This paper discusses Qu Qiubai's theoretical ideas about translation from his political and ideological point of view. It tries to understand how the political and historical background of the author had a deep influence on his thinking about translation. Qu Qiubai's writing on translation reveals a spatial and temporal imaginary which tends to see the cultural difference between China and western modernity as historical. Its commentary and critique on China's linguistic heterogeneity in the thirties, articulated with questions of translation, work as a destabilization of the traditional and reassuring distinction between a “source language” and a “target language”. In the end, this paper points out Qu Qiubai's anxiety on the difference of sense created by the process of translation. For the Marxist thinker, this difference could only be erased if the Chinese “target language” was a new and contemporary oral language which didn't keep any traces of an anachronic past.
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