Michael Gibb Hill: 'The Perils of Reading: Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī and Lin Shu'

Michael Gibb Hill: 'The Perils of Reading: Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī and Lin Shu'

This paper explores a startling coincidence in world literature: the overlapping careers of Lin Shu 林紓 (1852–1924) and Muṣṭafā Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī (1876–1924). Both men—who died in the same year—published famous “translations” of Western-language fiction without the benefit of knowing foreign languages and asserted a set of traditionalist literary values through their practice as translators, writers, and figures in the popular press. Their popularity also generated harsh, sometimes unhinged disavowals from their contemporaries and from later generations interested in shoring up their status as writers, critics, and readers of modern Arabic and Chinese literatures. Although the parallels between the careers of these two translators seem like pure coincidence, their rise to fame and subsequent fall from favor tells us about the importance of translators as new-style intellectuals and about the quandaries of colonial and postcolonial literature.