从传教士汉译小说《红侏儒传》看基督教文学在中国的本色化

Indigenization of Christian Literature in China as Viewed from The Terrible Red Dwarf

基督教文学在中国的本色化,即传教士以中国话本小说之形,叙写基督教思想文化之实,借助东方通俗文学的影响力,灵活主动地传播西方宗教思想的过程。2000年12月,美国汉学家韩南(Patrick Hanan)在《哈佛亚洲研究》上发表《中国19世纪的传教士小说》(The Missionary Novels of Nineteenth-Century China)一文,此后学界开始关注传教士模仿话本小说的语言和体例翻译创作汉文小说这一特殊的基督教"文字事工",探究其对中国近现代文学的影响。本文试以《红侏儒传》为例,从翻译、改写、操控的具体策略技巧对比分析原作和译作,探究来华传教士及其中国助手将基督教文学本色化的方式。

The indigenization of Christian literature in China is the process of creating Christian works in the form of Chinese vernacular stories and using Oriental popular fictions to disseminate Occidental religious thoughts.With the publication of Patrick Hanan’s The Missionary Novels of Nineteenth-Century China on Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies,the academic world has been exploring missionaries’efforts in composing and translating literary works in and into the Chinese language and style,as well as their influence on modern Chinese literature.This paper takes The Terrible Red Dwarf as an example,and tries to explore how the missionaries and their Chinese assistants indigenized Christian literature in the Chinese context by analyzing the strategies and techniques they applied in the translation,rewriting and manipulation process.