Abstract

Judith Gautier's The Book of Jade is one of the earliest French translations of ancient Chinese poems. Compared with le Marquis d'Hervey St Denys's Poems of the Tang Dynasty which has a smaller audience, The Book of Jade shocked the French literary world as soon as it was published and was soon translated into Danish, Russian, Portuguese, English, and German. Its translator, Judith Gautier, became famous overnight with this book. Since then, she has taken oriental charm as her creative characteristic and was elected as the first female academician of the Académie Goncourt in 1910. Since its publication, The Book of Jade has attracted the attention of many researchers at home and abroad, and the research results are relatively rich. The main research direction is to discuss the fidelity problem of its translations from the perspective of translation practice. Most researchers think that the translation of The Book of Jade is not faithful to the original text and is even the author's “re-creation”; there are also some works that analyze the translation characteristics shown in its translations by means of relevant theories of deconstructionism and imagism. However, the current research has forgotten a very important characteristic of The Book of Jade—its preferred feminist characteristics. If analyzed from the theoretical perspective of feminism, many “unfaithful” translations in The Book of Jade are actually a kind of manipulation of literary text translation by translator Judith Gautier in order to “make women appear in language so that the world can see and hear women.” This feminist thought runs through all aspects of The Book of Jade.