by Yang Guang
BEIJING, Aug. 30 (Xinhuanet) -- British literary translator Julia Lovell had her eureka moment some 15 years ago, while watching the James Bond film You Only Live Twice as a Cambridge freshman studying history.
"Back then Cambridge was very keen on history students writing in a rather argumentative style," says the 35-year-old lecturer in Chinese history at the University of London, whose translations of Lu Xun (1881-1936) and Eileen Chang (1920-95) are part of the Penguin Classics series.
"I didn't get along so well in the department, maybe because I'm too mild."
After learning that James Bond acquired his Japanese skills at Cambridge, Lovell was determined to start another Oriental language - Chinese.
She first landed in China in 1997 and spent a year as an exchange student at Nanjing University. It was then that she was drawn to 20th-century Chinese literature.
"The 20th century was an era in which ideas about literature changed dramatically in China," she explains. "And I was particularly interested in tracking changing ideas about authorship, in the role played by Western influences in this transformation and in Chinese writers' relationship with Western literary values."
A year later, Lovell was again in Beijing, doing research for her PhD, which was published later as The Politics of Cultural Capital: China's Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature.
