尼古拉斯·周思小说《长安街》中的"跨文化书写"

Avenue of Eternal Peace is an early novel written by Australian novelist Nicholas Jose. Set completely in China, the novel presents a panoramic description of a foreign culture with which the author has been closely associated. In that sense, it is Jose’s first "trans-cultural" novel. Jose claims that the novel represents an attempt on his part as an Australian writer to translate China. Indeed, Avenue of Eternal Peace offers a fascinating translation of Chinese culture. To Jose, cultural translation is different from interlingual translation because it all happens intralingually: it integrates the author’s understanding of the source culture and expression of it in the same process. In so doing Jose shapes his knowledge of a foreign culture through his own language and directly presents it to members of his own culture. This essay first looks into the contents of the Chinese culture in Jose’s translation. Employing what Raymond Williams refers to as the "three levels of culture", namely, the lived culture, the recorded culture and the culture of selective tradition, it then examines Jose’s translation strategies and offers a discussion of the underlying reasons. It concludes that the way in which Jose translates China in his early "trans-cultural" novels betrays a lot of affinities with what Bill Ashcroft calls the "transnational" writing in some postcolonial discourse.