A stranger in China. Self-, allo-, and atranslation in Lisa Carducci’s work

Abstract

Lisa Carducci is a Canadian writer, poet, translator, and teacher of Italian origin, born in Montreal in 1943. After a long career in Canada, she moved to China in 1991, where she continued her work as a writer and educator and became an enthusiastic popularizer of Chinese cultures for Western audiences. Writing in French, Italian, English, Spanish, and Chinese, she has published numerous works, many of which focus on contemporary China. This article examines her role as a cultural mediator between China and the West through a corpus of volumes published between 1998 and 2013, devoted to the cultures, traditions, customs, and social transformations of her adopted country. These monolingual or bilingual texts appeared in French, English, Italian, and Chinese within varying editorial configurations. The study considers the texts, their paratexts, and their publication contexts in order to investigate the nature of Carducci’s translational activity. The involvement of collaborators, revisers, and translators whose roles are sometimes unclear makes it difficult to distinguish between self-translation, allographic translation, and “semi-self-translation”, particularly in the Chinese versions. Comparison also reveals different translation strategies. Carducci’s books thus constitute a genuine writing laboratory in which she continually reuses and reshapes her own material. Particular attention is also devoted to the ideological dimension of this production: published mainly by Chinese presses connected with institutional circuits of cultural dissemination, Carducci’s works contribute to constructing a broadly positive representation of China and to correcting what she considers distorted Western perceptions. Her work therefore emerges as a complex space of cultural mediation in which writing, translation, editorial practices, and ideological concerns jointly shape an image of China for Western readers.