![]() She is currently working on the concepts and forms of cosmopolitanism in German and Chinese intellectual history in the early twentieth century. Engaging with postcolonial theory and German travel writing, literature, and philosophy around 1800, she is the author of “Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism,” published with Northwestern University Press in 2017. ![]() Me-ti represents a form of world literature that is translation and transliteration both in form and content.īio: Chunjie Zhang is associate professor German at University of California, Davis. Brecht’s self-styling as the German “translator” and his imitation of the aphorismic style of Mozi reveal his translation as transliteration, moving beyond linguistic, historical, ideological, national, cultural, and class boundaries. Or an ideological translation, an engagement that stresses the practical and ethical function of literature in intellectual debate and political movement. Hence translation is not merely an action from one language to another but also a trans-situational movement between historical periods, ideological orientations, and civilizations. Yet he translated the content and the spirit of Mozi from its ancient context into the twenty-century setting of the international communist movement. Brecht did not translate Mozi from English into German. Me-ti evinces an intertextuality inflecting both the ancient Mohist teaching and Brecht’s own reflection on universal love, mutual benefit, and the dialectic of the transience of things. ![]() I argue that Brecht’s aesthetics of “translation” is situated between ancient Mohism and contemporaneous Marxism, between theory and practice, and between art and reality. Then the issue of translation, which hasn’t been properly addressed in Me-ti scholarship, promises to take us to different contexts and yield a deeper understanding of Brecht’s textual and contextual practice. ![]() ![]() Yet Brecht’s self-ascribed role as the German translator and the alleged English translation of Mozi turn out both to be fictive. Book of Transformation and Usage) is allegedly Brecht’s own German “translation” of Mozi, a book of ancient Chinese philosophy of Mohism, from an English translation. Title: “Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti or the Aesthetics of Translation: Universal Love, Mutual Benefits, and Transience”Ībstract: Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti. ![]()
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