Guo, Fang (2016): La Traduction et la réception de la littérature chinoise moderne en France. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 403 p.

Most of the current research on the cultural exchange between France and China focuses on the reception of French literature in China rather than on the inverse scenario, the reception of Chinese literature in France. This is primarily due to the fact that the establishment of Chinese modernity is deeply indebted to the translation of Western texts during the late Qing period (1644-1912), on topics ranging from literature, religion, philosophy, politics, and science to medicine and technology. In fact, French literature was considered one of the most prominent vehicle of Western thought and power, and it proved useful for accelerating the process of Chinese modernisation. It was thus massively translated in Chinese. In the domain of Franco-Chinese literary studies, most research is therefore directed to either classical Chinese literature, embodying the classical Chinese thought that often attracts the attention of Western academia, or to the reception of French literature in modern China. Contrary to these popular orientations, Fang Gao adopts a different perspective to the study of the cultural exchanges between these two countries. Her book studies the translation and reception of modern Chinese literature in France from the 1920s until the end of the first decade of the 21^st century. Prior to Gao’s book, derived from her PhD thesis, two French sinologists, Angel Pino and Isabelle Rabut, had already addressed a similar topic in a 1998 article. However, it was limited in scope, covering only French translations of modern Chinese literature published in France between 1994 and 1997. In 2014, Pino published a book-length bibliography that indexed all Chinese literary works published between the late Qing period and 2013, and translated into French. Gao follows the same track, taking a 90-year span into consideration and including French translations published in China by the Beijing Foreign Languages Press and in the Panda collection of the Chinese Literature Press. Gao’s book is divided into three main parts, namely “Translate for Drafting an Inter-literary Relationship,” “Panorama of the Translation and the Reception of Chinese Modern Literature in France,” and “Three Specific and Representative Cases.” The first part traces the development of Western and Chinese modernity retrospectively. Gao then questions the definition of modernity and dwells on different concepts of “modern literature” in the European and Chinese context. The second part of the book addresses several questions, such as the selection of writers and texts for translation during the period under investigation and the reasons behind this choice. To answer these questions, Gao divides this part into two sections, presenting, on the one hand, the translated writers, and on the other hand, their works, classified by genre and grouped into three categories, namely novels and short stories, theatre and poetry, and sanwen (texts in prose). The second section presents significant translators of modern Chinese literature in six categories, each representing a specific period. Thus, according to its division, in the 1920s and 1930s, translators of modern Chinese literature were mainly young Chinese who studied in France, such as Jing Yingyu, who was probably the first to introduce the new spirit of Chinese literature after the New Culture Movement (1915-1926) to French readers. In the 1940s, translators were mainly French Jesuits and missionaries of the Congrégation du Coeur Immaculé de Marie (CICM). From 1950 to 1965, most translations done in China were for ideologically motivated. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), translations and publications in China were always censored politically and ideologically, whereas in France, during the same period, translations were essentially done by left-wing intellectuals, such as Michelle Loi (1926-2002), who belonged to what the author called “French Maoism.” Between 1978 and 1999, …