Translating the Past

Collaboration, conversation and translation

Recently, I got some rather good news: an article I’ve been working on with a colleague in China has been accepted for publication (in one of my bucket-list journals, no less!). When it is out, I’ll share a link and talk a bit more about what’s in it.

For now, it has provoked me to reflect on the process of writing it, especially in my first week adjusting to a new environment.

My colleague and I have been working towards this article for around five years, and working seriously on the manuscript for about three. In that time we’ve had Covid (at least once each), we’ve had lockdowns, and we’ve each been through pretty big life changes. It has been a pleasure and a frustration, focussed on three of my favourite things: collaboration, conversation and translation.

The article started form the fact that we are two researchers with quite closely connected interests. When we first met I was writing a book about the Western Indian Ocean in the first millennium and he was writing his PhD on the Red Sea in the first half of the first millennium. We immediately had a lot to talk about and, thankfully, Xuefei speaks English or it would have been a total non-starter (more on that later).

Intellectual conversations could still be tough, though. I might have expected the issue to be specific terminology, but mostly it wasn’t. Often, it was big ideas, the contours of our intellectual landscapes that were so ubiquitous and obvious that we didn’t even notice them ourselves until we realised that we were stumbling around different mental maps.

This mis-matched mapping could look like realising that the metaphorical ‘locations’ of particular terms were not in the same place for each of us. It could also look like one of us assuming that the other would find a particular view interesting or significant and finding that they did not. They were focussed on something we had never considered, or even found dull.

That was the beginning of our article: a work of translation, to try to introduce an English-reading audience to work done in Chinese on Indian Ocean history of the early first millennium CE. What it rapidly came to include was the broad outlines of history in China, especially the last eighty years or so, viewed through the lens of Indian Ocean studies, but actually applicable (we hope) much more widely. The point, we rapidly realised, was not to summarise what Chinese scholars have found out about first-millennium Indian Ocean connections, but to sketch out the intellectual world in which they have done so and how this has shaped what they have wanted to find out about it.

Some of what we discovered maybe should have been obvious from the start, but maybe we only realise that at the end.

For example, the Second World War cuts a trench through the study of history in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand.¹ Changes in university funding, themselves linked to wider changes in social attitudes after the war meant that history could never be written in the same ways it had been before. There are other points of change, but whether something was written before or after World War Two is one of the first things I tend to register, almost instinctively, when I read a piece of western scholarship for the first time.

In China, the Second World War mattered, but the Communist Revolution of 1949 and then the Cultural Revolution (1967-1977) formed the real disjunctures.

I might have guessed this: I certainly knew both events were important, but what we discovered as we worked together is that intellectual knowing is not quite the same as living, growing up and hardly even looking at the obviousness of these landmarks in each of our own communal pasts.

These factors help explain, but do not fully predict why people from different places get interested in certain topics at specific times. We should never discount the random chance that puts something in the way of somebody, for whom it then becomes an obsession. Nevertheless, the subtle, the social, the subjective nudges that make one thing not another into a scholar’s life work are never separable from that scholar’s wider world and experiences, even if the route they took is not obvious and may never be fully recoverable.

When we see groups of scholars finding the same or related topics interesting, at around the same time, we may begin to discern some of that route. Often, these collective journeys of scholarship, like the past itself, combine three things:

• broad historical circumstances and the questions they provoked (such as, at various points in China’s recent past, how China connected with other parts of the world and whether this had been a good or a bad thing before);

• ‘celebrity’ thinkers, whose work often crystallised those general questions or pitched itself provocatively against a general trend, thereby creating a focal point for debate and discussion;

• individual circumstances, which might sometimes be mysterious to us, but sometimes seem obvious. In many cases, for example, early writers in modern Chinese about long-distance trade in ancient times were directly involved in political and military dealings with western traders in their professional capacities. (Most of these writers were also not professional historians, so writing from the perspective of the experiences their employment gave them was common.)

One of the things I found most rewarding about this project was learning more about university systems in China and how their evolution shaped publishing and research. It was not uncommon in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, for example, for professors to hold posts in several universities at once, and often in very different subjects (for example, biology and history), as a response to an expanding education system and a shortage of trained scholars. Their combined interests could be reflected in the things they chose to write about, but more often were expressed in encyclopaedic writing, which also had roots in the Confucian tradition. Thus, rather than writing e.g. a biological history of [insert topic] or a history of the biology of [insert life form], as inter-disciplinarity might suggest, they very often applied expertise in the humanities and sciences as the foundation for writing about everything they saw around them and found in ancient texts.

The deep roots of some ways of organising knowledge in China today in ancient literature about the world was also striking. The division of history, for example, into ‘ancient, medieval and modern’, comes from interactions with western models, and especially Marxism.

However, the fact that departments, faculties, journals, conferences and the thought world of historical scholarship is further subdivided into ‘Chinese [ancient/medieval/modern] history’ and ‘world [ancient/medieval/modern] history’ comes directly out of the subdivision found in imperial court histories (complied during each dynasty from at least the first millennium CE onwards). They would record events during an emperor’s reign within the emperor’s own territory and then anything to do with outside. (Understanding this division also helped a lot in explaining the names of various conferences, journals and job titles I had seen!)

Hopefully other people will find the article as interesting to read as we found it to write. We also hope that it leads to people engaging with Chinese-language scholarship on the ancient Indian Ocean. Google Translate is actually pretty effective now, at least for getting some idea of the arguments of an article, if you know it exists to search for in the first place.

And that was probably the biggest mismatch we discovered in our respective landscapes, though in no way a surprise. For scholars working in Chinese (and, indeed, many other languages) it has been necessary since the beginning of modern university-led scholarship to engage with work in western languages. Whether that engagement is combative or enthusiastic, it is a structuring element of work on Indian Ocean trade. By contrast, for scholars working in the western tradition, reading other scholar’s work in Asian languages (not limited to Chinese), as opposed to perhaps reading and translating ancient sources in them, is not.

Both of us suspect that this will change over time, as the volume and quality of Chinese-language material increases. At the very least, when unique sources, such as archaeological finds, can only be accessed through Chinese, the incentive to learn how to get at that information increases, even if we do not necessarily engage with the same debates. That trend, however, is in competition with two different and massive exercises in state projection.

Historically, the western expansion of colonial power across the globe continues to play a determining role today in the languages that have to be read. Currently, the expansion and deepening of the influence of the Communist Party of China, both around the world and in China itself could go either way, by making the learning of Chinese more globally imperative or by restricting the reach of its scholars and their work. Only time can tell, and the changes it brings will give rise to new reflections on the ancient past as people try to make sense of the challenges of the present.

1. In the article, we use the terms ‘China/Chinese’ and ‘the West/western', referring to these areas/countries. Both labels are problematic, but there is no alternative for either that does quite the work we needed it to here.