The Role of Yanyi in the History of Translation in China

The term yanyi (演義), the vernacular or pseudo-vernacular narrative elaboration of historical materials, is nowadays a term primarily associated with Chinese pre-modern narrative tradition. If considered in its diachronic configuration, however, the term reveals an important translational dimension. In this paper I will address the role of intralingual translation in the configuration of yanyi texts. In particular I will consider what kind of linguistic and textual transformations were at stake in the transposition into vernacular (or pseudo-vernacular language) of textual materials originally written in literary language. I will develop my analysis by first considering the terminology used by authors and commentators to describe the transformations they operated in yanyi texts. In the second instance I will focus on a specific case study, namely the seventeenth century work Lienü zhuan yanyi, a collection of narratives which according to the intentions of its compiler was meant to be a vernacularization of the Han dynasty collection Lienü zhuan (Biographies of Women) by Liu Xiang (c. 79-8 B.C.). I will present a categorization of the linguistic and textual transformations shaping the yanyi version of the text and, on a second level of analysis, I will try to consider what kind of rhetorical, cultural and ideological factors were at stake in the intralingual transposition of texts. As a result of these analyses this paper will contend that the yanyi narrative tradition deserves a place in the history of translation in China, while, on the other side, research approaches in translation studies can provide important analytical lenses for understanding the practical function of yanyi texts beyond the categories of literary genres.