Panel: Ethical Considerations: Collaboration, Life Writing Texts, and
Translation
Copanelists: Marlene Kadar and Rachel Robertson
In this paper, I will consider post-war Chinese narratives of confession and self-criticism as acts of translation, drawing on self-criticisms and other testimony by those accused of political crimes, specifically of “collaboration” with the wartime Japanese occupation authorities between 1931 and 1945.
The self-criticism genre imposed strict conventions designed not only to record the detail of criminal or transgressive activity within a life history, but also to demonstrate that the author had developed and internalised an orthodox understanding of past failings. This required a successful translation of transgressive wartime choices and their declared rationales into the political language and value systems of the post-war era.
These confessions and self-criticisms were in many ways distinct from other public and private narratives of wartime transgressions. While we may see attempts at translation in personal diaries, combined with self-scrutiny and self-evaluation, these may be better characterised as a bricolage of elements from differing cultural or political positions; and while we see urgent engagement with audience in trial testimony, this tends to focus on action rather than on the acting self, and on selfexplanation rather than self-transformation.
In examining the post-war texts, I will consider the translation strategies deployed and the pressures imposed by the public form, and argue that, as these confessions and self-criticisms recorded a transformation of the self, they also demanded a translation between moral orders and generic conventions.
Marjorie Dryburgh completed a PhD in modern Chinese history at the University of Durham in 1993. This study on pre-war relations between China and Japan drew on a combination of archival and memoir sources and gave her an interest in shifting political reputations, the relation between writings that we understand as “official” and “personal,” and the multiple functions of autobiographical works. More recently, she has worked on strategies of self-representation in diaries produced by Chinese who collaborated with the Japanese armies before and during the war, and on personal and social memory of the war in post-war China. She was co-organiser of the international workshop Writing Lives in China, held at the University of Sheffield in March 2008.