The Extraordinary Adventure of Arsène Lupin in China

Abstract

During the late Qing and early Republican period, translated western detective novels are popular in China, especially Conan Doyle’s famous stories of Sherlock Holmes. In 1886, Zhang Kunde firstly translated the stories of Sherlock Holmes into Chinese. In the next decade, Chinese translation of this famous British detective stories increased continuously, and to a certain extent, inspired Chinese writers to create their own detective novels. The translation and transculturation of Sherlock Holmes’s stories had already attracted a lot of scholars’ interests. However, compared to the attention that Sherlock Holmes obtained, little research has been done on the famous “gentleman-cambrioleur” (gentleman thief), Arsène Lupin’s adventures. This paper focuses on the examination of Chinese translation of Arsène Lupin’s stories during the 20th century in China. Through comparing the translation and the original French works, English versions, this paper attempts to explore the characteristics of the Chinese translation and interpretation of these novels of Maurice Leblanc. This paper points out, at the beginning of 1910s, as a “gentleman-cambrioleur,” the image of Arsène Lupin in the Chinese translation is quite semi-villainous. However, when the times came to the late 1920s, Chinese translators, such as Zhuo Shuojuan, started to name this mercurial character as ancient Chinese warrior fold hero Xia. With that, Sun Liaohong, a famous popular novelist in Shanghai, created his own novels about the legendary life of a Chinese hero Lu Ping, he called it “Arsène Lupin in the East,” and achieved a huge success. What happened behind the transformation of the image of Arsène Lupin, from thief to folk hero? Is there any difference between Lupin and Lu Ping? By comparing and close reading, this paper not only discusses how Chinese translators and readers presented their cultural imagination by translating but also demonstrates how their translation represent the dialogue between the Chinese and Western literary tradition and cultural values, that means, to illustrate the cultural connotation that this extraordinary adventure of Arsène Lupin in modern china reflected.