通过绘画翻译中国：从罗马尼亚艺术家 Béla Gy. Szabó 的角度来了解 50 年代罗中的文化交流 / TRANSLATING CHINA THROUGH VISUAL ARTS IN THE EARLY’50S： ROMANIAN ARTIST BÉLA GY. SZABÓ AND HIS TRAVEL SKETCHES FROM CHINA

In the late 1950s, amidst increased Romanian-Chinese cultural exchanges, Romanian artist Béla Gy. Szabó (1905-1985) travelled extensively throughout The People’s Republic, with the aim of capturing various aspects of Chinese society. His visual and narrative impressions were later reproduced in a volume entitled Schițe de călătorie din China (1959) (Travel Sketches from China). My paper investigates from the perspective of cultural translation Szabó’s many sketches and drawings included in this volume. Specifically, I analyze the artist’s charcoal drawings of Chinese society and culture that resulted from his travels across China in the late 1950s, arguing for them as forms of cultural translation meant to offer to a Romanian, and indeed international audience, a glimpse into Chinese society at a time when little information about the daily lives of Chinese people was circulating in the Western world. Szabó’s modernist aesthetic translates China through images that articulate a surprisingly diverse and realistic sociological portrait of the Maoist society, although aspects such as otherness, exoticism and cultural ambiguity are also present in both the narrative and visual accounts of the Romanian artist’s unique travel.