EALC Speaker Series | “The Islamic Book of Odes (Tianfang shijing) and the Horizon of Translation in Modern China” | Michael Hill
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EALC Speaker Series
Michael Hill, Professor of Chinese Studies at William & Mary
Lecture: “The Islamic Book of Odes (Tianfang shijing) and the Horizon of Translation in Modern China.”
Location: Lucy Ellis Lounge, LCLB
Time: February 6 (Friday), 1:30 pm
This lecture discusses the Islamic Book of Odes (Tianfang shijing), a translation of The Mantle Ode (Qasidat al-Burda) by Ma Dexin (1794-1894) and Ma Anli (1820-1899), as an alternative archive of comparative thinking on translation and culture from the mid- to late nineteenth century. The Islamic Book of Odes is a deeply sourced translation from Arabic that in many ways surpassed the scholarly standards of more famous translations of Western literature and social thought from the late Qing. As such, it challenges us to expand our view of the flows of texts and knowledge to and through “China” at the end of empire. By insisting that the Islamic Book of Odes is a “classic” or jing, the book’s translators also test relatively secular definitions of literature and the literary (or wenxue) that took shape during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.