An interstitial space: Cross-cultural negotiation and concession in early fiction translations in new youth

This article focuses on the early translations published in New Youth, a leading periodical of the New Culture movement in China. While extant research mostly focuses on this journal’s iconoclastic and radical arguments that prepared the way for the May Fourth movement in 1919, this article examines the period before Chen Duxiu, founder of New Youth, raised the banner of literary revolution. By interrogating the concealed history of the relay translations of fiction published in New Youth, especially Chen Gu’s translations of Turgenev’s novellas, this article unfolds the various approaches Chinese translators took in presenting Western culture, which sometimes involved unexpected processes of localization due to Japanese mediation. Specifically, I argue that the early translations in New Youth formed an interstitial space of hybridity where writers negotiated among different visions of transcultural syntheses.