Intralingual Translation, Diglossia and The Rise of Vernaculars in Classical and Premodern East Asia 2/2

This is part 2/2 of a joint presentation. The writing of commentary and subcommentary was such a well-established and common feature of literary and intellectual culture of traditional China that it is mostly taken for granted, while the crucial role played within this activity by practices of rewording seems so obvious and necessary that it is rarely analyzed explicitly and even less frequently described in light of translation theories. The consequence of this situation is twofold: first, the general lack of references to the dynamics of intralingual translation in accounts on the history of translation in China; and second, the subsequent overlooking of terms, concepts and categories not directly related to interlingual translation but meaningful if considered from the perspective of intralingual translation. This paper will discuss the role of rewording within Chinese commentarial tradition by presenting a comparative analysis of excerpts from different commentaries and subcommentaries (dating from the II c. to the XIV c.) to the canonical anthology Book of Odes (Shijing) and, in some cases, to the commentaries themselves. It will describe the general characteristics of rewording practices within each single text as well as between texts, and define the parameters informing these practices (Zethsen 2009) considered in a broad diachronic perspective. The aim is to consider if and how stylistic variants and discursive strategies within different but interrelated commentarial sources may reflect different latent translating impulses. This case study is typical of the collaborative endeavor described by copresenter in part 1/2, aiming at highlighting sometimes unsuspected translational strategies in the context of the East Asian pluriglossic situation.