Constraints and Manipulation of Ideology and Poetics — Translation and Rewriting of the Works of Henri J. M. Nouwen

Constraints and Manipulation of Ideology and Poetics—Translation and Rewriting of the Works of Henri JM Nouwen

CHONG Yau Yuk

The works of Henri JM Nouwen, one of the most prolific and popular spiritual writers of recent times, are widely circulated among Chinese Christian communities through a vast number of Chinese translations published since 1976. These translations, together with literary criticisms by influential Chinese spiritual leaders , are two main types of rewritings that create the image of Nouwen and his English works in the Chinese culture, lifting him and his works beyond the boundaries of their culture of origin. Nouwen is projected as the spiritual guide par excellence whose life is a spiritual text that reflects the very themes he shares in his writings, including the meditation on prayer and contemplation, the struggle between solitude and community, the gospel challenge to follow Christ in “downward mobility”, the question of how to make our life and death a gift to others, and the path to realizing our identity as God's beloved.

The image of Nouwen as a renowned writer of Christian spirituality and pastoral theology can be conceived of as the outcome of the processes of rewriting (manipulation and domestication), which is closely connected with the political and literary power structures operating within the Chinese literary polysystem. In a period when there is a literary vacuum in contemporary classics of Christian spirituality and pastoral theology, Nouwen's works are widely translated and positively reviewed in spite of an ideological charge against the introduction of the works of a Catholic priest to Chinese Christian communities. Using André Lefevere's operative concepts of rewriting as the theoretical apparatus, this paper aims to describe and analyze the manipulative attempts on the part of rewriters to bring their texts in line with the dominant ideology and poetics within the Chinese Christian polysystem in the past three decades.