Fist of (Con)Fusion: Bruce Lee and monolingual cultural translation

Here’s an abstract of a paper I’m working on at the moment:

 

The opening of Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury (1972) depicts the funeral of a Chinese martial arts master, in a Chinese school in the Japanese-dominated area of the Shanghai International Settlement, circa 1908. This is already a fraught moment of cultural transmission: indeed the eulogists expend most of their energy emphasizing to the assembled martial art students that they know the correct way to preserve their master’s lineage and their tradition. But the funeral is rudely interrupted by the arrival of belligerent representatives of a Japanese martial arts school, who contemptuously present the Chinese with a large framed piece of calligraphic writing, which reads “Sick Man of Asia”. The Japanese issue a challenge, via their translator, the creepy and culturally and sexually ambiguous Hu En. The senior Chinese elders prevent any of the Chinese students from answering the challenge, in order to preserve decorum.

At one key point a senior Chinese teacher addresses the translator, Hu. In the dubbed English version, the Chinese senior asks Hu, “Look here, just what going on here?” In the English subtitles, however, this exchange is rendered as, “Look here, are you Chinese?” These are significantly different renderings. Hu’s answer in the subtitled version is that whilst he is Chinese he shares a different destiny to them. In the dubbed version, however, Hu shortly proceeds to speak of the superiority of “we Japanese”.

Deliberately without having sought to establish whether the different combinations of Dutch and Mandarin subtitles and dubbing replicate this disjunction or introduce others, this paper assumes the likelihood of these and other possibilities. It does so in order to explore several interconnected issues of translation. Firstly, various theories of translation and their imbrication in various models of culture and tradition; and secondly, Benjaminian arguments about the text as construct – Fist of Fury is clearly a complex (and internally contradictory) construct, with all sound added post-production and hence lacking any ‘original’ as such – and the complexity of such putatively ‘simple’ popular cultural texts as Fist of Fury when approached as the ‘arcades’ of ‘cultural translation’.

In order to explore such a massive set of problematics in such limited time and space, the paper will focus specifically on the two key dimensions of this opening scene: first, the fact that the funeral of the founder is already a fraught scene of rupture/tradition, transfer/loss, continuity/disjunction – indeed, of cultural translation – here supplemented – secondly – by the double, duplicitous (cultural) status of the (literal/linguistic) translator, Mr Hu. The reading of this scene will be organised by Rey Chow’s contribution to theories of translation in her essay, “Film as Ethnography; or, Translation Between Cultures in the Postcolonial World” (1995), which itself begins from a consideration of the Italian expression “Traduttore, traditore” – “Translator, traitor”.