The Chinese Poetess in an Australian Setting: Cultural Translation in Brian Castro’s The Garden Book

Abstract

The Garden Book, a novel set in the Dandenongs between the 1920s and 1940s, tells of a love affair between Darcy Damon, Swan Hay and Jasper Zenlin, but in a deeper sense, it is perhaps a novel that shows a deeper penetration into the cultural history of Australia. The novel begins with Norman Shih, a rare book librarian, who tries to piece together the lives of the female protagonist, Swan Hay, through memory and recollection, but it is a difficult task. The very connection with Chinese at the beginning, and the subsequent association of Swan Hay with He Shuangqing, an 18th Century Chinese poetess, links Brian Castro with cultural transplantation and translation. This paper is an attempt to use Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of reterritorialization and Homi Bhabha’s theory of cultural translation to discuss Brian Castro’s translation efforts to call into attention the in-between status of diasporic Chinese in Australian culture. Through the appropriation of He Shuangqing, the forgotten poetess in China, Brian Castro presents a picture of the marginalized status of the ethnic Chinese in white Australian culture and how their lives are maintained through translation. Jasper Zenlin’s translation of He Shuangqing not only marks the stage of her continued life, but also serves as a trope of Brian Castro’s exploration of the hybrid identity of the diasporic Chinese writers and their survival after cultural translation