Huiwen (Helen) Zhang

1. Book project “Kafka’s Dao” and digital project “Kafka’s Zürau Collection”

My sabbatical in the Spring of 2024 will be dedicated to the completion of my book (print), “Kafka’s Dao: The Patience Game,” and the development of my parallel project (digital), “Kafka’s Zürau Collection and Associated Reflections.”

Both Kafka’s interest in China and his Zürau aphorism collection have been extensively researched. However, even the finest works in the field miss a crucial point: how Kafka’s fascination with Laozi led to his Zürau collection—a modern German continuation of the Daodejing. My two projects focus on this point. Using the transreading method and paying particular attention to the far-reaching dialogues between ancient China and modern Europe, my projects will illuminate the promise of “Dao for modernity.”

“Kafka’s Dao: The Patience Game” is divided into 4 chapters: “Kafka’s Riddles,” “Kafka’s China,” “Patience Game,” and “Kafka’s Dao.” I concentrate on Kafka’s Zürau collection, which is comprised of 109 numbered aphorism cards. The modularity of this collection makes each card not only ideal to be mingled with other corresponding cards, but also with Kafka’s parables, journals, and letters. Drawing materials from the innovative Stroemfeld edition of Kafka’s handwritten manuscripts, I have completed 60% of the book.

“Kafka’s Zürau Collection and Associated Reflections,” is related to, yet independent of, “Kafka’s Dao.” They are related, because my own translation of the Zürau collection is being produced to lay the foundation for “Kafka’s Dao.” The digital project stands alone because it bridges a gap: the published translations of the Zürau collection do not adequately consider the Europe/China dialogue on modernity that influenced its creation. A fully interfaced digital edition will allow illuminating images of Kafka’s handwriting; multilingual audio readings of his aphorisms; and intensive annotations for the reader to explore. Four interlocutors have collaborated with me to develop this project as an integral part of the “Digital Transreading” series that I envisioned in 2020. We use several real-time collaborative editing systems to stimulate individual contributions from multiple remote participants and to accelerate our joint scholarly endeavors through discussion, debate, and mutual constructive critique.   

2. Book Project: “Nordic Modes of Transreading”

Norway, my new intellectual home since 2021, has exposed me to unexpected cross-cultural phenomena. I have been inspired to enrich my established transreading theory with a new research project, “Nordic Modes of Transreading.”

The 20th-century literary environment was dominated in many ways by American, German, and French circles. Poets in the most visible international spheres revolutionized their art by transreading ancient Chinese literature, using it as a novel lens to investigate their own cultural contexts.

Sitting outside of the dominant spheres, Scandinavians looked both outwards and inwards by necessity. Nordic thinkers and poets took the opportunity to integrate the Chinese classics and the modern Euro-American milieu to enrich their unique cultural base, stacking the lenses of modern Western thought and ancient Eastern wisdom atop one another to throw Nordic tradition into enigmatic and energizing focus.

Olav H. Hauge, for example, on the one hand transread the Chinese philosophical and poetic canon through the lens of Baudelaire, Pound, and Celan, and, on the other hand transread Euro-American modernism through the lens of Laozi, Li Po, and Tao Qian.

This Nordic mode of transreading—of incorporating prominent global work, ancient and modern, alongside local touchstones like the Edda—is further exemplified by Vilhelm Ekelund, Erik Blomberg, Gunnar Ekelöf, Paal Brekke, and Georg Johannesen.

Having discovered these novel and complex transreading connections, I will explore why they came to be, what their effects were, and how these reasons and consequences reveal more nuanced facets about Nordic cultural production.

3. Book project: “Transreading: A Common Language for Cultural Critique”

This research project grew out of the urgent need for productive cross-cultural dialogue. A paradox of our time is that even though technological and economic ties pull China and Europe ever closer, culturally the two seem to be drifting apart. As encounters become more frequent, anxiety heightens. The simultaneous overconfidence and self-doubt of a culture and its perception of others as incomprehensible or incompatible are but two symptoms. These circumstances demand a new approach to bridge-building between cultures. My drive toward synthesis and my ability to work across disciplines enable me to craft new intellectual frameworks. Utilizing my language skills in classical Chinese, modern Chinese, German, and English, and benefiting from my scholarly network in Scandinavia, I will focus on three representative ethnolinguistic areas: Lu Xun in Chinese; Søren Kierkegaard, Georg Brandes, and August Strindberg in Scandinavian languages; and Friedrich Nietzsche, Käthe Kollwitz, and Franz Kafka in German. By thematizing the global dialogue on modernity, walking unexplored paths to contextualize its central participants, and communicating the findings via traditional and new media to scholars and the general public, I will demonstrate how authentic and intensive cross-cultural dialogue helps diverse cultures better understand one another as well as themselves.

The manifold pressures of modernity—mechanisation, corporatisation, and dehumanisation—drove creative minds across geographically disparate cultures to a string of common responses. Together, these responses are characteristic of Europe and China’s dialogue on modernity. The problems they detected have by no means been resolved: the participants in this dialogue are voices speaking to the present. Examining how they wrestled with 19^th- and 20^th-century issues reveals how we might overcome the challenges of our own age.

My project aims to use “transreading”—an integration of lento reading, poetic translation, cultural hermeneutics, and creative writing—to reconstruct a transcontinental dialogue on modernity. Lento or slow-close reading sharpens our focus on linguistic and argumentative nuances that might otherwise be overlooked; poetic translation compels us to consider both the content of a message and the delivery that reinforces it; cultural hermeneutics grounds individual works in a panoramic context, providing the foil with which the author converses; creative writing hones our skills in condensing all of these considerations for a new audience. The synergy of these activities is essential to understanding the participants in Europe and China’s dialogue on modernity, whose works are foundational yet often cryptic. The examination of macro-scale phenomena through micro-level transreading characterizes my research and lends this project broadness, exactness, and originality.

By achieving my objective to thematise the global dialogue on modernity, my project will produce the first panoramic portrayal of the new cultural breakthrough in three ethnolinguistic areas and advance the understanding of individual thinkers by contextualizing them in a fresh landscape. It will bridge the gaps between Chinese, German, and Scandinavian studies and create new perspectives for future research.

By achieving my objective to illustrate transreading, my project will provide an innovative tool for a variety of scholarly and pedagogical applications. It will show how the principles of transreading can be distilled from the methods employed by the participants in Europe and China’s dialogue on modernity, spanning literature, philosophy, and art. It will also demonstrate how transreading benefits scholars, educators, and students alike by combining proven techniques that enable critique with deeper understanding.

Both the thematic and methodological originality of my project is relevant and timely. A paradox of our time is that even though technological and economic ties pull China and Europe ever closer, culturally the two seem to be drifting apart. As encounters become more frequent, anxiety grows. The simultaneous overconfidence and self-doubt of a culture and its perception of others as incomprehensible or incompatible are but two symptoms. These circumstances demand a new approach to bridge-building between cultures. By transreading the global dialogue on modernity, I will demonstrate how authentic and intensive cross-cultural dialogue helps diverse cultures better understand one another as well as themselves. My project will provide readers—in academia and beyond—deeper insights that will facilitate more productive intellectual exchanges.