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Home > JOURNAL > Vol. 13 (2024) > Number 1

 

Abstract

In 1929, Lim Boon Keng, a Straits Chinese and president of Xiamen University then, published The Li Sao: An Elegy on Encountering Sorrows. This was a translation of a 3rd century BCE poem attributed to Qu Yuan, and reputedly one of the most difficult Chinese poems to translate. There had been two English translations of this poem before Lim’s attempt, and one of them provided extensive paratextual materials. The fairly short, translated poem itself was accompanied by twenty-odd pages of preliminary notes on the translation, four substantive background essays as well as 90 pages of carefully researched annotations on the plants and flowers, persons and places, plus difficult Chinese vocabulary used in the text. Altogether, these paratextual materials made up three-quarters of the book. In focusing on these paratextual materials in his translation of the Li Sao, the study shall raise three themes with respect to the contribution made by Lim Boon Keng to East-West cultural exchange and civilisational dialogue in the early 20th century: firstly, bringing the Nanyang into the East-West dialogue; secondly, providing a historical and contemporary Chinese context to the debate on Qu Yuan and thirdly, making a difficult Chinese cultural product legible to an international reading public through serious literary and sinological study. This analysis points to the role played by Lim Boon Keng as an important public intellectual and cultural broker in the early 20th century.

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