擇選眼光與翻譯策略：德庇時「中國戲劇推薦書單」初探 = The Eye for Selection and the Strategies of Translation: A Preliminary Study on John Francis Davis’s List of Chinese Play-Books

This paper explores the book list from the preface of the earliest English translation of the Yuan drama Hangong qiu (The Sorrows of Han) by the 19th century sinologist John Francis Davis in 1829. Davis wrote at the end of this preface “The following list of Chinese Play-Books may perhaps be useful to students of the language” and then provided a list of thirty-two titles of Chinese plays. This is the first recommendation of Chinese plays for Westerners in the history of literature/drama transmission between China and Europe; before this, the Europeans had only heard of the Selection of Yuan Plays, which were translated and printed in 1735 and included The Orphan of Zhao. Davis claimed that this list was compiled for language learning as he himself had benefitted from reading a number of novels and plays to learn Chinese. More interestingly, this list revels the popularity of Chinese drama around 1829, foreigners’ interest in Chinese drama, and the reason why the particular items on this list were selected. It is curious that this list had been ignored by scholars for nearly two centuries. As a preliminary study of this list, this paper tries to dig out the underlying issues of the cross-cultural transmission of drama in the early nineteenth century.