Review of 'Translation in Diasporic Literatures' by Wang Guanglin

The award-winning Translation in Diasporic Literatures, by Wang Guanglin, is a welcome contribution to translation studies and the study of diasporic and transcultural literature. Winner of the Biennial Australian Studies in China Book Prize 2020 for an Original Work in Scholarship (English), the book is one of the few works that investigate the relationship between world literature and translation through a combination of Western and Chinese theories on translation. Here, translation is figured as ‘survival’ in a double sense: in the metaphorical sense of transfer as well as ‘border’ writing that echoes the hybrid space, which the diasporic subject inhabits. Both ‘transportation’, which ensures the survival of the source text in altered forms in the new context, and the ‘in-betweenness’ of translation, which allows the ‘silenced other an opportunity to be represented’ (101), are mobilised as ways of literary reinvigoration.