The following are excerpts from the interview.

Interview Excerpts
Professor Göran Malmqvist

I undertook two years of fieldwork for a dialect survey in Sichuan from 1948 to 1950, and then came to Hong Kong in July 1950 when I was 26 and lived here for some time. I paid a visit to Mr Qian Mu (錢穆) who had established the New Asia College. He was already a very established and renowned scholar, but he received me warmly although I was just a young scholar at that time. We talked about the sinology research of my teacher, the sinologist Bernhard Karlgren (高本漢). I began to have contact with CUHK in the 1990s, serving as a visiting scholar for Renditions (《譯叢》) for seven months, and also several times as an outside reviewer for the Department of Chinese Language and Literature and the Department of Translation. I gave a public lecture on the metrical pattern of poetry by the Song dynasty poet Xin Qiji (辛棄疾) , and another on Kang Youwei (康有為) and his Da Tong Shu (大同書, 'The Book of Great Unity') for the Department of Chinese Language and Literature. This article was published in 1991 in the third issue of the journal Twenty-first Century (《二十一世紀》) under the title 'Exploring the Differences of the Views on Utopia between China and the West from the Research on Da Tong Shu'. At that time I first met the Chinese writers Mo Yan and Han Shaogong at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature.

I undertook a lot of translation work after I retired in 1990. I translated Outlaws of the Marsh (《水滸傳》) into Swedish in the 1970s and Journey to the West (《西遊記》) in the 1990s. I spent a year and a half on the translation of Journey to the West, but only 26 weeks on Outlaws of the Marsh. This is because I had already read this novel many times and was familiar with its language. I also translated the poetry of Beidao (北島) , Gu Cheng (顧城) and several other poets within the Mist School of Poetry (朦朧詩派) , and the works of Shanxi writers such as Li Rui (李銳) and Cao Naiqian (曹乃謙). I also translated some Taiwanese poetry. I cooperated with Xi Mi (奚密) to compile an English Anthology of 20^th Century Taiwan Poems, which contains the works of fifty Taiwanese poets, including Lo Fu (洛夫) , Ya Xian (瘂弦) , Shang Qin (商禽) , Luo Men (羅門) and Xiang Yang (向陽). I took greatly to the poetry of the Taiwanese poet Yang Mu, so I translated his works into Swedish a few years ago.

My current research work for roughly the past year has been on the relationship between old pre-Qin Chinese texts and the spoken Chinese of that time. Hu Shi (胡適) argues in his History of Chinese Vernacular Literature  (《白話文學史》) that the classical Chinese language (文言文) has been dead for 2000 years. I agree with him. I think classical Chinese after the Han Dynasty had nothing to do with the spoken Chinese of that time. However, the old pre-Qin Chinese had many different variants, for example, the old Chinese in Mencius (《孟子》) is distinct from that of Zuo Zhuan (《左傳》) , Xun Zi (《荀子》) , Zhuang Zi (《莊子》) and Mo Zi (《墨子》) in grammatical structure. I argue that the old Chinese used in the Analects of Confucius, Mencius, Zuo Zhuan and Mo Zi had a very close relationship with the oral language of that time. I have done some research on this. I found a vivid and dramatic dialogue between the King of Chu and his general on a chariot in Zuo Zhuan. I used the old Chinese phonetic alphabet to spell out these paragraphs to find out how many homophones there were. I found that 30 per cent of the words did not have homophones, especially the most commonly used words such as 'ye' and 'wei'; and that 15 per cent of the words did have homophones. Usually, within a pair of homophones, one is a noun or a pronoun that cannot be negated and the other is a verb or adjective that can be negated. I hope to continue this research using different texts such as Zhuang Zi and Hui Zi to launch a comparative study. Early Swedish sinologists held the idea that pre-Qin Chinese was a dead language, but my supervisor Bernhard Karlgren and French sinologist Henri Maspéro oppose this view. Henri Maspéro contends that the discourse in Mo Zi is close to the spoken language of that time.

Last month, I noticed a scholar named Zhou Shoujuan (周瘦鵑) to whom I had not paid attention before. I think his contribution to translation is much more significant than that of Lin Shu (林紓). He translated foreign literary works into four different languages: pre-Qin Chinese, traditional Chinese, vernacular Chinese like that used in Outlaws of the Marsh, and the modern Chinese of his time. In 1915 he published An Anthology of European and American Short Fiction, which includes works by 48 famous writers in Europe and the USA. The language of the translation is very beautiful, but his contribution has not been fully recognised. He even translated the works of two famous Swedish writers, August Strindberg and Selma Lagerlöf. I converted the translation of the latter back into Swedish and then compared my translation with the original, through which I discovered that Zhou's translation was really good. I wrote an article about this and shared it with academicians at the Swedish Academy. This is part of my recent work of exploring contributions to the translation of Western literature by Chinese translators during the May Fourth era. I also looked up the introduction and translation of Nordic literature in Xiaoshuo Yuebao (《小說月報》) from its very first issue. Mao Dun (Shen Yanbing, 沈雁冰) and his brother Shen Zemin (沈澤民) both took part in this translation work. Shen Zemin was a young Chinese Communist Party member then, and his interest in and translation of a nineteenth-century Swedish romantic poet is very interesting to me. I also intend to explore other translators who have translated Swedish literature into Chinese, such as Guo Moruo (郭沫若) and Zhou Zuoren (周作人). All of these examples prove the great Chinese interest in European and especially Nordic literature at that time. Many journalists have asked me when Chinese literature will reach the level of World Literature. My argument is that the Book of Songs (《詩經》) , a work of literature with a 3000-year history, can be considered one of the greatest poems in World Literature. The categorisation of different literary genres in Wen Xin Diao Long (《文心雕龍》) is much more progressive than that of Europe in the same period. When Wang Wei (王維) , Li Bai (李白) and Du Fu (杜甫) appeared during the Tang Dynasty, there was only spoken language in Northern Europe. So I think that China reached the level of World Literature 2000 years earlier than Europe.

Translation plays a critical role in disseminating literature. There are two major responsibilities for translators. One is a responsibility towards the author: they cannot add or delete original text at will. The other is a responsibility towards readers: for example, the badly written poems in Outlaws of the Marsh should be strictly translated into bad poems according to the original text, without rewriting them into good poems. Therefore, regarding the generally held standards of translation, 'faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance' (信達雅) , I do not agree with the last. I think that translation ought to be true to the original text. When I translate farmers' discourses in the novels of Li Rui and Cao Naiqian, I do not change those discourses into elegant or beautiful language. Cao Naiqian uses lots of dirty words and swearing to express certain feelings of his protagonists; I have to invent corresponding words to achieve the same effect. Many Chinese translators do good work translating foreign works into Chinese, but usually fail when doing the reverse.

When I served as president of the European Association for Chinese Studies, I invited about 100 sinologists to work on an English book, A Selective Guide to Chinese Literature 1900–1949, for which I was chief editor. It has four volumes: one contains 100 novels, one 100 short stories, one 100 poems and one 100 plays. The aim of this guide was to help us to remember these writers. Now a Chinese publisher is preparing to release a Chinese version of this book. Literary critic David Der-Wei Wang (王德威) has affirmed the significance of this guide, and the new journal Literature (《文學》) , sponsored by Fudan University, is now organising a group of scholars to comment on the book.

Finally, because I always work by myself, I think highly of the working conditions of scholars at CUHK. Both the Department of Chinese Language and Literature and the Department of Translation with its Renditions have made a great contribution to translation. I believe that the Department of Chinese Language and Literature could make even greater achievements given its strength. Rather than the concept of 'Chinese Literature' (中國文學) , I personally prefer the concept of 'Written Chinese Literature' (中文文學) , that is, all Chinese literary writing. I think that CUHK should cooperate more with world-famous sinologists and translators and invite them to discuss issues of translation here. This would be really worthwhile work.