ABSTRACT
Appropriating an old narrative form in traditional Chinese mandarin ducks and butterflies romance, “Broken Hairpin” 斷簮記 by Su Manshu 蘇曼殊 (1884-1918) is among the very first instances in modern China to showcase “I” as an eyewitness to something relatively new and tragic (or perhaps, more precisely, interregnum) in a period of difficult transition, with three young lovers hopelessly caught between two worlds - either following the elders’ dictates or finding one’s own true path to love and death. The story is an interesting and mixed retelling of Wuthering Heights and Romeo and Juliet, but it is reset in modern China, in which young people are struggling to cultivate their modern experiences in love and in identity formation. The narrator is not a simple-minded Lockwood; he reveals himself to be Su Manshu, a most famous translator, educator, poet, and scholar-critic in modern China, who appears to empathize and groan over his colleague’s longing, pain, and loss. Certainly, we can easily dismiss the story as a case of free translation or indebtedness to Western classics by Emily Brontë and William Shakespeare. But that would not explain why this piece of retranslation should appear in a new magazine (新青年 La Jeunesse) edited by the future Communist leader, Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀, let alone the reasons as to the magazine using a French title (and in feminine gender) on the cover, with numerous modernization projects in mind. In this chapter, we draw on the notion of transcultural “untranslatability” and of “compressed modernity” to examine the story in detail, particularly around sentimentality and subjectivity issues in the story.
