Translating the Untranslatable: Foreign Otherness and Cross-Cultural Readability A Case Study of Wang Rongpei's Translation of The Peony Pavilion

As a classic traditional Chinese chuanqi drama, Tang Xianzu's The Peony Pavilion (Mudan Ting), written in an unusually dense and poetic style, has been translated into multiple languages. However, little research has been conducted to address the translational issues pertaining to foreign otherness or readability of this masterpiece. Untranslatability, a perennial issue central to translation studies and beyond, is deeply rooted in foreign otherness in terms of an awareness of cross-cultural diversities and complexities, and readability, which is directly related to the issue of literary value, can be seriously compromised by untranslatability. In this light, this study, with Wang Rongpei's translation of The Peony Pavilion as its object of enquiry, concentrates on the untranslatable or seemingly untranslatable elements-cultural references (CRS) to investigate how the literariness of The Peony Pavilion is negotiated, reconstructed, and manifested in Wang's translated text. Based on the theoretical discussions of untranslatability, readability, and foreign otherness, this paper proposes a framework into which the cr translation procedures developed by Olk, are integrated for the sake of both quantitative and descriptive analysis of the given text. The data and findings gained from the above analysis reveal the intricate patterns of the interplay between Wang's stable behavior to enhance the cross-cultural readability of The Peony Pavilion and his continuous attempts at diluting or highlighting the foreign otherness encoded in this literary text in order to preserve the original's aesthetic stability. This study aims to provide a better understanding of the multidimensional nature of translation operating at different levels.