Tradurre l’intraducibile: eros e humor nella versione inglese del Rouputuan

Rouputuan is a 17th century Chinese erotic novel renowned for its shifts from the use of an ambiguous and sarcastic irony to a faithful adherence to the Buddhist belief and doctrine, and vice versa. Identifying the moralizing aspect as a characterizing element of the novel, many scholars and translators have sometimes watered down the comic charge of Rouputuan, sacrificing above all its interconnection with sexual description, and ‘betraying’, to certain extent, the original intent of the novel. Facing with eros and humor which are the most atavistic and instinctual interiority of man but also a dis- tinctive character of cultural diversity, they may be sometimes difficult to ‘translate’, or are even untranslatable, into another cultural and social context. Hanan made a wonderful attempt to reproduce the comic and provocative streak of Rouputuan in English, re-connecting it with narrative sexual descriptions. This article will briefly discuss some factors that are involved in Hanan’s process of translating erotic passages and terminology of sex and lovemaking.