Book Review

Translation as Painting from Life (《翻译似临画》) by Fu Lei First coined by the great Chinese translator Fu Lei (1908–1966) in 1951, the phrase "translation should be like painting from life — seeking not formal likeness but spiritual resemblance" (翻译当如临画，所求不在形似而在神似) has become one of the most quoted maxims in Chinese translation theory. The volume Translation as Painting from Life (《翻译似临画》), edited by Fu Min (Fu Lei's son) and published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in 2014 as part of the "Words of Translators" series, brings together Fu Lei's essays and letters on translation in a bilingual Chinese-English edition — a compact yet richly layered collection for anyone serious about literary translation. The book is divided into two main parts: "Notes on Translation" (译话点滴), which gathers Fu Lei's prefaces and theoretical pieces (including the forewords to his retranslations of Le Père Goriot and Cousin Bette, and his famous "Dribs and Drabs of Translation Experience"), and "Translation Correspondence" (翻译书札), a treasure trove of letters to fellow translators such as Song Qi, Luo Xinzhang, and his own son Fu Cong. A brief appendix compiling the Fu Lei research bibliography (1970–2013) rounds out the volume. What sets this revised edition apart is the inclusion of original book covers, facsimiles of Fu Lei's manuscripts, and archival material — giving the reader a tangible sense of the man behind the translations. Fu Lei's translation philosophy is built on the word 神似 (shen-si, "spiritual resemblance"). For him, translation is not a mechanical transfer of meaning but an act of artistic re-creation, akin to a painter copying a masterpiece — you must capture the soul, not merely the contour. He famously argued that a translator must "understand, experience, and feel the original deeply; otherwise the reader can never understand, experience, and feel it." This demand extends beyond language: Fu Lei insists that a literary translator's foundation is artistic cultivation (艺术修养). In his letters to Luo Xinzhang, he writes that translation is no less demanding than a musician's performance — the translator must "live with the characters day and night," as he did when rendering Balzac's Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes. Reading these pieces is humbling. Fu Lei's self-criticism is unsparing: he confesses to hesitating for years before tackling Candide, and to finding his own early drafts "stiff in wording." His letters reveal a man who revised obsessively, fought for terminological consistency, and bristled when editors tampered with his choices. The famous line about translators "dancing in shackles" — often attributed loosely in Chinese discourse — finds its true temper here: Fu Lei accepts the shackles but refuses to let them numb the rhythm. That said, the book is not without limitations for the general reader. Fu Lei's concerns are overwhelmingly those of literary translation, specifically French-Chinese renditions of Balzac, Voltaire, and Romain Rolland. Readers looking for guidance on non-literary, technical, or bidirectional English-Chinese translation may find the scope narrow. Moreover, the essays and letters were written across decades in a refined, slightly classical Chinese idiom; even in the bilingual edition, some nuance inevitably sits on the Chinese side. But for its intended audience — translation scholars, aspiring literary translators, and students of comparative literature — this is a minor quibble. Translation as Painting from Life is less a "how-to" manual than a portrait of a translator's mind. It reminds us that behind every polished sentence in Fu Lei's Balzac lies a man who treated words as seriously as a painter treats pigment. In an age of machine translation and speed, Fu Lei's patient, almost devotional craft feels almost radical. I'd recommend it not just to translators, but to anyone who cares why some translated books read like originals while others don't. Pick it up, and you'll close it thinking differently about what it means to carry a voice across languages.