EALC Lecture | "The Islamic Book of Odes (Tianfang shijing) and the Horizon of Translation in Modern China" | Michael Hill
- Sponsor
- Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures; Co-sponsors: Center for East Asian & Pacific Studies, School of Literatures, Cultures, & Linguistics, Center for South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, and Department of Comparative & World Literature
- Contact
- Jingling Chen
- jingling@illinois.edu
- Originating Calendar
- CEAPS Events Calendar
Join us for an event with Dr. Michael Hill of College of William & Mary.
About the Speaker:
Michael Hill is a professor of Chinese Studies at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Professor Hill's research and teaching interests include the literary and intellectual history of China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of translation, and cultural relations between China and the Middle East. He also contributes regularly as a translator. Prior to his arrival at William & Mary, Professor Hill served as director of the Center for Asian Studies at the Walker Institute of International and Area Studies at the University of South Carolina.About the Talk:
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.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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