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The Chinese Poetess in an Australian Setting: Cultural Translation in Brian Castro’s The Garden Book

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Abstract

This chapter is an attempt to use Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of deterritorialization and Homi Bhabha’s theory of cultural translation to discuss Brian Castro’s translation efforts to call attention to the in-between status of diasporic Chinese in Australian culture in the novel The Garden Book. Through the appropriation of He Shuangqing, the forgotten poetess in China, Brian Castro presents a picture of the marginalized status of the ethnic Chinese in white Australian culture and how their lives are maintained through translation. Jasper Zenlin’s translation of He Shuangqing not only marks the stage of her continued life but also serves as a trope of Brian Castro’s exploration of the hybrid identity of the diasporic Chinese writers and their survival after cultural translation.

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Wang, G. (2019). The Chinese Poetess in an Australian Setting: Cultural Translation in Brian Castro’s The Garden Book. In: Translation in Diasporic Literatures. Palgrave Pivot, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6609-3_3

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