Translating and Popularizing China’s Past in Portugal
Double Foreignness in José de Freitas’s A China antiga e moderna (1941)
Keywords:
History as Translation, Double Foreignness, Cultural Translation, Rewriting, Popular History, Chinese History in Portugal, Acknowledgements / Agradecimentos — not a standard QuickSubmit field; retain for editorial checking:, The author is grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions on the theoretical framework and its analytical application. The author also thanks Alexandra Lopes for her valuable comments on an earlier version of this article, written for the seminar Translation & Worldmaking.Abstract
This article proposes ‘double foreignness’ as a methodological prompt for analyzing the writing of a foreign country’s history, where spatiotemporal distance is compounded by cultural-linguistic distance. It examines José de Freitas’s A China antiga e moderna (1941), a Portuguese popular history volume that connects China’s past to the Second Sino-Japanese War for early-1940s readers. Through Lefevere’s ([1992]/2017) concept of rewriting, the study shows how Freitas selectively rewrites francophone sources into Portuguese within a popularizing editorial framework. Drawing on Maitland’s (2017) model of cultural translation, the analysis traces Freitas’s interpretive gestures through which China’s past is made more intelligible to Portuguese readers and framed sympathetically, notably through familiar reference frames and recurrent images of the Chinese as ‘pacifist’ and ‘traditionalist.’ The case suggests that double foreignness can be productively analyzed through the interplay of intertemporal, interlingual, and cultural translation.Downloads
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