Children’s Gothic in the Chinese Context: The Untranslatability and Cross-Cultural Readability of a Literary Genre

As an emerging literary subgenre in the twenty-first century, Children’s Gothic challenges and blends the norms of both children’s literature and Gothic literature, featuring child characters’ self-empowerment in the face of fears and dark impulses. The foreignness and strangeness that pertain to the genre haunt the border of its translatability. Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999­–2006), written under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, poses a chain of translational challenges due to its linguistic creativity, paratextual art, and mixed style of horror and dark humor intended for a child readership. To investigate the interplay between Children’s Gothic and its (un)translatability within the context of cross-cultural communication, this study compares the Gothic manifestations in the original English-language series and its Chinese translations. A comparative analysis shows that the Gothic elements are diluted in the Chinese version’s translation, re-illustration, and repackaging of the original, reflecting a tendency towards moral didacticism and localization. Taking together the educational emphases of Chinese children’s literature with François Jullien’s aesthetics of blandness, this paper argues for the commensurability of the diluted translation with the Chinese cultural-educational system, as well as draws poetic implications from the translation of a literary genre that is simultaneously pedagogical and transgressive.