special issue of Cadernos de tradução [Translation notebooks] 39 (1).). The external factors and causations are sometimes multiple (Pym 1998Pym, Anthony 1998 Method in Translation History. Manchester: St. Jerome.; Chesterman 2000Chesterman, Andrew 2000 “A Causal Model for Translation Studies.” In Intercultural Faultlines: Research Models in Translation Studies I: Textual and Cognitive Aspects, edited by Maeve Olohan, 15–28. Manchester: St. Jerome.; Paloposki and Koskinen 2010Paloposki, Outi, and Kaisa Koskinen 2010 “Reprocessing Texts, the Fine Line between Retranslating and Revising.” Across Languages and Cultures 11 (1): 29–49. ; O’Driscoll 2011O’Driscoll, Kieran 2011 Retranslation through the Centuries: Jules Verne in English. Oxford: Peter Lang. ), forming a rhizomatic structure (Brownlie 2006Brownlie, Siobhan 2006 “Narrative Theory and Retranslation Theory.” Across Languages and Cultures 7 (2): 145–170. ) or complex system (Albachten and Tahir Gürçağlar 2019Albachten, Özlem Berk, and Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar eds. 2019 Perspectives on Retranslation: Ideology, Paratexts, Methods. New York: Routledge.), but they are still believed to be discernible and explicable. This descriptive approach to Retranslation Studies presumes the singularity and absolute unity of the present in each (re)translation. Williams (1977Williams, Raymond 1977 Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press., 121) would call it an “epochal” reading, noting that the dominant feature of a certain time gets the most attention, yet the residual culture from the past and the emerging element which would become dominant in the future are disregarded.

Several studies have noted that norms in different time periods can exist simultaneously, contrary to the linear hegemony concept in Retranslation Studies. For example, Brownlie (2006Brownlie, Siobhan 2006 “Narrative Theory and Retranslation Theory.” Across Languages and Cultures 7 (2): 145–170. , 165) finds that the strategies which should have belonged to different time periods in the retranslation of Zola’s Nana (1884Zola, Emile 1884 Nana: A Realistic Novel [orig. Nana ]. Translated without Abridgment. London: Vizetelly & Company.) had existed in the same historical setting in different versions, with the “past text ‘haunting’ present ones.” Bollaert (2019Bollaert, Charlotte 2019 “Jean-Paul Sartre’s Theater after Communism: Perpetuating the Past through Non-Retranslation?” In Retranslation in Context, edited by Piet van Poucke and Guillermo Sanz Gallego, special issue of Cadernos de Tradução [Translation notebooks] 39 (1): 45–72., 45) uses the term “double normativity” to refer to the coexistence between the reprints of the translation of Jean-Paul Sartre produced in the Soviet era and the new translation after the Cold War in Russian, recognizing the lingering Soviet influence in the present in the form of a reprint. However, both scholars suggest that the coexistence of renditions in different time periods is brought about by human intentions to serve a present purpose.

Underlying the descriptive analysis of retranslations is the accentuated agency of humans. When translations contradict norms, such situations are usually explained as intended by the human translational agent. The rule–idiosyncrasy scale in Descriptive Translation Studies (Toury 2012Toury, Gideon 2012 Descriptive Translation Studies — and Beyond. Rev. ed. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ) implies that deviations from and violations of norms are attributable to translators themselves. For example, more established translators are believed to have the freedom to violate norms (Boulogne 2019Boulogne, Pieter 2019 “And Now, Something Completely New… The Same Book by Dostoevsky: A (Con)textual Analysis of the First and Most Recent Retranslations of Dostoevsky into Dutch.” In Retranslation in Context, edited by Piet van Poucke and Guillermo Sanz Gallego, special issue of Cadernos de Tradução [Translation notebooks] 39 (1): 117–144.). At other times, these deviations are caused by a lack of self-censorship and conformity (Walsh 2019Walsh, Andrew Samuel 2019 “Retranslating Lorca’s ‘Ode to Walt Whitman’: From Taboo to Totem.” In Perspectives on Retranslation: Ideology, Paratexts, Methods, edited by Özlem Berk Albachten and Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, 11–27. New York: Routledge.), or by the subjectivity and individuality of the translators (Brownlie 2006Brownlie, Siobhan 2006 “Narrative Theory and Retranslation Theory.” Across Languages and Cultures 7 (2): 145–170. ; Paloposki and Koskinen 2010Paloposki, Outi, and Kaisa Koskinen 2010 “Reprocessing Texts, the Fine Line between Retranslating and Revising.” Across Languages and Cultures 11 (1): 29–49. ). These attributions endorse the belief that humans have unambiguous control over translation, an anthropocentric view that underlies and is preliminary to studies of translation and norms. “Translation is increasingly seen as a process, a form of human behavior” (Chesterman 1993Chesterman, Andrew 1993 “From ‘Is’ to ‘Ought’: Laws, Norms and Strategies in Translation Studies.” Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 5 (1): 1–20. , 2) — specifically, a rational human behavior, and thus “we need to assume that human translators are rational beings, and that their translation behavior is governed by rational decisions” (13). This view implies that if rationality is applied, strands of influence can be delineated within human society in a certain historical context, however complex they may be. Human translators can exert their agency in perceiving and responding to the context in which they inhabit and personalize norms (Simeoni 1998Simeoni, Daniel 1998 “The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus.” Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 10 (1): 1–39. ). In recent years, the role of human agency in the establishment and negotiation of norms has been accentuated, as researchers are asking, “[s]o where do ‘people’ come in?” (Hu 2020Hu, Bei 2020 “How Are Translation Norms Negotiated? A Case Study of Risk Management in Chinese Institutional Translation.” Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 32 (1): 83–122. , 88). Humans are conventionally seen as the dominant agents that conduct translation decision-making.

The proposal to introduce an additional agent in translation, that of the specter, is not to suggest that there exists a supernatural being that accompanies the human in carrying out translation. Rather, the specter is an aspect of textuality that cannot be limited to interpretations of the time and space of the translation. The specter is an intrinsic element of temporality that disrupts the linear sequence of time. The spectral view of (re)translation suggests that we may surrender to the possibility that translation may not respond to its immediate surroundings and that translation may engender uncontrollable deviations from norms that cannot be explained by its contemporaneous context or the translators themselves.

The inexplicable deviations from norms in translation have been investigated previously. They tend to be ascribed to human factors, context, and existing conventions of language. For example, they may be attributed to the chance and randomness caused by cognitive errors (Cohen 2018Cohen, Imogen 2018 “On Randomness.” Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 30 (1): 3–23. ) and the unconscious mind (Venuti 2002Venuti, Lawrence 2002 “The Difference that Translation Makes: The Translator’s Unconscious.” In Translation Studies: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline, edited by Alessandra Riccardi, 214–241. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.). Apart from the translator, textuality is also believed to be a factor that can determine translation and may render the outcome uncontrollable: “Languages and textuality, the functioning of texts, have a force of their own and a certain determining power with regard to translational phenomena” (Brownlie 2003Brownlie, Siobhan 2003 “Investigating Explanations of Translational Phenomena: A Case for Multiple Causality.” Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 15 (1): 111–152. , 120). However, the power and force that Brownlie recognizes are required by the linguistic and lexical conventions of the language, which are relatively stable and such that the translator may decide to employ them. They are not the unconfined potentialities of text per se that may transcend the external linguistic and textual conventions of any fixed moment (Chapman 2019Chapman, Edmund 2019 The Afterlife of Texts in Translation: Understanding the Messianic in Literature. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. ), which Derrida (1982Derrida, Jacques 1982 Margins of Philosophy [orig. Marges de la philosophie ]. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. , 24) describes as follows: “It [text] is not surrounded but rather traversed by its limit, marked in its interior by the multiple furrow of its margin.” Similarly, while scholars believe that the meaning of texts can be non-stable and non-essential, which may give rise to unpredictable interpretations in translation, they still insist that this non-essentialism is ultimately bound by the context — “meanings are always context-bound. Depending on our viewpoint and our circumstances, we may perceive them to be either ‘more’ or ‘less’ stable but all of them are always equally dependent on a certain context” (Arrojo, in Chesterman and Arrojo 2000Chesterman, Andrew, and Rosemary Arrojo 2000 “Shared Ground in Translation Studies.” Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 12 (1): 151–160. , 158). Based on this premise, randomness and deviations in translation may still be retraced to certain contextual factors. However, text may not be interpreted historically, in the sense that it would not be confined to an immovable point in time in the bound of the historical context that surrounds it; otherwise, it would have been an obstinate way of text interpretation (Gadamer 2013Gadamer, Hans-Georg 2013 Truth and Method [orig. Wahrheit und Methode ]. Translated by William Glen-Doepel. Translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Bloomsbury Academic., 406). Instead, textual interpretation can extend beyond fixed points in time and history. Complementing the existing literature on inexplicable deviations, I focus on cases in which text performance refuses to be contextualized, to be controlled by human agents, or to conform to existing norms. Most importantly, deviations from norms may not be undesirable defects that break an established regularity in translation, but they may be inevitable and can tell us what the future retranslation looks like.

4.Disjointed time and modernist haunting in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

The People’s Republic of China (1949–) is a socialist state in East Asia, where the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology had been dominant from the late 1940s to the late 1970s and lingered until the early 1990s (Goldman 1999Goldman, Merle 1999 “Politically-Engaged Intellectuals in the 1990s.” In The People’s Republic of China after 50 Years, edited by Richard Louis Edmonds, special issue of The China Quarterly (London) 159: 700–711. , 701–703). In 1992, the People’s Republic of China consolidated its market-oriented economic reform and gradually assimilated itself into the global capitalist modernity. Along with this, “[t]otalitarianism failed as well in the People’s Republic of China” (Fukuyama 1992Fukuyama, Francis 1992 The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books., 33). The market economy ineluctably mitigated leftist control in the cultural field, including the arts, literature, and the translation of foreign literature.

The data analyzed in this article are translations of spectral presence in Western modernist literature, specifically in To the Lighthouse by the English writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), first published in 1927. To the Lighthouse takes up “the central position among Woolf’s nine novels” (Dick 1992Dick, Susan 1992 “Introduction.” In To the Lighthouse, edited by Susan Dick, xi–xxxvii. Oxford: Blackwell for the Shakespeare Head Press., xi) and has been extensively researched throughout the years (see Pease 2015Pease, Allison ed. 2015 The Cambridge Companion to To the Lighthouse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.). The novel was fully translated and introduced to China in 1988. The novel features an experiment with time and the portrayal of ghosts. The ghostly depiction in this novel violates both historical materialism (that time should be linear and teleological) and dialectical materialism (that spirits cannot exist independently from materials) — the Marxist reading which had dominated the interpretation and translation of Western modernist literature in 1980s China.

The Chinese translation of To the Lighthouse in the late 1980s (Woolf 1988Woolf, Virginia 1988 达洛卫夫人, 到灯塔去 [orig. Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse ]. Translated by Sun Liang, Su Mei, and Qu Shijing. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House.) compared to its translation in the early 2000s (Woolf 2001Woolf, Virginia 2001 达洛维夫人, 到灯塔去, 雅各布之屋 [orig. Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Jacob’s Room ]. Translated by Wang Jiaxiang. Nanjing: Yilin Press.) may serve as a useful set of data for conceptualizing a spectral view of (re)translation. First, the novel features spectral depictions, and the translation of the ghosts conspicuously show the responses of the two versions to the materialist norm in the 1980s and its decline in the 2000s. Second, the late 1980s translation of ghosts in Western modernism in socialist China can be seen as a contemporaneous reflection of Derrida’s spectrality theory in the form of translation — seemingly, the ghost depicted in the novel was almost doomed to be exorcised in the 1988 translation, but counterintuitively, it survived the exorcism and managed to return in 2001, akin to the spectrality of text that circumvents its temporal restriction and converses with the future. However, using text that features ghostly depictions does not mean that the spectral view of (re)translation is only applicable to the translation of haunting stories. Instead, I suggest that the spectral feature is relevant to (re)translation in general.

As part of Woolf’s modernist experiment, time is not depicted as linear and progressive in this novel but could be ‘folded’, with the past coming close to and impinging on the present. When the characters recall the past, they see the past scene in front of their eyes again. In the modern era, the absolute time in Newtonian cosmology since the Enlightenment has been brought into question (Lewis 1927Lewis, Wyndham 1927 Time and Western Man. London: Chatto and Windus.). Arts, science, and philosophy had all responded to this newly convoluted perception of time, most prominently in the theory of relativity by Albert Einstein, Henri Bergson’s concept of la durée, and the notion of Dasein by Martin Heidegger (Lewis 1927Lewis, Wyndham 1927 Time and Western Man. London: Chatto and Windus.; Scott 2006Scott, David 2006 “The Concept of Time and the Being of the Clock: Bergson, Einstein, Heidegger, and the Interrogation of the Temporality of Modernism.” Continental Philosophy Review 39: 183–213. ; Galison 2003Galison, Peter Louis 2003 Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.). In the modernist literature, confusion and complexity in relation to time are ubiquitous (see, e.g., Tung 2019Tung, M. Charles 2019 Modernism and Time Machines. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.). In Woolf’s high modernist novels, the present is constantly covered by a layer of the past (Richter 1970Richter, Harvena 1970 Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage. Princeton: Princeton University Press.; Gorsky 1989Gorsky, Susan Rubinow 1989 Virginia Woolf. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne.; Starck 2016Starck, Lindsay 2016 “The Matter of Literary Memory: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Ian McEwan’s Saturday .” Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies 9 (3): 328–344. ): “In Virginia Woolf’s novels, we can observe how the past weighs more and more heavily until it dominates and overshadows the present moment” (Hasler 1982Hasler, Jörg 1982 “Virginia Woolf and the Chimes of Big Ben.” English Studies 63 (2): 145–158. , 157). The ghostly depiction in To the Lighthouse, the reappearance of the dead in the present setting, is a representation of this complexity of time. The figure who had died and who should have been seen in the past only appears in the present and is witnessed by people who are still alive, evoking a haunting scene.11.For the literature on modernist haunting, see Thurston (2014)Thurston, Luke 2014 Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval. London: Routledge., Darvay (2016)Darvay, Daniel 2016 Haunting Modernity and the Gothic Presence in British Modernist Literature. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. , and Foley (2017)Foley, Matt 2017 Haunting Modernisms: Ghostly Aesthetics, Mourning, and Spectral Resistance. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. .

The ghosts appear in To the Lighthouse in the middle and final chapters. The novel comprises three chapters, namely “The Window,” “Time Passes,” and “The Lighthouse.” “The Window” depicts one evening in 1910 in the Ramsays’ summer house at the Isle of Skye. James Ramsay, the youngest child of the family, wanted to go to the lighthouse the next day, but his father disapproves of the idea because of the bad weather foreseen. In “Time Passes,” which portrays one night following the evening in “The Window,” the family has left the house deserted. As part of Woolf’s literary experiment with time, this night covers a period of ten years. During this decade, a war has broken out, and Mrs. Ramsay and two of her children have passed away. In the last section, “The Lighthouse,” the rest of the family and some of their guests from ten years previously, including Lily Briscoe the painter, return to the summer house in one morning. Mr. Ramsay and the two youngest children finally make their trip to the lighthouse. Lily Briscoe finishes her painting, left ten years ago.

The haunting scenes take place in “Time Passes” and “The Lighthouse.” After Mrs. Ramsay’s death, Mrs. McNab, the housekeeper in “Time Passes” and one of the few human agents in the abandoned house, witnesses the specter of the matriarch. Lily Briscoe, the protagonist in “The Lighthouse,” sees Mrs. Ramsay sitting in the chair as she had done ten years ago, before Lily herself is about to finish the painting. Mrs. Ramsay’s reappearance in these two scenes is conceived in the characters’ minds, but the mental phenomenon of the ghost has been materialized and rendered into visible existence, initiating the haunting. In other words, the return of the dead is “an explanation of […] the human psyche through pictorial representations of striking physical appearances” (Darvay 2016Darvay, Daniel 2016 Haunting Modernity and the Gothic Presence in British Modernist Literature. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. , 131). The specter of Mrs. Ramsay exists independently of any material base and is given a visible presence in the physical world. The two haunting scenes in the novel will be the focal points in the case studies.

To the Lighthouse was published simultaneously in the UK by Hogarth Press and in the US by Harcourt and World in 1927. Miscellaneous differences exist between the two versions, and the British and American editions have given rise to their own lineages of textual production (Briggs and McKenzie 1999Briggs, Julia, and Donald Francis McKenzie 1999 “Between the Texts: Virginia Woolf’s Acts of Revision.” Text (New York) 12: 143–165., 144). Information about the source text used is available on the copyright pages of both translations, published in 1988 and 2001. The initial translation in 1988 (Woolf 1988Woolf, Virginia 1988 达洛卫夫人, 到灯塔去 [orig. Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse ]. Translated by Sun Liang, Su Mei, and Qu Shijing. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House.) refers to the Harcourt, Brace, and World Inc. edition (1955) of the novel in the American lineage, while the 2001 retranslation used the Granada (1981) edition, a British reprint. The Granada (1981) impression used by the 2001 translation is inaccessible, but this edition was found to have been reprinted by Granada (the later Grafton Books owned by the Collins Publishing Group) multiple times in the 1970s and 1980s. To ensure the accuracy of the source text, an identical 1985 reprint of Granada (1981) by Grafton Books, as identified by ISBN record and WorldCat catalogue, has been used in this study. In the case studies involved, no variation between Woolf (1955)Woolf, Virginia 1955 To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. and Woolf (1985)Woolf, Virginia 1985 To the Lighthouse. London: Grafton Books. was found, so I reference the Harcourt, Brace, and World edition of 1955 used by the initial translation.

5.Performing within the norms: The renditions of the ghost in the 1988 and 2001 Chinese translations of To the Lighthouse

In this section, I show how human translational agents have intended to conform to the Chinese literary and translational norms in the 1980s; that is, literary translation was required to serve socialism with an interpretation of novels based on historical and dialectical materialism. The translator, commissioner, and publisher of the 1988 version were all aware of and tried to adhere to this normative materialist reading in the 1980s. As a result, the ghost of the deceased which comes to haunt the characters in the novel is largely eliminated and exorcised in this initial translation. The 2001 retranslation, however, is found not to be affected by any overt ideological constraint in the twenty-first century marketization and commercialization. Instead, this retranslation appears relatively liberal, and allows Mrs. Ramsay’s ghost to exist. In Section 6, with this normative reading in mind, I show how the ghost still appears in the 1988 translation despite the strong human control.

In the Republican era of China (1912–1949), a time contemporary to Woolf’s writing career, the writer had already had a Chinese readership in the mainland. The translation of Woolf in Republican China was relatively liberal, but fragmented and occasional. This pre-socialist Chinese translation of Woolf includes her essays The Mark on the Wall (1912), Flush: A Biography (1933), and a sixty-two-page excerpt of To the Lighthouse (1927) (Yang 2009Yang, Lixin 2009 20 世纪文坛上的英伦百合:弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫在中国 [ The 20th century English female writer: Virginia Woolf in China ]. Beijing: People’s Publishing House.). After the communist takeover in 1949, however, while the newly founded People’s Republic was undergoing socialist construction based on the Soviet model, socialist realism, which originated from the Soviet Union, became the norm for both literary writing (Chung 1996Chung, Hilary ed. 1996 In the Party Spirit: Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China. Amsterdam: Brill Rodopi. ) and the selection of foreign literature for translation (Wang 2015Wang, Xiulu 2015 Bridging the Political and the Personal: Literary Translation in Contemporary China. Bern: Peter Lang.). Socialist realism aims to reflect the construction of an industrialized and classless society rather than presenting the internal and subjective perceptions of individuals (Bent 2022Bent, Maria 2022 “Virginia Woolf’s Literary Heritage in Russian Translations and Interpretations.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature, edited by Jeanne Dubino, Paulina Pająk, Catherine W. Hollis, Celiese Lypka, and Vara Neverow, 132–151. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press., 134–135). From 1949 to the early 1960s, Soviet literature was translated on a large scale, as was the literature of other socialist states, including Vietnam, North Korea, Romania, Cuba, and Albania (Kaple 1994Kaple, Deborah A. 1994 Dream of a Red Factory: The Legacy of High Stalinism in China. Oxford: Oxford University Press. , 13–18; Zha and Xie 2007aZha, Mingjian, and Xie Tianzhen 2007a 中国20世纪外国文学翻译史-上卷 [ A history of foreign literature translation in 20th century China, volume 1 ]. Wuhan: Hubei Education Press., 568, 588–606). Certain Western classics by Shakespeare, Cervantes, Balzac, Hugo, Dickens, and Thomas Hardy had also been translated in the 1950s People’s Republic of China, as they could be interpreted as ‘anti-feudal’ in a Marxist sense or serve to reveal the cruelty of the capitalist society (Zha and Xie 2007aZha, Mingjian, and Xie Tianzhen 2007a 中国20世纪外国文学翻译史-上卷 [ A history of foreign literature translation in 20th century China, volume 1 ]. Wuhan: Hubei Education Press., 570–571). However, twentieth-century modernism, with its intense focus on the characters’ consciousness and internal world, and bizarre and alienated representation of reality, had been labelled as the cultural artifact of bourgeois intelligentsia and denounced as decadent works of art. Modernist works could not motivate nor boost morale for socialist modernization. Depictions of ghosts, which invalidate the primary position of the material world and the linear course of modernization, would be a jarring sound in the construction (Yang 2009Yang, Lixin 2009 20 世纪文坛上的英伦百合:弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫在中国 [ The 20th century English female writer: Virginia Woolf in China ]. Beijing: People’s Publishing House., 140). For this reason, Woolf and her modernist contemporaries, such as Marcel Proust and T. S. Eliot, had remained untouched in translation during this early socialist period (131–141). During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), China had experienced continuous class struggles under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Most foreign literature was regarded as toxic, reactionary, and pornographic, and, therefore, obliterated. The translation and study of foreign literature, accordingly, were seen as an “excessive admiration of foreign culture” and were likely to encounter persecution (Zha and Xie 2007bZha, Mingjian, and Xie Tianzhen 2007b 中国20世纪外国文学翻译史-下卷 [ A history of foreign literature translation in 20th century China, volume 2 ]. Wuhan: Hubei Education Press., 786). The next time Woolf met the Chinese public was already in the 1980s.

The introduction of Western modernism resumed during the reform and opening-up period (1978–) after the Mao era ended in 1976. Faced with a deteriorating state economy in its urban and rural areas (Walder 2015Walder, Andrew G. 2015 China under Mao: A Revolution Derailed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. , 315–333), China ended the perpetual class struggles and turned its focus to economic development. In the reform era, the country started to introduce foreign capital and investments, conduct market-oriented economic reforms, develop the manufacturing industry, and promote exports (Zhang 2019Zhang, Yuyan 2019 “China’s Opening Up: Idea, Process and Logic.” Social Sciences in China 40 (2): 134–151. ), an embrace of global capitalism which was in tandem with an increased level of cultural tolerance and diversity. In November 1978, the National Conference on Foreign Literature Research Planning (全国外国文学研究工作规划会议 quán guó wài guó wén xué yán jiū gōng zuò guī huà huì yì ) was held in Guangzhou, China, by the School of Foreign Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, to discuss the future policy of Foreign Literature Studies. There were plans to introduce twentieth-century Western literature, modernism included, in translation. This translation aimed to inform the Chinese readership of world literature after decades of cultural isolation beginning in 1949 (Foreign Literature Studies 1979Foreign Literature Studies 1979 “全国外国文学研究工作规划会议在广州召开 [The National Conference on Foreign Literature Research Planning was held in Guangzhou].” Foreign Literature Studies 1979 (1): 105–107., 106).

However, the translation of foreign literature in the 1980s was not a liberal acceptance of Western literature but a reconciliation with it, under Marxism. Although the People’s Republic of China had embarked on market-oriented economic reforms and started to welcome diversity, the country was still adhering to the ‘Four Cardinal Principles’ as prescribed by Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), the vice chairman of the Central Committee of Communist Party of China, and the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. The Four Cardinal Principles refer to “the socialist road, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party], and Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong thought” as “the basic prerequisite for achieving modernization” (translated in Gewirtz 2022Gewirtz, Julian 2022 Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press., 31–32). In other words, China was assimilating capitalist elements to modernize its economy, while still adhering to socialism. The contention between this lingering leftist ideology promoted by the officialdom and the gradually liberalized cultural field as an actual fact — whether it was indigenous modernism, such as post-socialist creative writing, or imported foreign culture, such as translated modernism (Gewirtz 2022Gewirtz, Julian 2022 Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.) — had existed throughout the 1980s. Even when the reform was initiated in the late 1970s, the officialdom had started to worry that the exposure to Western culture would liberalize the belief system of Chinese people and threaten the leadership of the communist party (Gold 1984Gold, Thomas B. 1984 “ ‘Just in Time!’: China Battles Spiritual Pollution on the Eve of 1984.” Asian Survey 24 (9): 947–974. , 948).

Consequently, as early as 1979, the party leaders had advocated the cultivation of a “socialist spiritual civilization,” which required people to keep upholding Marxist tenets and communist morales in their value systems, at a time when the country was assimilating into global capitalist modernity (Baum 1994Baum, Richard 1994 Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping. Princeton: Princeton University Press. , 143–144). “Without a spiritual civilization, without communist thought and morality, how could we build socialism?” asked Deng Xiaoping in 1980 (translated in Baum 1994Baum, Richard 1994 Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping. Princeton: Princeton University Press. , 144). Deng believed that socialist morales should be maintained as a prerequisite for China’s Western-style modernization under socialism (144, 148–149) and envisaged that socialist spiritual civilization could co-exist with capitalist socioeconomic modernity (Baum 1997Baum, Richard 1997 “The Road to Tiananmen: Chinese Politics in the 1980s.” In The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng, edited by Roderick MacFarquhar, 340–471. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 342). The idea to construct a “socialist spiritual civilization” was officially endorsed at the Twelfth National Congress of the Communist Party in 1982 (Baum 1994Baum, Richard 1994 Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping. Princeton: Princeton University Press. , 144) and was maintained throughout the 1980s as a way of upholding the ‘Four Cardinal Principles’ (The Beijing Professor Lecture Group, 1st Divisional Editing Group 1989The Beijing Professor Lecture Group, 1st Divisional Editing Group, eds 1989 坚持四项基本原则、反对资产阶级自由化问答 [ Questions and answers on adhering to the Four Cardinal Principles and anti-bourgeois liberalization ]. Beijing: Changzheng Publishing House., 309–310). The 1983–1984 Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign and the 1986–1987 Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization Campaign are the two most notable incidents launched by conservative leftist scholars and officials, who labelled Western arts and literature as spiritual pollution and aimed to suppress and eliminate the emerging liberal ideologies (Wang 1986Wang, Shu-Shin 1986 “The Rise and Fall of the Campaign against Spiritual Pollution in the People’s Republic of China.” Asian Affairs: An American Review 13 (1): 47–62. ; Baum 1997Baum, Richard 1997 “The Road to Tiananmen: Chinese Politics in the 1980s.” In The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng, edited by Roderick MacFarquhar, 340–471. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 390–407).

In this context, translation policy also served to strengthen the socialist spiritual civilization. “Literature and arts must serve the people and socialism” — thus said the People’s Daily People’s Daily 1980 “文艺为人民服务、为社会主义服务 [Editorial: Arts and literature serve the people and socialism],” June 27., the newspaper of the CPC Central Committee, in an editorial (27 June 1980). The 1978 Guangzhou Conference insisted that even though world literature was to be introduced into China, socialist literature, featuring a realist depiction of the world in the socialist construction, must still be the canon: “Socialism will be the future of the world; socialist literature will be the future of world literature. […] The literatures in capitalist countries may be our allies. We must unite them while staying critical of them” (Foreign Literature Studies 1979Foreign Literature Studies 1979 “全国外国文学研究工作规划会议在广州召开 [The National Conference on Foreign Literature Research Planning was held in Guangzhou].” Foreign Literature Studies 1979 (1): 105–107., 106; my translation). Stories that did not reflect reality from a materialist point of view, including ghost stories and “anti-scientific assumptions,” were considered toxic to people’s supposedly socialist spiritual world and had to be removed (Gold 1984Gold, Thomas B. 1984 “ ‘Just in Time!’: China Battles Spiritual Pollution on the Eve of 1984.” Asian Survey 24 (9): 947–974. , 972).

The article entitled 现代派怎样和现实主义‘对抗’——这里也不能不涉及某种现实主义理论现象 xiàn dài pài zěn yàng hé xiàn shí zhǔ yì ‘duì kàng’——zhè lǐ yě bù néng bù shè jí mǒu zhǒng xiàn shí zhǔ yì lǐ lùn xiàn xiàng ‘How should modernism ‘confront’ realism — some realist theory needs to be involved’ is prototypical in describing how the stream-of-consciousness novels in Western modernism should be introduced under socialist realist tenets. The article was published in the 社会科学 shè huì kē xué ‘Social sciences’ journal in 1982 and was written by the Chinese writer, scholar, and editor, Geng Yong 耿庸 (1921–2008). The journal was issued by the same academic institute that commissioned and hosted the research on and translation of Woolf, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. This article by Geng was contemporary to the Academy’s Woolf project, so it can be seen as representing the institutional ideology that oversaw this translation of Western modernism.

Geng cites from Lenin to maintain a firm distinction between the material and the spiritual. In Geng’s argument, Lenin asserts that “to say that thoughts are ‘material’ is clearly faulty. It confounds materialism with idealism” (1982Geng, Yong 1982 “现代派怎样和现实主义‘对抗’——这里也不能不涉及某种现实主义理论现象 [How should modernism ‘confront’ realism — Some realist theory needs to be involved].” Social Sciences 9: 63–68., 65; my translation). However, even though thoughts are not material, Lenin holds that they can be deemed “realist” and “existent” (ibid.) as they are dependent on and determined by the material foundation. In line with Lenin, Geng believes that all mental phenomena are based on material foundations; that is, they derive from the external, objective world and are perceived by the human brain, and are therefore “realist”: “Mental activities and psychological states (thoughts and beliefs, ideals and fantasies, imaginations and memories, love and hate, passion and indifference, pleasure and pain…) — are all realist and existent” (Geng 1982Geng, Yong 1982 “现代派怎样和现实主义‘对抗’——这里也不能不涉及某种现实主义理论现象 [How should modernism ‘confront’ realism — Some realist theory needs to be involved].” Social Sciences 9: 63–68., 65). These “realist” phenomena of the mind can therefore be reflected by the socialist realist literature — “if realism cannot reflect both the material and the spiritual which originates from its relations with the material, how can it be called realism? […] the depiction of the stream of consciousness is an intrinsic part of realist literature” (65, 67). In other words, for modernism to be mediated by socialist realism, Geng advocates a materialist interpretation of the mind’s depiction and that mental activities should be read as derivatives of the material structure. They must be truthful and identical reflections of the material world. Mental images or memories of physical existence that disrupt materialism, such as the witness of ghosts in To the Lighthouse, can hardly be endorsed by this official reading. As we will see in the case studies, in the 1988 Chinese translation of To the Lighthouse this haunting spiritual image has been rendered as an ordinary memory of the past, recalled by the character. Memories are generated by the physiological, material structure of the brain. They are mental reflections of the existence of past material. In this way, the ghostly image has been rendered as an acceptable “realist” depiction.

The agents related to the 1988 translation of To the Lighthouse, including the commissioner, translator, and publisher, had all shown willingness to conform to this Marxist reading of Western modernism required by the officialdom. These agents were either state-sponsored research institutes, researchers, translators affiliated with the institute, or publishers of state-owned propaganda machines. Research on and the translation of Woolf were commissioned by the School of Literature at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS). The SASS was founded in 1958 and was the earliest academy of social sciences established in the People’s Republic of China after socialist construction in the 1950s (Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences 2015Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences 2015 “院况简介 [Introduction to the academy].” https://​www​.sass​.org​.cn​/1224​/list​.htm, n.p.). The translator of the 1988 To the Lighthouse, Qu Shijing 瞿世镜 (1936–), was at that time a research fellow with the School of Literature at the academy. The novel was published by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House. The press was founded in 1978 to specialize in foreign literature translation during the reform and opening-up periods. However, the establishment of the press was based on the former foreign literature editing offices of the People’s Literature Publishing House, Shanghai Division, and the Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House (Shanghai Translation Publishing House n.d.Shanghai Translation Publishing House n.d. “企业简介 [Introduction to the enterprise].” http://​www​.stph​.com​.cn​/about). Both presses were founded in the 1950s and were active during the heyday of the socialist construction, acting as the mouthpiece for the officialdom in the field of literature (China Publishing Group 2021China Publishing Group 2021 “People’s Literature Publishing House.” https://​en​.cnpubg​.com​/portal​/article​/index​/id​/96​/cid​/4​.html). In the translation of To the Lighthouse, conspicuous institutional control of the reading of this modernist writer is evident, most directly from the advice Qu received from his mentor at the academy.

In 1980, Qu Shijing, a newly appointed research fellow at the academy, was informed during a conversation with his mentor that he had been assigned to the research and translation of Woolf. Qu’s mentor, Wang Daoqian 王道乾 (1921–1993), the deputy director general of the School of Literature, shared this information. Upon hearing the assignment, Qu instantly expressed concern, as Woolf had been labelled ‘toxic’ in previous decades. Qu worried that the project would cause him trouble in future political campaigns (Qu 2015Qu, Shijing 2015 “《意识流小说家伍尔夫》再版后记 [The epilogue to the second edition of The Stream-of-Consciousness Novelist Virginia Woolf ].” Contemporary Foreign Language Studies 2: 1–2., 2). Aware of Qu’s concern, Wang Daoqian reassured him that modernism was now permitted to be read in the post-Mao era, but one must read it through a Marxist lens:

Mr. Wang very seriously told me that […] since it was in the time of reform and opening-up, it would be impossible to stay isolated from the rest of the world in the cultural field. We should take the Marxist standpoint in analyzing Western literature: to see which part was acceptable, which was to be criticized, and which was to be shut out of the door.(Qu 2015Qu, Shijing 2015 “《意识流小说家伍尔夫》再版后记 [The epilogue to the second edition of The Stream-of-Consciousness Novelist Virginia Woolf ].” Contemporary Foreign Language Studies 2: 1–2., 2; my translation)

In the preface written in 1986 for 意识流小说家伍尔夫 yì shí liú xiǎo shuō jiā wǔ ěr fū ‘Stream-of-consciousness writer Virginia Woolf’ (Qu 1989Qu, Shijing 1989 意识流小说家伍尔夫 [ The stream-of-consciousness novelist Virginia Woolf ]. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House.), Qu’s monograph finished in the same period as his translation of To the Lighthouse, the author shows his allegiance to the official Marxist ideology in 1980s China. He observes that in Western academia, critics tend to probe the narrative structure and aesthetic value of Woolf’s writings, thereby severing the writer from her sociohistorical context (Qu 1989Qu, Shijing 1989 意识流小说家伍尔夫 [ The stream-of-consciousness novelist Virginia Woolf ]. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House., 10). This academic preference is understandable. It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that Woolf’s diaries and essays were published posthumously. These newly recovered autobiographical materials had led the academics in Western academia to focus on the inner world of fictional characters with a biographical reading based on Woolf’s personal life (DeSalvo 1980DeSalvo, Louise A. 1980 Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making. London: Palgrave Macmillan. , 1989DeSalvo, Louise A. 1989 Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. London: Women’s Press.; Poole 1982Poole, Roger 1982 The Unknown Virginia Woolf. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press.). Scholars who positioned Woolf in a wider society, such as Zwerdling (1986)Zwerdling, Alex 1986 Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of California Press., had just emerged in the same year that Qu was writing the preface. Distinct from Woolf studies in Western academia, Qu “take[s] the standpoint of historical materialism and put[s] the [literary] experiment and exploration in the framework of history” (Qu 1989Qu, Shijing 1989 意识流小说家伍尔夫 [ The stream-of-consciousness novelist Virginia Woolf ]. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House., 9; my translation) in reading Woolf’s novels.

Based on historical materialism, the depiction of ghosts must be exorcised on two grounds. First, the ghostly scenes in Woolf’s writings were derived from Western modernity in the early twentieth century. When introduced into socialist China, a social state more ‘advanced’ in historical progression, according to the view of historical materialism, the ‘backward’ and ‘bizarre’ elements of the ghosts needed to be modernized. According to this logic, Woolf’s writing on consciousness needed to be subjected to the materialist reading outlined in Geng (1982)Geng, Yong 1982 “现代派怎样和现实主义‘对抗’——这里也不能不涉及某种现实主义理论现象 [How should modernism ‘confront’ realism — Some realist theory needs to be involved].” Social Sciences 9: 63–68.. This strategy would ensure that the reading of Western literature conforms to Marxist tenets and would prevent the erosion of socialist spiritual civilization. Second, belief in ghosts would be seen as an undesirable remnant of the premodern society in the Marxist view of history. In premodern China, the ghosts of deceased family members were believed to coexist with the living. The ancestors were offered sacrifices in shrines and had the power to protect and supervise the daily lives of their descendants (Owen 1986Owen, Stephen 1986 Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. , 8; Von Glahn 2004Von Glahn, Richard 2004 The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. , 6). This traditionalist view of time persisted until the early twentieth century, when it was replaced by the linear view of time in the country’s modernization schemes and later by the Marxist teleological view of history in socialist China (Wang 2001Wang, Q. Edward 2001 Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography. Albany: State University of New York Press.). Therefore, the portrayal of ghosts in Woolf’s novels is not compatible with the 1980s Marxist ideology in that it reflects both a backward, premodern superstition, and a capitalist modernism, both of which must be replaced by socialist modernity.

The specter of Mrs. Ramsay in Qu’s translation, as a result, has been denied existence. When the ghost appears in “Time Passes,” as witnessed by Mrs. McNab, the 1988 To the Lighthouse in Chinese claims that the scene is only a memory recalled by Mrs. McNab. This renders the existence of the ghost as a memory episode engendered by the brain of Mrs. McNab, contingent on the physiological, material base of the human rather than being independent and spiritual on its own. In the scene in the source text, Mrs. McNab is tending to the personal belongings of Mrs. Ramsay after her death. She fingers Mrs. Ramsay’s cloak and sees Mrs. Ramsay at that moment:

She [Mrs. Ramsay] was dead, they said; years ago, in London. There was the old grey cloak she [Mrs. Ramsay] wore gardening (Mrs. McNab fingered it). [*] She [Mrs. McNab] could see[1] her [Mrs. Ramsay], as she [Mrs. McNab] came up the drive with the washing, stooping over her [Mrs. Ramsay] flowers (the garden was a pitiful sight now, all run to riot, and rabbits scuttling at you out of the beds) — she could see[2] her with one of the children by her in that grey cloak. […] Yes, [*] she could see [3] Mrs. Ramsay as she came up the drive with the washing.(Woolf 1955Woolf, Virginia 1955 To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 204; serial numbers and asterisks added)

In the source text, the image of the late Mrs. Ramsay comes to Mrs. McNab’s mind and materializes into a visible presence in the material, physical world. While ‘seeing’ in English can both refer to seeing in the mind and in person, the repetition of the act of ‘seeing’ — “she could see her […] she could see her […] Yes, she could see […]” — gives an uncanny effect and implies that the witnessed figure had come to exist in person and not in the mind. However, this uncanniness is eliminated in the 1988 translation. The visible presence of the dead is invalidated. The witnessed spectral scene is temporally pushed back to the past by being labelled as a memory that had happened in the past and was remembered by the living. To achieve this, the 1988 translation reorganizes the temporal sequence of events based on a strict chronological order. The temporal contemporaneity between the dead and the living is negated, and the temporal gap between the past and present widens.

On the textual level, the translation adds a sentence that does not exist in the source text at the first asterisk: “夫人当年的风姿，仍历历在目” fū rén dāng nián de fēng zī, réng lì lì zài mù ‘The madam’s graceful bearing in those years floated up vividly before the eyes’ (Woolf 1988Woolf, Virginia 1988 达洛卫夫人, 到灯塔去 [orig. Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse ]. Translated by Sun Liang, Su Mei, and Qu Shijing. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House., 346). Although the English back translation of this added sentence may sound like a replay of the past in the present, the Chinese phrase 历历在目 lì lì zài mù ‘(past events) floating up vividly before the eyes’ intrinsically entails a reference to the past. The reader would automatically know that the depicted scene had happened in the past rather than in the present. Additionally, a temporal deictic 在那时候 zài nà shí hòu ‘in those years’ (ibid.) is added at the second asterisk. Similarly, it confines the haunting figure to the past, reassuring the reader that what Mrs. McNab had seen was not a ghost in real life but only a memory in her mind. This 1988 Chinese rendition of To the Lighthouse unfolds the wrinkle of time and linearizes the events along an objective, chronological time scale.

This 1988 effort to exorcise the ghost becomes even clearer when compared to the 2001 retranslation. In this later version, 仍 réng ‘still’ is added in between the “could” and “see” in point [1]–[3], rendering the meaning ‘she could still see Mrs. Ramsay’ three times in the translation (Woolf 2001Woolf, Virginia 2001 达洛维夫人, 到灯塔去, 雅各布之屋 [orig. Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Jacob’s Room ]. Translated by Wang Jiaxiang. Nanjing: Yilin Press., 292), repeatedly confirming that Mrs. Ramsay had indeed “come back again” after death (Woolf 1955Woolf, Virginia 1955 To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 266). In contrast with English, the act of ‘seeing’ in Chinese almost exclusively refers to seeing with the eyes in person. Therefore, the ghost of Mrs. Ramsay is allowed to be visible in the 2001 retranslation.

In contrast with the 1988 translation, the ghostly appearance in the 2001 rendition can be ascribed to the absence of strong ideological control over the translation. Simultaneously with the end of the Cold War, Marxist control over translation and the cultural field in China was loosened when the market-oriented reform was consolidated in the 1990s. After Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour in 1992, China began further economic reforms and started to participate in the global capitalist system, ultimately joining the World Trade Organization in 2002. These vigorous economic activities enhanced liberalization and commercialization, the cultural phenomena of the 1990s–2000s post-socialist China (Wang 2000Wang, Ning 2000 “The Mapping of Chinese Postmodernity.” In Postmodernism & China, edited by Arif Dirlik and Zhang Xudong, 21–40. Durham: Duke University Press., 27–28). The society was undergoing “a transition from (state) heteronomy to (relative) autonomy” (McGrath 2008McGrath, Jason 2008 Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. , 9–10), as the country was breaking away from Maoist modernity. In the era of gradually opening up and marketizing, publishers were faced with reduced government subsidies and were encouraged by the National Press and Publication Administration to pursue profit on their own (McGowan 1999McGowan, Ian 1999 “Publishing in China.” Publishing Research Quarterly 15 (1): 20–32. , 24; Yun 2019Yun, Qidong 2019 China’s Publishing Industry: From Mao to the Market. Cambridge: Chandos Publishing.). Therefore, foreign literature translation during this period no longer served the political agenda of socialist construction in the immediate aftermath of the Mao era. Instead, foreign literature translation had become an industry that served to satisfy the growing readership of commercial literary publications in the urban areas. The publisher of the 2001 retranslation of To the Lighthouse, Yilin Press, is such a commercial press founded to fulfil this need (Yilin Press 2022Yilin Press 2022 “译林简介 [Introduction to Yilin].” http://​58​.213​.14​.38​/index​.php​/Category​/index​?nav​_id​=1). Translators in this era were given more freedom to interpret the source text in their own way. Accordingly, the ghosts which had not been allowed to haunt in the late 1980s were freed.

6.Beyond control: Text, différance, and the specter from the future

However, even if the 1988 publisher, commissioner, and translator all subscribed to the canonical materialist reading of Western modernism, the ghost of Mrs. Ramsay still appeared in the text. This spectral existence circumvents the ideological restrictions in the 1980s and heralds the liberal reading of Woolf in the 2000s. Based on available materials, a few explanations can be found for this untimely haunting effect in the 1988 translation. In the “The Lighthouse” chapter towards the end of the novel, the ghost appears in translation when there is not even a mention of it in the source text. In other words, the 1988 translation contains a made-up ghost, when there is no sign of it in the corresponding source text. Little information on the proofreading and editorial process is available, but based on the translational outcome, the appearance of the ghost has somehow escaped the translator’s and publisher’s proofreading and ideological censorship.

The specter of Mrs. Ramsay appears again toward the end of the original novel, which is the culmination of the haunting in To the Lighthouse. Having recalled Mrs. Ramsay repeatedly while painting, Lily Briscoe finally sees Mrs. Ramsay sitting in a chair in the summer house, knitting the brown stocking again: “Mrs. Ramsay — it was part of her perfect goodness — sat there quite simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the step. There she sat.” (Woolf 1955Woolf, Virginia 1955 To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 300) Immediately before witnessing this haunting scene, Lily notices that something has stirred the air in the room. The specter has entered the house. In the source text, there is no conspicuous mention of this entrance of the spectral Mrs. Ramsay. If in line with the materialist method, the 1988 translation would not have gone so far as to manifest the specter when there was no sign of it even in the original novel. However, Mrs. Ramsay’s ghost nevertheless sneaks into the 1988 translation, marked as point [1] in the extract from the translation below, and underlined in the source text:

Ah, but what had happened? Some wave of white went over the window pane. The air must have stirred some flounce in the room. […] Mrs. Ramsay — it was part of her perfect goodness — sat there quite simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the step. There she sat.

啊，但是出了什么事情? 一阵白色的波浪掠过了玻璃窗。一定是那空气的幽灵[1] 在房间里引起了某种骚乱。(Woolf 1988Woolf, Virginia 1988 达洛卫夫人, 到灯塔去 [orig. Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse ]. Translated by Sun Liang, Su Mei, and Qu Shijing. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House., 416)

ā, dàn shì chū le shén me shì qing? yí zhèn bái sè de bō làng lüè guò le bō lí chuāng. yí dìng shì nà kōng qì de yōu líng [1] zài fáng jiān lǐ yǐn qǐ le mǒu zhǒng sāo luàn.

Ah, but what had happened? A white wave went across the glass window pane. It must be the specter of the air [1] stirring some flounce in the room.(Woolf 1955Woolf, Virginia 1955 To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 300)

The 1988 translation suggests that the flounce in the air is caused by some spectral agent. The rest of the text in the above excerpt, that of Mrs. Ramsay sitting in a chair with a stocking, is translated literally. If the translation had not clarified that there is an invisible specter in the air, or made up of the air, which is stirring the flounce, the rest of the knitting scene would not necessarily be haunting. For example, the reader might feel confused as to why the deceased Mrs. Ramsay appears again; they might also regard the scene as being imagined by Lily Briscoe. However, by specifying that a specter is stirring the air in the room and has likely entered through the window, the 1988 translation asserts that a spectral scene is occurring.

I see this untimely haunting in the 1988 Chinese To the Lighthouse as both an unintended precursor of and a response to the 2001 retranslation, in which haunting scenes are allowed to exist. Text in general has a spectral feature in the Derridean sense, and text performance can signal the future. When applying the notion of spectrality to the analysis of text, Derrida’s early writing on différance may provide a useful additional perspective. Spectrality and différance may be seen as complementing each other. Specifically, différance can show us that the spectral quality is innate in the differential play of text, whereas spectrality helps accentuate the temporal delay in the notion of différance. When drawing upon the idea of différance, Translation Studies scholars have noticed that the differential play of text may generate uncertainty and undecidability in text interpretation. This uncertainty and changeability allow a text to be repeated in different contexts (i.e., the iterability and translatability of a text) but preclude an identical repetition (i.e., the untranslatability of a text) (Gentzler 2001Gentzler, Edwin 2001 Contemporary Translation Theories. 2nd rev. ed. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.; Florentsen 1994Florentsen, Peter 1994 “Translation, Philosophy and Deconstruction.” Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 2 (2): 225–243. ; Davis 2001Davis, Kathleen 2001 Deconstruction and Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome., 2020Davis, Kathleen 2020 “Deconstruction.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker and Saldanha Gabriela, 139–142. Abingdon: Routledge.). Translation Studies scholars seem to have mostly focused on the spatially differential play of text; that is, how the meaning of one word can be carried over by another, which has a different meaning and connotation. They have not directed much attention toward the temporally deferred play of a text. This temporal deferral dovetails with the spatial differentiation in Derrida’s very coinage of the neologism différance.

Drawing upon Ferdinand de Saussure’s thesis that there are only differences in language, that each sign only makes sense by distinguishing itself from others, Derrida suggests that each concept is “inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by means of the systematic play of differences” (Derrida 1982Derrida, Jacques 1982 Margins of Philosophy [orig. Marges de la philosophie ]. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. , 10–11). The word différance refers to this “systematic play of differences” (11). Because the match between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, as proposed by Saussure and inherited by Derrida, the signifier can be detached from the signified and deferred to the next signifier in the lexical chain (Derrida 1982Derrida, Jacques 1982 Margins of Philosophy [orig. Marges de la philosophie ]. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. , 11; 1997, 44–47). While this différancing chain is in working, the signifier necessarily refers to a signified concept that is not originally intended, but instead, an unpredictable other.

Apart from this spatial differentiation in the chain of signifiers (i.e., one signifier next to another), différance also triggers a temporal deferral, meaning that the other signifiers along the chain engendered by the différantial play of text may not be contemporaneous to the original signifier. The word différance originates from the Latin verb differre, which refers to postponing, delaying, and reserving (or in Derrida’s (1982Derrida, Jacques 1982 Margins of Philosophy [orig. Marges de la philosophie ]. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. , 8) word, “temporizing”) and the spatial difference and discernibility between one concept and the other (Derrida 1982Derrida, Jacques 1982 Margins of Philosophy [orig. Marges de la philosophie ]. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. , 7–8). The French word différence lacks the temporizing effect, so Derrida replaces the e with an a to compensate for the sense of temporal deferral (8). To ‘temporize’ a signifier is to defer it to another signifier (and to yet another signifier in the chain on end) so that the sense-making of that signifier is deferred and delayed (ibid.). The meaning of the making of the signifier, having been postponed, “is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element,” which has not yet existed (13). The deferring process would reach a signifier that does not belong to the same temporal realm as that of the original signifier but another signifier that belongs to a later temporal realm, namely, the future.

Relating this temporal delay in différance to retranslation, the temporally suspended and deferred sense-making of signifiers in translation can reach beyond the moment of translation, to the signifier in the future context of a retranslation. This temporizing, deferring effect in signification can circumvent the prescribed norm for text interpretation at a certain time and reach some other signifiers in the future. A rendition that seems disjointed from the initial translation would appear if the text interpretation in translation reached future retranslation along the différancing chain. The delayed and eventually signified concept in the future context may appear to be a deviation from the initial translation and a precursor to the future.

It is through this différancing chain and temporizing effect that the ghost of Mrs. Ramsay, which has been exorcised in the 1988 Chinese translation of To the Lighthouse, finds its way back to the scene. In the haunting scene cited above, the temporized signifier, which has reached beyond its contemporaneous context via the différancing chain, is the word “flounce.” As well as referring to quick moves which disturb the air, “flounce,” as a polyseme, denotes a piece of cloth sewn into ruffles to be stitched on the edge of skirts and clothes. Flounce, here, as a signifier, may not have referred to a piece of ruffled cloth straight away. Rather, the sense-making of the signifier may have been deferred to another signifier that is closely linked to it, that of a piece of clothing decorated with a flounce. Stirring a flounce then no longer means causing disturbance in the air but causing a flounced piece of clothing to move across the air. The piece of clothing appears on its own in this scene and is not worn by anybody. There is only air inside, yet it has the agency to move. The ruffled piece of clothing that has the agency to move is again deferred to the human-shaped emptiness inside the clothing that could have been filled with a real human body that could make it move. This human-shaped hollowness is then deferred to an agent that could be wearing the piece of clothing but has remained invisible, namely, a ghost.

This is the spatially différancing chain that may have conjured the specter of Mrs. Ramsay in the 1988 translation, and the chain is not groundless in the novel. Right before Mrs. McNab witnesses the ghost of Mrs. Ramsay in the “Time Passes” chapter, the excerpt analyzed in Section 5, she is tending Mrs. Ramsay’s clothing that was left in the summer house. The cloak that Mrs. Ramsay had once worn but was left in the cupboard arouses Mrs. McNab’s uncanny feelings:

For there were clothes in the cupboards; they had left clothes in all the bedrooms […] There was the old grey cloak she [Mrs. Ramsay] wore for gardening (Mrs. McNab fingered it). She could see her, as she came up the drive with the washing, stooping over her flowers […].(Woolf 1955Woolf, Virginia 1955 To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 204)

The sense-making of the cloak as a signifier is deferred to the absence and space that it encompasses, and the absence is further deferred to the figure that could still have filled the void, the ghost of Mrs. Ramsay. While this différancing trajectory makes Mrs. McNab see the ghost of Mrs. Ramsay in the novel, a resurrection of the past in the present, the différancing chain enables the 1988 translation to reach beyond the context of translation and point to the future. The temporal deferral from one signifier to another invokes spectral otherness in text interpretation, a non-materialist depiction that does not come into existence until the early 2000s retranslation.

With this analysis, I do not suggest that translational agents have deliberately carried out this deferral. Venuti (2002Venuti, Lawrence 2002 “The Difference that Translation Makes: The Translator’s Unconscious.” In Translation Studies: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline, edited by Alessandra Riccardi, 214–241. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 230–232) would identify the made-up ghost in the 1988 translation as a “false cognate,” a Freudian and Derridean verbal slip that derives from the translator’s unconscious. However, Venuti (2002Venuti, Lawrence 2002 “The Difference that Translation Makes: The Translator’s Unconscious.” In Translation Studies: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline, edited by Alessandra Riccardi, 214–241. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 238–239) acknowledges that his study of the unconscious in translation is provisional and needs to be complemented with more cases. Drawing on Derrida ([1993] 1994)Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge., I suggest that the inexplicable deviation from the norms in translation can also be a temporal phenomenon in history. What Derrida’s spectrality subscribes to is a historical view that brings into question the periodization of time, the teleological linearity of historical progression, and the synchronic analysis of historical events based on their immediate contextual factors, all of which are ubiquitous in both historical studies and contemporary Translation Studies. In contrast, an anti-periodization view of history suggests that each time in history may be exposed to the traces of the past and may give signals to the future, forming a temporal ‘constellation’ that entails the coexistence of the past, present, and future (Jordheim 2012Jordheim, Helge 2012 “Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities.” History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 51 (2): 151–171. ). In Koselleck’s (1985Koselleck, Reinhart 1985 Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge: MIT Press., 94) words, a time in history is “prognostic;” it “anticipates events which are certainly rooted in the present and in this respect are already existent, although they have not actually occurred.” In textual performance, the différancing chain can invite the future to occur at the present, what Koselleck calls “the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous” (ibid.). The 1980s’ People’s Republic of China was a time when students’ and scholars’ pursuit of intellectual and political liberalization coexisted with the leftist ideological remnant of the Maoist decades, yet this pursuit was also a precursor to a more liberalized future that was not consolidated until the early 1990s. On a global scale, the 1980s were a time when the USSR was undergoing reforms, democratic protests, and gradual disintegration, yet it had not reached the commencement of the post-Cold War era. The translation of Western modernism in China, a cultural activity conducted at this time, would also signal the future through its textual performance, specifically by deviating from the norms. The deviation could be caused by the unconscious, randomness, neglect, or a slip of the tongue of individual translators based on the chain of différance, but I regard it more as an uncontrollable and inevitable historical phenomenon rather than as the intended or unintended translational behavior of human agents. Once it happens, the deviation from the norms can be the first-time precursor of what will recur in the future.

In Specters of Marx and other works that he has written since the early 1990s, Derrida envisages a democracy to come in the future (Derrida 1992aDerrida, Jacques 1992a The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe [orig. L’autre cap, suivi de la démocratie ajournée ]. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. , 1992bDerrida, Jacques 1992b ““This Strange Institution Called Literature:” An Interview with Jacques Derrida [orig. Cette étrange institution qu’on appelle la littérature ].” Interview by Derek Attridge. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. In Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, 33–75. New York: Routledge., 1995Derrida, Jacques 1995 On the Name [orig. Passions, Sauf le nom, Khōra ]. Edited by Thomas Dutoit, translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod. Stanford: Stanford University Press. , 2002Derrida, Jacques 2002 Acts of Religion. Edited by Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge., 2005Derrida, Jacques 2005 Rogues: Two Essays on Reason [orig. Voyous, deux essais sur la raison ]. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.). In particular, Derrida describes the democracy in literature to come as the unrestricted freedom to express everything in writing (Derrida 1992bDerrida, Jacques 1992b ““This Strange Institution Called Literature:” An Interview with Jacques Derrida [orig. Cette étrange institution qu’on appelle la littérature ].” Interview by Derek Attridge. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. In Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, 33–75. New York: Routledge., 36–40). Democracy in literature can affranchise people from external restrictions (36). To achieve this democracy in literature means that one must break away from all confining regulations, including norms in translation. Therefore, uncontrollable deviations from norms may reach beyond the surrounding socio-cultural context and attain the democracy to come in translation. In this sense, a translation that breaks the norms is not anything that disproves or upsets regularities; it may not be ascribable to its surrounding context either. Instead, it may be a sign of future democracy via translation. To talk about a retranslation to come may sound unsettling to Translation Studies scholars: Will there be any retranslations in the future? Is it really to come? In Retranslation Studies, we tend to consider historians’ standpoints and view events retrospectively. We have been accustomed to a situation in which the trajectory of all retranslations involved, by the time of our research, has already taken place and is available for examination. However, when an earlier or the initial translation is made, it remains unknown when that future retranslation will come — and whether it will come at all. For example, in the case of the 1988 To the Lighthouse in Chinese, while Qu was worried about the potential struggles when he was assigned the translation in the early 1980s, he could not have known that a future retranslation would take place in the liberalized 2000s. Nevertheless, his translation still deviates from the norms and foreshadows the future. In Derrida’s words, his deviation is a memory of the future, an “inheritance of the promise” that is yet to be fulfilled (Derrida 1995Derrida, Jacques 1995 On the Name [orig. Passions, Sauf le nom, Khōra ]. Edited by Thomas Dutoit, translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod. Stanford: Stanford University Press. , 83), a promise to the democracy to come in translation. In this sense, deviations from norms in translation inevitably foreshadow democracy in future retranslations.

7.Conclusion

This paper introduces Derrida’s ([1993] 1994)Derrida, Jacques [1993] 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [orig. Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale ]. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. theory of spectrality into Retranslation Studies, offering a reflection on historical time and progression in the immediate post-Cold War era. A combined view of Derrida’s concepts of spectrality and différance reveals that textual interpretation ineluctably extends beyond its immediate context, signifying the future. Applying this perspective to the study of translation and its repetitions, this paper critiques and complements three key areas in contemporary Translation Studies: the teleological and linear view of time in Retranslation Studies, the translation’s indivisible connections with its immediate context, and the dominance of intentional human control in translational practices. It argues that translation can extend beyond its immediate sociohistorical context by deviating from the norms. The deviation might not be a response to the present context but to the time ahead and the future to come, which could be a future democracy in translation and writing. The deviation is not necessarily a random decision, idiosyncratic preference, or conscious or unconscious phenomenon related to human translational agents; rather, it is an occurrence in the progression of history and the passing of time, as engendered by différance and the spectrality of textuality. The performance of time has intrigued physicists, psychologists, and philosophers alike. The findings presented in this article may offer a glimpse into the future via its studies of translation in times of (reoccurring) global political changes — yet the future of the world remains unknown.