COMPTES RENDUS - AFEC

Comptes rendus
sorship in 1934, not from real life but from Bernardo Bertolucci's (b. 1940)
highly imaginative récréation in his 1987 movie The Last Emperor. It
should be noted that the latter is a fictionalized account. But that's already
irrelevant for Liu. The new culprits are clearly the Japanese. This is of a
pièce with the rise of Chinese nationalism both at home and abroad, and
especially so among the expatriate académie community of Chinese in
North America.
Lydia Liu seems especially intent on leaving us with a theoretical
contribution. Whether or not the "super-sign" will be picked up by other
scholars remains a matter for the future to décide. If the past is any
indication, then the adoption by many of "translingual practice" (Liu's
essai at a theoretical contribution in her first book) would seem to be cause
for optimism, though no one actually involved in the work of translation of
whom I am aware has adopted it 6 . The Clash of Empires cornes with
endorsements from several prominent scholars of modem Chinese history,
who offer firm stamps of approval. My sensé, though, is that this is a work
full of research but also equally full of posturing, and frequently the latter
outstrips the former, thus allowing politics to run roughshod over
scholarship.
1 As translatée by Barry Steben in Sources of Japanese Tradition, Volume Two
(1600-2000), Wm. Théodore de Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur E. Tiedemann,
(éd.), New York : Columbia University Press, 2005, p. 93.
2 Ibid., p. 95.
3 Others include: "Chiying" should be Qiying (p. 57); gelangma (p. 199) is not
a "translitération" but a transcription of "grammar" (not being an alphabetic
language, there can, by définition, be no translitérations into or out of it);
"Chiuta Itô" (p. 221) should be Itô Chuta; "Jiun-ichi Tsuchiya" (p. 221) should
be Tsuchiya Jun'ichi; "Lejzer L. Zamenhof ' (p. 243) should be Ludwig Lejzer
Zamenhof; the chapters from The Cambridge History of China dealing with
Qing foreign relations do not appear in "vol. 2, pt. 2" (p. 251) but in volume 11
(perhaps she read the Roman numéral "II" as a 2).
4 '"Like Kissing Through a Handkerchief : Traduttore Traditore," China
Review International, 8.1 (Spring 2001), 1-15.
5 Tokyo University Press, 1985.
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