A Journey Across Rivers and Lakes: a Look at the Untranslatable 'Jianghu' in Chinese Culture and Literature

This paper sets out to explore the possibility as well as the impossibility of representing a seemingly untranslatable term: jianghu (江湖), which literally means “rivers and lakes” in the Chinese language. The paper discusses how the term evolves almost like an organic entity of its own, stretching from Chinese literature, cinema to the everyday use of the term as slangs and idioms. By looking at how the term is translated from one language to another, from an ancient context to a (post)modern context, and further away from one generation to another, this paper attempts to study the process of adaptation and translation beyond a linguistic scope, but towards a broader field of literary, cultural and film studies. The paper also examines how the process of translating, adapting and imagining jianghu can be deemed a manifestation of the Derridian concept of “supplementarity”.