With the support of the CCS Summer 2024 Fellowship, I was able to complete a 15-day research trip to the Chinese University of Hong Kong, working with over 100 items from the university library’s archival collections and rare books in the David Hawkes Archive, Ma Kiam Papers, Minguo Collection, and Chinese Overseas Collection. These materials were of great help to my research in two main projects: one on the material conditions of Hawkes’ translation Story of the Stone, and the other, on establishing connections between Xu Dishan’s teaching and intellectual career in Hong Kong and his fiction writing.
In the David Hawkes Archive, I read letter exchanges from 1966 to 1980 between David Hawkes and his publisher, editor, copyeditors, and cover designer from Penguin Classics including William Sulkin, Douglas Rust, Frances Balfour, Kathy John, and Diana Bigham, and learned numerous significant details about the translator’s self-editing as an essential practice in his twenty-year-long project of translating the Stone, his views on cover art and typesetting, and the ways in which the material conditions of the publishing industry and demands of the market shaped the end product of the Stone in English, embedding Hawkes’ decades-long solitary artistic and academic journey in the rapidly changing global market of book publishing in late twentieth century.
Piecing together original publications, letters, scrap papers, notepads, name cards, and other miscellaneous objects written by or owned by Xu Dishan available in various special collections at the CUHK library, I was able to gain better access to Xu Dishan’s academic and social life in Hong Kong, and begin to map out the interrelationships among his literary endeavors, efforts on educational reform in Hong Kong, research in religious studies and South Asian folklore, and his service in the Sino-British Cultural Association. I was also able to track Xu Dishan’s intellectual and artistic projects in connection with other modern Chinese (including overseas) writers and intellectuals including Lin Yu-tang, Eileen Chang, Chen Yinke, Guo Moruo, Ma Jian, Chen Junbao, among others. In a letter exchange between B.H. Bon and Xu Dishan, it became clear that Xu Dishan was actively involved in establishing a better cultural exchange between India and China in their shared anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles. On a page of unfinished, dateless manuscript, I found Xu Dishan’s incomplete response to questions proposed by an Esperanto translator of his debut short story, “Mingming Niao,” which illuminates many aspects of the complex referentiality of the story and its transnational and transnational concern. Both these materials directly helped me refine my research paper on “Mingming Niao” and Xu Dishan’s critique of gender in the transnational religious institution of Buddhism and also in transnational anticolonial movements.
- Lianbi Ji
Department of Comparative Literature