Michael Gibbs Hill, Associate Professor, College of William & Mary
“Arabic Literature and the Boundaries of Translation History in Modern China”
This talk will take up questions concerning the history of literary translation between Chinese and Arabic from the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Drawing on his current research and experience as a translator of Chinese intellectual history, Michael Gibbs Hill will discuss how intellectuals in the Qing empire and the Republic of China—Muslim, Manchu, and Han Chinese—used Arabic as an alternative means to discuss the possibilities of commensurability between Chinese and other languages, a debate nearly always framed in terms of comparisons to the European Renaissance.
Michael Gibbs Hill teaches in the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures at William & Mary. He is the author ofLin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture (Oxford, 2013) and translator of China from Empire to Nation-State by Wang Hui (Harvard University Press, 2014) and What Is China? by Ge Zhaoguang (Belknap/Harvard, 2018).
