Comparative Critical Studies 11.2–3 (2014): 295–314 Edinburgh University Press DOI: 10.3366/ccs.2014.0130 C  British Comparative Literature Association www.euppublishing.com/ccs Proust and China: Translation, Ideology and Contemporary Intertextual Practice SHUANGYI LI The first integral Chinese translation of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (literally ‘in search of lost time’) was published between 1989 and 1991, 1 more than seventy years after the original publication of Du côté de chez Swann. The realization of this translation project – a collaborative work among fifteen scholars – was very belated even compared to its Japanese and Korean counterparts (1953–1955 and 1970–1977 respectively). Over the past three decades, Proust and his works have been placed under ever closer scrutiny by researchers working both within and outside French studies in China, in their rather urgent attempt to recuperate or ‘retrouver’ the foreign canon, which had not yet received its merited national recognition. This progress has been accelerated by the ongoing translation of Western academic as well as popular books on Proust, ranging widely from Samuel Beckett’s Proust (1930), Gilles Deleuze’s Proust et les signes (1964), J.-Y. Tadié’s Proust et le roman (1971) and Gérard Genette’s Figures III (1972) to Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997) and Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid (2008). An enhanced interest in Proust finally necessitated a new translation: since 2000, two Chinese publishing houses have commissioned two competing new individual translations of A la recherche, the first volumes of which appeared in 2004 and 2005. 2 The general critical interest in Proust’s work is to a certain extent culturally biased. While issues such as anti-Semitism and homosexuality are too often neglected, other traditional Proustian themes like time and memory, and the Modernist technique of ‘stream-of-consciousness’, have become a ruling passion in the Chinese critical as well as creative receptions of Proust, which also demonstrate a strong tendency to have recourse to Chinese conceptual tools, bringing ‘Chinese critical features’ to the world of Proust studies. Such critical negligence and passion 295