Chapter 2 The “Double Effect” of Translation in Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat’s Iu-Kiao-Li
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Abstract
This essay tells the story of the cultural forces, habits of mind, and individual acts of creativity that led to the public reading and later publication of Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat’s Iu-Kiao-Li, ou les Deux Cousines; Roman chinois, the source text of which is the anonymous early Qing —or, possibly, late Ming —dynasty “scholar-beauty romance” (caizi jiaran xiaoshuo) entitled Yu Jiao Li. This essay describes how this work of narrative fiction from seventeenth-century China—in elegant French translation—end up being read aloud to and enjoyed by an audience of notable members of Restoration-period French society. It also explores what this audience understood themselves to be listening to and, later, reading. Answers to these questions reveal a complex dynamic between imperialist and anti-imperialist impulses—a kind of “double effect”—at the heart of “oriental studies” and the simultaneous emergence of la littérature comparée as an academic discipline.