Exploring the texts, contexts and paratexts of Zhu Dake’s works:《燃烧的迷津》(The Burning Maze) and 《大桶》(Datong/Big Barrel)

In one of the recent interviews with Zhu Dake (in Sept. 2023, as part of the Faculty SEED project), a prominent writer and cultural critic from China, we asked him, what he meant by the “Burning Maze” (which is the title of his book on cultural criticism published in 1991), he responded by saying that the “burning maze” is metaphorically referred to as the Chinese culture. The contract project (to be sponsored by Xin Jin Shan Library Foundation, based in Ballarat) aims to explore the texts, contexts and paratexts of Zhu Dake’s works, including 《燃烧的迷津》(The Burning Maze, published in 1991 by 学林出版社 Academia Press in Shanghai) and 《大桶》(Datong/Big Barrel, published in 2023 by 四川文艺出版社 Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House, in Chengdu). The “Burning Maze” is one of Zhu Dake’s earliest works on Chinese cultural criticism, and the “Datong/Big Barrel” is one of his latest works completed during the Pandemic, and it’s a mythological story based on the Stone of Tizoc in the midst of the rainforest in Central America.

The major outcomes of the project are produced in three phases: Phase 1: collecting, processing and updating the paratexts of Zhu Dake and his works; Phase 2: building a bilingual corpus (including annotated notes) of Zhu Dake’s work, Datong/Big Barrel; and researching issues of AI translation and human translation of Datong/Big Barrel; and Phase 3: Unpacking “Zhuspeak” (朱语), a unique literary genre named after Zhu Dake, from the perspectives of literary creativity and cultural criticism, translation studies, and cultural linguistics with reference to Zhu Dake’s ‘Burning Maze’ and ‘Datong/Big Barrel’. Specific outcomes include: 1) bilingual websites in Chinese and English (e.g., Wikipedia on Zhu Dake, and other relevant websites); media articles based on the interviews of Zhu Dake (conducted at part of the Faculty SEED project); 2) a bilingual corpus consisting of Zhu Dake’s Datong/Big Barrel; 3) a research article on exploring methodological issues of AI translation and human translation (with extensive annotations) of Zhu Dake’s Datong/Big Barrel; and 4) a research article on unpacking the “Zhuspeak” (metaphorical use of language in his “Burning Maze” and mythological story of “Datong/Big Barrel”).