Le tribolazioni di un americano in Cina. Traduzione indiretta e transtestualità nella novella «Qie ming bo» 妾命薄 (1906) di Bao Tianxiao 包天笑 (1876-1973)

From the end of the Qing dynasty through the early Republican period, the translation of world literature played a crucial role in shaping China’s modern commercial publishing and literary cultures. Such translations were frequently produced as indirect translation. Within this context, the novelist Bao Tianxiao, with a limited knowledge of foreign languages, carried out most of his translations through Japanese intermediaries. This paper analyses the translinguistic trajectory of Bao’s short story «Qie ming bo» (1906). Through a comparative reading, the study reconstructs how a short sketch by Mark Twain was rendered into Chinese via Hara Hōitsuan’s translation (1903) and examines the extent to which Bao creatively reworked the source material.