Politics of self-translation: Eileen Chang

In this article, the author focuses on the aesthetics of the body, the philosophical study of the beauty of the body, in Eileen Chang's English short story "Stale Mates - A Short Story Set in the Time When Love Came to China" and her own translation of this story into Chinese under the title"Wusi yishi - Luo Wentao sanmei tuanyuan. " It is argued that as the author who had the copyright, Chang enjoys an aesthetic freedom to highlight and interpret cultural perceptions of men and women through the practice of self- translation. By making changes to the representations of the body in "Wusi yishi, " Chang both preserves and transforms her descriptions of physical beauty in "Stale Mates". Having implicitly re-evaluated and explicitly re-contextualised "Stale Mates" in "Wusi yishi, " Chang points to a transcultural aesthetics of the body, which incorporates both Chinese and Western cultural influences.