Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues Between Chinese and Western Poetics

About this book

In this collection of passionately argued essays the internationally acclaimed poet and critic Wai-lim Yip calls Western scholarship to account for its treacherous representation of non-Western literature. Yip moves from Plato to Hans-Georg Gadamer from Chuang-tzu to Mao Tse-tung from John Donne to Robert Creeley as he attempts to create a double consciousness that includes the state of mind of the original author and the expressive potentials of the target language. He aims first to expose the types of distortions that have occurred in the process of translation from one language to another and second to propose guidelines that will prevent this kind of linguistic violence in the future.