The Sight of Mightiest Empire: Vision, Translation, Imperialism, Anti-Imperialism

Lucas Klein, University of Hong Kong

In Paradise Lost, the first thing Adam sees after being expelled from Eden is China, and his vision moves, like Hegel’s history, East to West. The moment presents a valuable starting point to questions of cross-cultural representation, as it allows us to ask about the ethics of seeing, siting, sighting (a ‘gaming term,’ Jonathan Spence tells us, ‘specifically in the sense of cheating at dice’), and citing other cultures in literature. Milton, too, is an important backdrop to such cross-cultural considerations: not only is his poetic vision hailed by one of the most famous English poems about China – Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ – Milton’s sonnet ‘On His Blindness’ was also the first poem in English ever published in Chinese translation, as Lun shiming 論失明, in 1854 in a Hong Kong newly ceded to the British crown. My presentation will examine these two Miltonic representations of China, Coleridge’s and the anonymous Chinese translators’, and argue that we should not only pay attention to the contexts of colonialism and knowledge production in translation and cross-cultural literary representation. We should also disaggregate representations in and out of the dominant language so as not to see them as equally exemplary of that language’s imperialist drives, but rather in struggle against each other. At stake is not only the ethics of literature’s relationship to empire, but the representation of translation and literary ‘visions’ of other cultures, especially between English and Chinese.

This event is free and open to all. Booking is not required.