Dr. Bo Cao, professor of English Language and Literature at College of Foreign Studies, Hunan Normal University, Hunan Province, China, will be in residence at Emory University for 2019. He is the Chinese translator of the first volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett to be published Hunan Literature and Art Press. He is working with Lois More Overbeck, one of the editors of the original edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett published in four volumes by Cambridge University Press (2009-2016). The Beckett Letters Project is based in the English Department of Emory University. The Letters of Samuel Beckett has been translated into German (Suhrkamp Verlag), French (Editions Gallimard), and Italian (Adelphi Edizioni).
While at Emory, Dr. Cao will complete his translation of The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1929-1940. He will also familiarize himself with the research for all four volumes of Beckett’s letters, so that he can guide colleagues who are translating the other three volumes. The full Chinese edition of The Letters will be available by the end of 2021. “The publication of The Letters in Chinese will be monumental, marking the completion of the Beckett translation project and rewriting the reception of Beckett in China,” said Bo Cao. To him, The Letters, a biography with “no commentary,” is as significant as Beckett’s works themselves.
In 2016 Hunan Literature and Art Press published The Complete Collection of Samuel Beckett in Chinese. In that series are Dr. Cao’s translations of Beckett’s novels Murphy, Watt (first edition in 2012), and More Pricks Than Kicks (2016), as well as his collection of occasional pieces edited by Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn: Disjecta (2016).
According to Dr. Cao, critical Chinese playwrights and novelists are curious about Beckett’s avant-garde works, and foreign literature scholars now find Beckett so fascinating and consider it their mission to remove political mis-readings of the previous decades. This renewed interest reflects changes in China. As to the difficulties of translation, Dr. Cao says that Beckett alludes to much classical European philosophy and arts, which are not widely known by Chinese readers. Beckett uses many invented terms and plays many word games for which it is difficult to find exact equivalents in Chinese. The translation of The Letters of Samuel Beckett is a great intellectual challenge.
Dr. Cao is Director of Center for British and Irish Literature at College of Foreign Studies, Hunan Normal University, where he also directs Department of Translation Studies. Since getting a Ph.D. degree in 2005 at Shanghai International Studies University, he has written on Irish and British authors and English-Chinese translation. Among his monographs are A Study of Samuel Beckett’s Novels of Failure (Beijing: Commercial Press, 2015) and Humanity Exploration: A Study of 18th Century British Novels (Beijing: Guangming Daily Press, 2009). Among his translations is also the Irish national epic The Tain (Changsha: Hunan Education Press, 2008). He is Secretary General of China British Literature Association.
The Beckett Letters project at Emory welcomes Dr. Bo Cao, and looks forward to arranging discussions within the Emory community about issues of translation as well as explorations of the cultural interactions invited by the study of literature. His presence at Emory offers a rich opportunity to share ideas.
Leading Chinese translator of ‘The Letters of Samuel Beckett’ comes to Emory
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