The Poison of Polygamy: Genre of the English Translation

Abstract

When the Chinese-language The Poison of Polygamy was translated into English, some critics identified the work as picaresque . Skeptical of this conclusion, the author of this paper broadens the field of inquiry to suggest classification in an emigrant sensational genre. Briefly, the first two plots of the multi-strand work unfold the adventures of Chinese emigrants travelling by sea and land to Melbourne’s Gold Mountain. Interestingly, we are also afforded a glimpse of emigrant miners’ cooperation regardless of race and colour when a mine disaster occurs. The work provides sharp recognition of migrants’ dilemmas, such as marriage, before tackling the bigamy issue, the gender war, the fallen lifestyle of the female protagonist and so on. As the work unfolds, further shocking tales of murders and indulgence are revealed. Unlike the picareque’s episodic style, the translated Poison of Polygamy is coherent, realistic, serious and critical, and completely lacking in both sarcasm and playfulness. To investigate the appropriateness of assigning the work to the picaresque genre, the paper compares briefly with representative Spanish picaresque works such as Lazarillo and Gusman and English canonical Moll Flanders , watching carefully for commonalities. However, The Poison of Polygamy would seem to resonate more with Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, a sensational fiction which shocked the English world in the 1860s. The contexts of both novels are close, mid-Victorian and Edwardian, where the latter is a continuation of the Victorians. The author is further enlightened by research results of literary translators who advocate that a text, once translated into a target language, becomes a canon of that culture and is cherished as such by its readers—as in the case of Shakespeare being revered as a German poet when read in translation. From this experiment the paper deems that cross-lingual comparative literature is not only possible but significant and resourceful.