Mirok Li (1899-1950) has been described in various ways—an exile, an overseas student, an independence activist, a philosopher, a zoologist, and a novelist. His life paths cannot be singularly defined, reflecting the intricate interweaving of different aspects of his transnational trajectory. Born in Haeju, he continued his medical studies in Gyŏngsŏng, fled to Germany via Shanghai, and later engaged in literary activities in exile. Even after settling in Germany, his path remained multifaceted: Three years after publishing his dissertation in Zoology, he began writing short stories, ultimately publishing his first novel The Yalu flows in 1946.

This study explores the central questions: Why did an exile Mirok Li begin writing fiction in Germany? The existing scholarship has largely portrayed him as a 'cultural ambassador of Korea' of a figure spreading knowledge of his homeland. However, it has overlooked his active editorial and publishing engagement with literary works from East Asian nations. Addressing this gap, this study examines the characteristics of Li’s exilic literature in Germany and explores its connections with world literature. Li was the first Korean to write in German, actively participated in Germany’s World Literature series projects, selecting and introducing East Asian literary works for a German readership. Thus, this study hypothesizes that Li, as a mediator of East Asian literature, sought ways for East Asian literature to coexist within the framework of world literature, while ultimately exploring pathways to world peace.

To achieve these objectives, this research employs Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur and Rey Chow’s theory of cultural translation as its methodological framework. Given that Li began his literary career after his exile to Germany, this study focuses on his literary activities between 1920 and 1950. It examines the networks he established with German writers, Asian intellectuals, and socialist circles in Europe. The primary sources include his essays and novels published in Germany, and archival materials from the German Literature Archive Marbach related to Germany’s world literature projects. Li also personally translated and introduced East Asian literary works into German, making it crucial to examine how his own writings positioned and represented East Asian culture and literature within the field of world literature.

The ultimate goal of this research is to expand the scope of studies on Mirok Li, which have so far been confined to his novel The Yalu Flows (Der Yalu fließt).

Furthermore, by examining post-World War I era -when values such as peace and reconciliation were emphasized- through the lens of Li as an exile, this research offers insights into the contemporary understanding of world literature and global citizenship. In doing so, it critically engages with and rethinks key concepts such as borderlessness, post-nationalism, and transnationalism.

Cette communication examine les dimensions linguistiques (et traductologiques) des récits migratoires d’autrices iraniennes telles que Marjane Satrapi, Maryam Madjidi et Nahal Tajadod, dont les œuvres, écrites directement en français, témoignant d’expériences complexes de migration, de mémoire et d’appartenance, mais où l’écriture en français devient un acte de traduction intérieure, un processus d’auto-traduction au sens métaphorique. L’objectif principal est d’analyser comment cette traduction intérieure agit comme un vecteur de médiation interculturelle, tout en interrogeant les représentations de perte, de transformation et de transfert culturel qui émergent dans le passage entre la langue de l’univers de ces récits (le persan) et celle de leur écriture (le français).

Dans cette communication, j’analyserai mon corpus de deux points de vue :

1. La (auto)traduction intérieure comme outil de recontextualisation

Je présenterai les stratégies traductives employées par ces trois autrices pour adapter les référents culturels iraniens (les concepts religieux, les rituels, ou la poésie persane, les proverbes et noms propres) au lectorat français.

2. Langue de l’exil : écrire ou s’autotraduire ?

J’explorerai les tensions linguistiques dans les textes d’autrices comme Nahal Tajadod (Passeport à l’iranienne) ou Maryam Madjidi (Marx et la poupée), où l’écriture en français devient un acte de traduction intérieure et j’étudierai l'impact de la migration sur la langue source et la langue cible, en me posant une question principale : quels déplacements opère ce type de traduction/écriture sur les récits d’exil et d’appartenance ?

Mon corpus sera constitué principalement de :

• Persepolis (2000-2003) de Marjane Satrapi : (bande dessinée autobiographique traduite dans plusieurs langues).

• Passeport à l’iranienne (2007) de Nahal Tajadod : (récit semi-autobiographique écrit en français, explorant les tensions identitaires entre l’Iran et la France).

• Marx et la poupée (2017) de Maryam Madjidi (roman autobiographique écrit en français, qui interroge les thèmes de l’exil, de la langue et de l’héritage culturel).

Je choisis de travailler spécifiquement sur les autrices, car leurs récits migratoires sont souvent marqués par des enjeux de genre et des expériences spécifiques liées à la condition féminine en Iran. Ces écrivaines, à travers leur langue et leurs choix narratifs, ouvrent un champ d’analyse particulier sur les tensions et les rapports de force linguistiques et culturels, ainsi que sur la manière dont la traduction et la langue de l’exil deviennent un outil pour revisiter et redéfinir leur rapport à la culture d’origine et à celle d’accueil. L'objectif de la communication est donc de comprendre la traduction comme un acte créatif et culturel, en montrant que la (auto)traduction des récits migratoires,où chaque mot porte une charge émotionnelle, ne se limite pas à un simple transfert linguistique, mais implique une reformulation des expériences d'exil pour un lectorat étranger.

This presentation, which will be brief and exploratory, examines the even shorter autobiographical chronicle, "Balada de los Apalaches" (Ballad of the Appalachian Mountains) by Melanie Márquez Adams, written and published in Spanish in 2020 in Querencia, the author's compilation of similar chronicles. Of particular interest to me is Márquez Adams's understanding and use of the concept of "soledad": a concept (often translated into English as "solitude") that in many respects has become emblematic of the Latin American condition and to some extent of the Latin American region as a whole; indeed, soledad – as it is developed and expressed across several moments in Latin American thought – is the focus of my current monograph; I am still in the early stages of this project, so I would welcome any suggestions. In "Balada de los Apalaches," I am particularly interested in how the author grapples with her stimulating but uneasy residency in the United States, where the mountains of eastern Tennessee both remind her of her Ecuadorian homeland, while simultaneously reminding her that she is now in a new region, far from her origins. In expressing this nostalgia, Márquez Adams deploys notions of soledad. To what extent does this deployment of our concept align with other usages within the Spanish-American intellectual tradition? Conversely, to what extent does it depart from said usages? In either case, in what ways does Márquez Adams's short chronicle expand our understanding of "soledad" in the Americas? The answers to these questions entail explorations into both migration and translation, the twin subjects of this panel.

People moving across borders naturally bring languages into contact, occasioning acts of translation. Yet the standard history of translation theory has surprisingly little to say about immigration, emigration, or diaspora—and there is strikingly little research in translation studies on the place of migration in the movement of literature across languages. This brief (8–12 minute) paper will introduce and frame the panel "Translating Migration: The Movement of Texts and Individuals in World Literature." Modern forms of diasporic mass migration across national language boundaries are prone to precipitate the translation of literature. This chapter in the history of world literature surpasses any dynamic once envisioned by Goethe. It gives us a vision of literary translation as a distinctively migratory literary practice, and one which might have particular expressive import to writers caught up in histories of migration as they play out over the course of generations.

How did James Joyce’s Ulysses, originally banned in both the United Kingdom and the United States, become the world literary classic it is today? This article investigates how Ulysses navigated censorship across multiple nations, overcoming ideological constraints to achieve canonization and even inspiring writers in other linguistic traditions to safeguard literary autonomy. It begins by tracing the reasons for its banning in the UK and US during the 1920s and examines how Joyce, with the support of Sylvia Beach, published the first complete English edition through her Paris-based bookstore and publishing house, Shakespeare and Company.

The analysis then explores the pivotal role of Shakespeare and Company as a bookstore, publishing house, and library in enhancing the visibility of Ulysses within both the Anglophone and Francophone worlds. In the wake of World War I, disillusioned Anglo-American modernist writers—including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein—gathered at Shakespeare and Company. Their active engagement with and promotion of Ulysses secured its status as a cornerstone of modernist literature. Simultaneously, in the Francophone world, Beach’s partnership with Adrienne Monnier, the proprietor of La Maison des Amis des Livres, was equally crucial. Together with translator Auguste Morel, and under Joyce’s meticulous guidance, they produced a French edition of Ulysses in 1929, solidifying its reputation in French literary circles. Ulysses thus emerged not only as a seminal modernist work across Anglophone and Francophone cultures but also as a text that, through its acclaim in the Francophone world, regained prominence in the Anglophone sphere.

The final section of this article expands the discussion to Sinophone Taiwan, tracing how Joyce’s resistance to censorship during the interwar period in defense of literary autonomy inspired Taiwanese writers in their pursuit of literary modernism during the Cold War. Under martial law, Taiwan’s cultural production was deeply politicized, with literature frequently serving as a tool for anti-communist ideological narratives. Yet, in response to this restrictive environment, Joyce’s negotiation with censorship became a crucial reference point for Taiwanese writers, prompting them to embrace a seemingly depoliticized and highly aestheticized form of literary modernism as a means of preserving their vision of literariness. So profound was Joyce’s influence that, as this article demonstrates, many Taiwanese writers even sought to emulate him by relocating abroad—particularly to the United States—to pursue a path toward literary freedom.

Raising the questions of migration and translation together gives us an opportunity to respond to Talal Asad’s critique of cultural translation as involving “the privileged position of someone who does not, and can afford not to, engage in a genuine dialogue with those he or she once lived with and now writes about.” The massive migrations caused by the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945 urged numerous East Asian writers to engage in intense dialogues with their past experiences across geographic, historical, and political distances. This paper examines from a comparative perspective works in this genre produced within a few years after the end of the war by some of the foremost figures of postwar Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese literatures: Yŏm Sangsŏp, Abe Kōbō, and Zhong Lihe. Critiquing the conventional nation-based approach, this study considers a dialogical narrative form shared across their works. This form enabled these writers to fathom the realities of a postwar world being made in such unpredictable ways that they defied an authorial, monological point of view based on an available historical consciousness. Through analyzing these narratives, this paper will consider the function of polyphony in cultural translation.

Born in Guilin, Guangxi Province in China in the year of the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war and having grown up in the flames of civil war before evacuating to Taiwan with the Nationalist army and government, Pai Hsien-yung’s translative habitus as a diasporic Chinese writer living in the West and the humanist values in his works have gained him entry to the international book market and acclaim in the English-language literary sphere. Owing to this, his works have been rendered into English by many academics teaching in North American universities, such as Terence Russell, Steven Riep, Christopher Lupke, Bert Scruggs, Linshan Jiang and Howard Goldblatt. While in producing the English version of his most well-known collection of short stories, Taipei People, Pai himself also stepped into this crucial role as a translator with the second translator Patia Yasin and the editor George Kao contributing finishing touches. Unlike other Southern literary works, bound for the Northern book market, that have undergone the interpretations of foreign translators, the author himself was intimately involved in the process of trading Taipei People to the market for world literature in English-speaking countries.

By exploring differences between the original version and the English version of Pai Hsien-yung’s self-translated short story “Love’s Lone Flower,” this paper explains the cultural and political ideology latent in the second version of the work, exploring how the multicultural and multilingual identities of the Southern other in the original version have been “standardised” in the translated version in order to serve the English audience. In working towards the goal of empowering the minorities and Others of the Global South, this paper also investigates the issues that involved in the literary industry in order to call for a more de-colonised translation for the future’s generations.

Migrant translators hold the position in world literature of not just carrying texts across languages but also reshaping literary and historical memory. While David Damrosch argues that texts “gain in translation” (What is World Literature), Emily Apter in Against World Literature argues that world literature relies on a “translatability assumption” (14): the tendency to endorse cultural equivalence. In contrast, Longxi Zhang argues for the importance of translation by stating that it establishes human relationships. To consider world literature texts in translation to be a loss due to the idea of ‘transferring meaning’ would be to disregard the historical and political negotiations that occur as texts such as River of Fire (2019) by Qurratulain Hyder, embody the position of a migrant text in motion.

Translation is not merely a process of linguistic transfer. Instead, as a migrant world-literary text, Hyder’s self-translated novel River of Fire is an act of world-making: the narrative is encoded with displacements, cultural negotiations, and epistemic ruptures that not only reflect the history and lived realities of the Partition of 1947 but also urges us, as world literature critics, to consider the role of migrant translators in shaping world literature (as texts circulate and translate across borders).

This paper considers River of Fire, through the lens of self-translation (Gyatari Spivak and Susan Bassnett), and world literature (David Damrosch and Amir Mufti) to argue that the text is a form of refugee poetics: where the fractured structure, polyphonic voices, and temporal and linguistic shifts mirror the refugee’s ongoing translation in the world. This creates a nuanced understanding of self-translation as the novel becomes a mirror of the refugee and displaced experience during the Partition of India and Pakistan. Thus, this paper analyzes how Hyder’s self-translation makes visible the transnational literary movement's pressures (and burdens) on migrants. As Hyder’s novel enacts Partition linguistically and narratively, her work urges us, as world literature critics and readers, to consider self-translation as an active site of cultural and historical mediation that should be regarded as a space of resistance and confrontation.

This paper explores Ha Jin’s self-translation in his poetry collection A Distant Center (2018), interrogating the concepts of national identity, literary translingualism, and performative hybridization in the context of diaspora and displacement. Despite extensive scholarship on Ha Jin’s idiosyncratic “translation literature” (Gong 2014) characterized by his nativized English discourse that exhibits remarkable linguistic and cultural Chineseness, as well as some limited attention directed at his sporadic efforts to self-translate his own English-language works “back” into his native language, there remains a marked absence of scholarly inquiry into the reverse direction of transfer within his self-translation oeuvre later in his career, where he began to compose poetry in Chinese for the first time to “enrich” the subsequent English versions. For a writer who has built his career exclusively in English and who has been embraced by the American literary establishment, the bittersweet nature of this linguistic homecoming is manifested in a “short-lived” and “vacation-like” respite from the existential burden of writing in a non-native language. Through close readings of his selected poems in English against the Chinese originals, the article explores the ways in which Jin’s self-translations reflect and negotiate the tensions, ambivalences, and hybridities of diasporic subjectivity amid his poetic engagement with the painful realities of China’s state violence and his thematic preoccupations with rootlessness, nostalgia, and the search for belonging in his self-imposed political exile. Writing Chinese original poems with English translations in mind, Jin’s anticipatory orientation has embedded the very genesis of his poems with a jarring Anglicism deeply informed by his extensive readings of Western literary canons, such as Hardy and Yeats, while his use of rhyme and meter in the originals is replaced by alternative means of creating poetic resonance in English. Positioning the translated collection within the institutional and publication context of the leading American poetry publisher Copper Canyon Press, this article examines how Jin’s attempt to claim a place within the poetic canon in the hostland simultaneously involves a resistance to its assimilationist pressures through foreignization strategies of literary allusions to Ancient Chinese poet Li Po, and linguistic restlessness and ungrammatical phrasing that deviates from standard American English. As a "born-translated" autobiographical poetry (Walkowitz 2015), it creates a “third space” (Bhabha 2004) that challenges monolithic paradigms of national literature, the arrogance of U.S. monolingualism, and the essentialist notions of Chineseness or Americanness through cross-cultural fertilization and hybridization. In exploring concepts of transculturalism, transnationalism, and translingualism, it sheds light on how diasporic writing gains in translation as a piece of world literature.

The Ganges, a vital conduit of migration, trade, and cultural transmission, has profoundly

shaped the literary and oral traditions of Bengal. Among these, Bhatiali (boatmen’s songs)

and Bhawaiya (pastoral ballads) stand as emblematic folk genres that encapsulate the rhythms

of riverine and agrarian life. These genres depicts the symbiotically entangled relationship

between the people and their environment. This paper investigates the problems in translation

of these songs, where the songs have a deep connections with the specific riverine and

pastoral locality. A major obstacle is the loss of local imagery, where evocative metaphors

tied to the land and water lose their cultural resonance in target languages. Furthermore,

Rajbanshi and Kamrupi phonetics often resist standardization thus the linguistic fluidity of

folk dialects complicates translation. The improvisational essence and melodic structure of

these oral traditions complicate direct linguistic translation, as rhythm and meaning are

inextricably linked. Additionally, the colonial ethnographers distorted them by romanticized

these songs as ‘mystical Eastern ballads’. In postcolonial scenario nationalist translations

reframed them to fit political narratives.

This paper thus argues that the Ganges functions as both a metaphor and a mechanism

for the movement of texts, where translation becomes an act of negotiation rather than mere

linguistic substitution. A truly faithful translation of these traditions must recreate the

experiential, rhythmic, and existential depth embedded in their original performance contexts,

acknowledging the fluidity of meaning, migration, and memory that defines Bengal’s riverine

literary landscape.

Douyin, with its English name TikTok, draws many Tibetan users. Among them, some instantly become “notorious ” online due to their critical attitude toward Buddhist Culture in Modern Tibetan society. Buddhist culture is not equivalent to profound religious philosophy or texts. It refers to rituals and behaviours which are practiced by the majority of people in everyday life. By adopting unobtrusive observation, this paper studies a vlogger’s story. What kind of videos does he make? What is the impact of his videos? Why does he make these videos?

His videos often draw many impolite comments since he courageously expresses his unhinged view of people’s religious practice. His understanding of some high-ranked monk’s words and behaviours draws much attention and hate. This paper explores the reason behind such a phenomenon. What are the key elements that lead to heated criticism and discussion? Why does the vlogger insist on creating these “unwelcomed” videos? This paper suggests that the key point of this story lies in the role of Buddhism in modern society. A drastic societal change brings many clashes between religious practice and everyday economic life. Thus, this research proposes that these “notorious” Tibetan vloggers are not opposing religion itself. Instead, they want to encourage ordinary people to be more with secular life so that people get more capital and agency in a modern society. One way of getting more involved with secular life, suggested by the vlogger, is reducing excessive donations and practicing time and rituals. As indicated by people’s hate comments, the vlogger’s criticism is unwelcomed, yet a portion of the voice still considers the vlogger as progressive and reasonable.

To Panel G11. Buddhism and its role Modernism in Asia

This paper plans to make a comparative reading of classical Chinese Buddhist text Lengyan jing (The Sūraṅgama Sūtra) and French philosopher Michel Serres (1930-2019)’s “philosophy of mingled bodies” as represented in his 1985 work Les Cinq Sens (The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (I) [2008]). Since the days of Freud, Bergeson and their contemporaries, a modern tradition has established itself which, aiming at the possible healing of the split between the empirical experience and abstract cognition, attempts a “return” to and reevaluation of human body. Contemporary French philosopher Michel Serres, by his simultaneously philosophical, scientific and poetic works, is a key speaker of this modern tradition. In The Five Senses, Serres refutes the conventional idea that treats senses as separate entities and takes senses as “exchangers” that are constantly subject to mutual interference. Moreover, the emphasis on bodily senses enables Serres to reestablish an immediate and concrete communication and contract between the modern self and the world, a tie that is freed from the tyranny of abstract reason, language, conception. As Serres maintains, through his review of bodily senses “we are re-establishing an equilibrium between what our predecessors called the empirical and the abstract, the sensible and the intellectual, data and synthesis even interference itself.”

A remote yet significant echo to Serres’s idea of senses can be found in classical Chinese Buddhist text Lengyan jing (The Sūraṅgama Sūtra). In volumes five and six of Lengyan jing, Buddha requires that his disciples illuminate on their various ways to enlightenment. Twenty-five disciples each make a statement, declaring that they either reach enlightenment through the concentration on six senses, six sensory organs, and the objects of the senses accordingly, or through a meditation on the seven basic elements. Different sensual organs, experiences and objects are distinct yet confluent at the same time, and there are essentially no differences between what ordinary people understand as subjective and objective, the self and the world. A revisit to the ancient Buddhist wisdom in the light of contemporary philosophy of Michel Serres may lead to the formation of an alternative pattern of modernization that draws on traditional Buddhist resource of East Asia and actively participates in the cross-cultural dialogues on the global intellectual and cultural frontier.

Keywords: body, senses, Lengyan jing (The Sūraṅgama Sūtra), Michel Serres

This paper shall try to explore the influence of Buddhist philosophy in modern Indian literature. I would also like to analyze Buddhism’s influence on Dalit literature.

Buddhist philosophy influenced modern Indian literature from two perspectives- (a) embracing the idea of peace and humanism in a violence-torn society and (b) presenting a counter-discourse against all social inequalities. Buddhism rejected the age-old oppressive caste system and advocated progressive values of life. Modern Indian authors including Rabindranath Tagore used Buddhist stories to compose poems and poetic dramas. Amalgamation of Buddhism, Upanishadic values and humanism strengthened the base of modern Indian poetry. Tagore’s idea of ‘dharma’ and ‘civilization’ surpassed the literal translation of these words. His poems based on ‘dhamma’ tales and buddhist legends portrayed a sharp criticism against all kind of religious dogmatism and the caste-system. Later other Bengali poets and authors took stoff from the Jataka stories and other Buddhist teachings and reshaped them to new literary texts to uphold the basic values of mankind. A few other modern Bengali writers authored literary texts based on Buddha’s life and his teachings.

One of the greatest Indian thinkers B. R. Ambedkar challenged the dogmatic Hidutvavadi structure and advocated to take refuge to Buddhism. Mahars and a few other Dalit communities spontaneously converted to Buddhism. Dalit literature and songs also became reshaped under the strong influence of Buddhist values. Dalit literature presented a counter-discourse to challenge the mainstream aesthetics and literary discourses. Rejecting Manusriti and other canonical texts dalit literature emerged as a new literary expression of the oppressed. To identify the problem of caste system and to challenge societal discriminations, Buddhist philosophy played a pivotal role in the modern Indian writings.

How did the stories and teachings of Buddha help to develop the literature of the ‘other’? How did the modern Indian authors present Buddhist philosophy as a subtly subversive text against the dominant cultural-religious discourse? I would like to answer these questions in my paper.

British Library manuscript S.3092, The Story of Daoming’s Return from the Dead,（道明還魂記） is a Buddhist miraculous tale （靈驗記）that recounts the protagonist’s journey through the underworld. Its primary purpose is to promote the image and faith of Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva（地藏菩薩）. The story exemplifies how religion seeks to validate its authority by drawing on evidence from the Buddhist afterlife through miracle tales—one of the key characteristics of such narratives during that time. This paper introduces and transcribes The Story of Daoming’s Return from the Dead, analyzing its significance within the broader context of religious storytelling in the East Asian religious sphere.