柏云飛

Yunfei Bai received his Ph.D. in French at Rutgers University. A native of Sichuan, China, he is also fluent in French, Spanish, Tibetan (Ü-Tsang dialect) and has worked extensively on primary sources written in these languages.

In his first book Rewriting the Orient: Asian Works in the Making of World Literature (NCSRLL/University of North Carolina Press, 2024), Yunfei delves into the creative adaptations of classical Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan literary texts by four renowned nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors in France and Argentina: Théophile Gautier, Stéphane Mallarmé, Victor Segalen, and Jorge Luis Borges. Without any knowledge of the source languages, the authors crafted their own French and Spanish retellings based on received translations of these Asian works. Rewriting the Orient not only explores the so far untapped translation-rewriting continuum to trace the pivotal role of Orientalism in the formation of a singular corpus of world literature that goes beyond the Anglophone canon, but also sheds light on a wide range of innovative discursive strategies that readily challenge traditional notions of cultural appropriation.  Yunfei is currently working on his second book project tentatively titled Interpreters at the Dawn of Global Buddhism. Drawing on previously unstudied primary sources in Tibetan, Chinese, French, and English, this book aims to reconstruct four singular interfaith encounters between Chinese/Tibetan Buddhists, Daoists, and Westerners that took place in various Asian localities in the first half of the twentieth century. These encounters—involving a cacophony of voices—were arguably part and parcel of Buddhism’s emergence as a world religion. Through rigorous archival research and textual scholarship, Yunfei wishes to cast fresh light on the ingenious interpreters who played a pivotal role in these interreligious encounters. In so doing, he seeks to rethink two fundamental premises of translation theory: interpreters’ lack of agency and their assumed invisibility.

While he is not teaching, Yunfei enjoys swimming at the beach and backpacking around the world, notably in South Asia and Latin America. He is adamantly passionate about learning languages through immersive sojourns and meaningful conversations with local people.

Before joining Lingnan University, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, from 2019 to 2022.

• Indirect Translation
• History of Interpreting
• Censorship in Translation
• French Literature
• Tibetan Literature
• Latin American Literature
• World Literature beyond the Anglophone Canon