Translating Scat – how do you choose the ‘right’ register in English?
Is a taste for ‘scat’ humour cultural? (Sorry, no pun intended!) Reading Cindy Carter’s recent piece Studies in Scat: Excerpts from Yu Hua, Zhu Wen and Li Er about the Chinese scatological sense of humour started me thinking.
What to do if your editor doesn’t like all this talk of crap? My translation of Han Dong’s 扎根, which will appear in English as Banished!, is at the copy-editing stage. The copy editor has put a lot of careful work into correcting my ‘infelicities’ (lovely word!) of expression for which I am extremely grateful, but we have one major disagreement. It’s – you’ve guessed it – the language used to translate those ‘toilet functions’!
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By Nicky Harman, May 9, 1pm
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Although this may be of limited interest for those of you not resident in China, the recent confusion over visa renewals has caused some consternation in our circles, the little campfires around which yours truly, and her fellow translators-in-arms, are bivouacked.
Here’s a post from Danwei.org related to the great summer 2008 visa kerkuffle: Visa, visa, where are you.
You might ask why, in light of these changes, we translators don’t simply find a related day job or link up with some corporate sponsor willing to support our endeavors. The answer: there is no such thing as a company dedicated to literary translation in China. Ditto for film translation. Translation companies, such as they are, offer rates that fall tragically short of a living wage (particularly for our Chinese colleagues; we Chinese-to-English translators are somewhat better off), and they tend to focus on technical, legal, medical or commercial translation.
Advertising companies pay handsomely, but who wants to spend four or five hours per day convincing the Chinese populace to buy more cars/smoke more cigarettes/consume more meat, imported or domestic? Wages aside, there’s a way to be a person, and a person’s got to sleep. Besides, after a decade or so of studying Chinese, wouldn’t our time be better spent translating authors and filmmakers such as Yan Lianke, Li Er, Wang Xiaobo, Wang Xiaoshuai, Tian Zhuangzhuang or Luo Yan, rather than salvaging cheap ad copy for Audi, Pepsi, Avon, Budweiser or Ford?
A far more common option is to cadge or chivvy a friend or colleague into putting one on the books as a foreign hire, the recipient of a coveted “Z” work visa. In the short-term, it seems an easy solution...but keep in mind the old adage about favors: “The most expensive things in China are free.”
The upshot of this diatribe is that, effective July 7 of 2008, I honestly don’t know where I’ll be.
By Cindy Carter, May 8, 9pm
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The May 4, 2008 edition of the New York Times Book Review features reviews of four new translations of Chinese novels:
- Mo Yan’s Life and Death are Wearing Me Out, translated by Howard Goldblatt
- Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem, translated by Howard Goldblatt
- Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, translated by Michael Berry and Susan Chang Egan (includes chapter excerpt)
- Yan Lianke’s Serve the People, translated by Julia Lovell (includes chapter excerpt)
One interesting, and rather humbling, note: the two books translated by Howard Goldblatt total 1067 English language pages. 1067 pages, people. As someone who counts herself lucky, very lucky, to get through 1000 characters of literary translation per day, I can’t imagine how he does it and still manages to find time to sleep. Damn, I could have/should have/would have asked him that at the Moganshan translation seminar…
(Thanks to fellow-translator Bruce Humes for giving us the heads-up on these reviews.)
By Cindy Carter, May 6, 10am
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Goodbye Once More to Cambridge
Xu Zhimo
Translation by Canaan Morse
Over blades of grass I’m leaving,
as over them I once came,
a slender hand privately waving
goodbye to this western plain.
Light falls from the tress of the willow
(a bride by the evening stream)
murmurs out in bright alloy the water
and through all the aisles of me.
while the childish algae that play
in the mud of the riverbed
duck from the current, wave me away
as a gift from the giver—
—and rise to a dream, the dream
of a rainbow, distilled from
the news of the wind in the green
fractured face of the spring by the elm;
For dreams? Bow a long elm pole
to pull slowly for a place of unthinkably bright;
load that, somehow, to the paint,
and sing as you drift through the night.
But—I have not that right,
my escape is the broken reed of farewell;
as some sympathy dims the cicadas and gloom
is described by the evening bell.
And under a shadow I’m leaving,
just as under a shadow I came.
The pale hand brushes silently, leaving
stray clouds on this autumnless plain.
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By Canaan Morse, April 27, 2am
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I’ve been doing some background reading on the Duanlie (断裂, ‘Broken’ or ‘Split’) literary movement, something Zhu Wen instigated in 1998. It was an important, if low-profile, attempt to voice dissatisfaction with the literary establishment (academia, the Writers Association, the literary journals), and to remind authors that they were not alone in their frustrations. Over the course of several years and a series of Duanlie publications (put out by the Shaanxi Normal University Press), the movement did much to foster independence and diversity among the newer generations of Chinese writers.
Duanlie started as a list of questions which Zhu Wen, Han Dong and a few others mailed around to 70 Chinese writers, 55 of whom responded. They were leading questions, questions meant to snap writers out of their diffidence and goad them into defiance, a call for a vote of no-confidence in modern Chinese literature. Through the good graces of Lü Zheng I was able to get my hands on a copy of a book called Duanlie, published in 2000, which contains a series of interviews with the authors most closely associated with the movement: Wei Hui, Chen Wei (one of the writers responsible for the Heilan website), Huang Fan, Gu Qian, Li Xiaoshan, Wu Chen, Zhao Gang, Liu Ligan, Zhu Zhu, Lu Yang, Chu Chen, Han Dong and Zhu Wen. The book also contains the thirteen original questions, which I’ll translate below. I’m leaving the answers out: there are many, and they are predictable.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, April 27, 2am
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We here at Paper Republic strive to bring you the latest and greatest in Chinese language usage, and we’d be criminally unhip if we failed to alert you to the most recent Really Cool Thing on the internet: 囧.
This little beauty is pronounced jiǒng. It is a very old character, appearing on turtle shell inscriptions (甲骨文) from thousands of years ago; while it has many meanings, the most basic is light coming through a window, rather evident from its shape. The more leet among you, however, will note that its also shaped rather like a frowny face: that’s right, 囧 is the hip new way of saying 郁闷 (yùmen, to be bored or depressed or down). Can you feel the grandeur of 5,000 years of history? Read on for advanced usage.
By Eric Abrahamsen, April 25, 2am
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After an evening spent sipping Qingdao and grumbling about the low profile of Chinese literature abroad, we’re generally forced to concede that baby steps are the only practical solution to the problem. There’s a chicken-and-egg dynamic going on with publishers – they won’t publish a book in translation if the author has no name recognition, but without publication authors have precious little means of getting recognized. Realistically, what’s needed is a slow-drip campaign of small-scale publication, word of mouth, and literary journalism. It will be slow, but it’s the only way that the attention of publishers and readers can be drawn to a wider selection of Chinese fiction.
So it’s good to see two recent advances in that campaign. First was the Olympic Voices from China issue of Words Without Borders: a collection of translated short stories drawn heavily from some of China’s better female writers: Sheng Keyi, Ye Mi, Liu Sola and others. Not all of the translations are top-notch, but it’s good to see these writers represented. Sheng Keyi’s Little Girl Lost got good treatment; you can hear the strangeness of her Chinese in places: “Ripples spread from the doorframe as water slid back from both sides, showing off the bright slickness of his skin.”
The other is a books issue of Public Radio International’s The World program. The contributions are knowledgeable, ranging from an article on China’s Nobel Prize complex, to a review of Zhu Wen’s I Love Dollars, to an interview with Yu Hua. Our Cindy and our Brendan are in there too!
I suppose only incremental progress is real progress…
By Eric Abrahamsen, April 21, 3am
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China will be “Guest of Honour” at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2009 (Oct 14-18).
Read all about it.
By Bruce Humes, April 21, 2am
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A series of books widely available in China – in English – has opened my eyes to new ways of looking at literary translation.
Published by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press (上海外语教育出版社), the cover of each of the 30+ tomes carries a 国外翻译研究丛书 etiquette on the cover. I bought some of these volumes at 王府井的外文书店, but I have seen the series in places as diverse as Xi’an, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
Authors include scholars known for their role in what many call “translation studies.” They include Susan Bassnet, Andre Lefevere, Eugene Nida, Maria Tymoczko and Lawrence Venuti.
I personally recommend:
“Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame” by Andre Lefevere (翻译、改写以及对文学名声的制控)
“Translation Studies” by Susan Bassnet (翻译研究)
“The Translator’s Invisibility: The History of Translation” by Lawrence Venuti (译者的隐身)
“Translation and Gender: Translating in the Era of Feminism” by Luise von Flotow (翻译与性别：女性主义时代的翻译)
I have read several of the books and have been pleasantly surprised that some—certainly not all—of these authors are bloody good writers whose writing is highly critical, witty and spot on when it comes to identifying and analyzing thorny issues that I have confronted as a translator of Chinese fiction into English.
If you only read one, make sure you read “The Translator’s Invisibility”!
By Bruce Humes, April 16, 11pm
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The pre-dinner hour at Moganshan was often given over to talks and presentations by various course participants; the group leaders one evening, the writers the next. These presentations could be eye-opening in terms of the widely-varying approaches people take to this business – Bonnie McDougall and Howard Goldblatt, for instance. There was almost a kind of glee in the way Bonnie described her translations: leisurely, considered, I think she even described herself as spoiled in being able to pick and choose, freed by her position at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. Howard, on the other hand, was very much the harried professional man, and talked of funding and negotiations, work he’d taken to make the rent. Bonnie goes patiently from beginning to end; Howard generally starts somewhere in the middle and jumps around. Howard hates the second draft more than anything; Bonnie goes and reads a book until the aha! moment comes.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, April 7, 11pm
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With all the excitement going on these days, staying home and translating the words of dead authors can feel a little irrelevant, if not actually escapist. I’m neither a Qing historian nor a diplomat, so won’t stray too far from my comfort zone of language and literature, but I do think there’s something to be said about the Chinese responses of rage to the reporting of the foreign media.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, April 7, 5pm
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It wasn’t all work and no play…
Some of us went to a local restaurant.
The local produce was fantastic. Here’s the menu:
Cold Starters 冷菜
Pickled bamboo shoots (bamboo grows everywhere and gets into everything).
Wild ‘herbs’ 野菜 with chopped beancurd (the herbs were about the size and thickness of chives, and had a slightly astringent flavour).
Warm salad of chicken giblets.
Salad of cucumber slices.
Fried dried fish slivers.
Hot dishes
Soup of chicken and terrapin.
Red-cooked wild boar.
Red-cooked wild rabbit with bacon.
Red-cooked game chicken (野鸡 unspecified, maybe partridge).
Scrambled eggs with fungi of some sort.
Deep-fried fishes (about the size of whitebait) mixed with lots of deep-fried bay leaves and chilli peppers.
Stir-fried greens and various other dishes of stir-fried vegetables, more or less 野.
Local beer; local tea; local grain spirit (白酒).
Total cost 100 RMB, which including treating our leader, author and helper.
Wow!
By Nicky Harman, March 28, 1am
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”PEN believes there are currently 38 writers and journalists imprisoned in China for exercising their right to speak and write freely, as guaranteed under Chinese and international law. We are concerned that, despite official pledges to respect essential rights in this Olympic year, Chinese authorities continue to harass and detain writers in violation of their right to freedom of expression.”
By Eric Abrahamsen, March 28, 1am
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The night of March 23, a Sunday night in the brand-new Grand National Theatre, where the National Centre for the Performing Arts was putting on a version of Puccini’s Turandot. Ping, one of the emperor’s three ministers, stands forward to lament, “O China, o China, che or sussulti e trasecoli inquieta” ("O China, O China, now always startled and aghast, restless"), and what comes up on the Chinese subtitle screen? “O World, O World, now always startled and aghast…”
Because we’ve become fragile to the point where words of a fictional character in a Western opera written in 1920s are sufficient to bring us down. Or are our national feelings so easily hurt? Or is it part of the gentle campaign to blur the edges of things, to recast what’s seen and heard in a way that leaves a false impression, while stopping short of out-and-out dishonesty?
Funny how these little things can touch off the rancor you’ve otherwise kept well in check…
By Eric Abrahamsen, March 28, 1am
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The arena: The second floor of the Baiyun Hotel, an enormous official meeting hall some of us have dubbed the Great Hall of the People, complete with velvet curtains, raised podium, and (apparently) refrigerated wooden chairs.
The contestants: Jiang Rong, author of Wolf Totem, and Howard Goldblatt, translator of that novel into English.
The grudge: Billed as a conversation between translator and translatee, the event was actually a chance for Jiang Rong to air his grievances about Howard Goldblatt’s translation. The two are actually pretty chummy, but neither was averse to a little dustup – Goldblatt started off by essentially leaning back, folding his arms, and saying “do your worst”.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, March 28, 12am
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The awards are out! PEN has announced the recipients of the 2008 awards; China is represented by Andrea Lingenfelter, who won a grant to translate Annie Baby’s Padma, “the story of two disaffected city-dwellers who set out on a quest-like trek in a rugged and remote area of Tibet.” No publisher has picked this up yet, but word is the award itself has generated a lot of interest. Congrats!
By Eric Abrahamsen, March 20, 11am
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The first thing you learn from group translation is how vital privacy ordinarily is to this kind of work. Laboring in solitude, in whatever state of disarray or distraction you please, is a luxury – and something of a necessity. As a general rule the first three drafts of anything are execrable, and being able to drown those drafts in the confidence that no one will ever know they existed provides such peace of mind. Silly ideas surface and subside without being much exposed to the light of rational judgment, and the final forms of things are gently extracted from this unarticulated mess.
It’s alarming, to say the least, to be given a chunk of a Chinese novel and asked, “So, how would you translate that first sentence?” while everyone in the room watches you. I think we all started out more or less aghast that we’d be asked to perform, in a sense – if we were comfortable with that we’d have gone into interpretation. But, of course, there are salutory things about this public disrobing – most immediate is the way it zaps your emotional investment in your translation. You stammer out something far, far inferior to what you might have produced had you been sitting alone at your own desk in your boxer shorts, and then everyone in the room tears it apart. Three rounds of that and you no longer regard your words as your own. Which, of course, they weren’t to begin with.
We’re doing about six sentences an hour on Tie Ning’s Dayunü (大浴女), chewing over every article and preposition, dueling for adverbs, and the main lesson so far has been one I’ve learned over and over, and will probably continue to learn until I give up on this altogether: You’ve never thought hard enough about what you’ve written.
By Eric Abrahamsen, March 19, 8pm
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Today is day one of the Sino-British Literary Translation course. After a very raucous train ride from Beijing to Shanghai we boarded a four-hour bus to Moganshan (莫干山 – Ever-wet Mountain?) and here we are. It’s been a long day and I’m tired, but the general format of the course is this: there are twenty Chinese to English translators and twenty English to Chinese. Each group is split in half, and assigned to one of two authors: the English-Chinese folks got Hari Kunzru and Bernadine Evaristo, and we of the Chinese-English persuasion got Tie Ning (铁凝) and Li Er (李洱). That’s four groups of ten, each with their author, and also a moderator to keep things in hand. And then… we translate. Together. Line by consensual line. Given the crotchety personalities of the translators I know, it sounds highly dubious, but this is the model they use at the British Center for Literary Translation, and they say it works. At the very least we should get some lively arguments out of it, and there are enough fascinating people around to ensure a worthwhile week.
By Eric Abrahamsen, March 17, 8pm
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It seems Jiang Rong, author of Wolf Totem, has decided it’s time to step out of anonymity and start going by his real name – Lu Jiamin. Apparently, with the release of the book’s English version right around the corner and his international reputation rising, he decided now was the time…
By Eric Abrahamsen, March 12, 10am
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Mo Yan visited the Beijing Number Eleven School on Saturday, and spoke to students on the verge of taking the 高考 (gāokǎo, the test which determines a student’s chances of getting in college). There’s lots of hand-wringing (or at least there should be) about China’s high-school educational system, which steamrollers students into a single mold, and leaves them hardly any time to themselves in which they might repair the damage.
Mo Yan to the rescue. Never mind that the steamroller possesses the momentum of a celestial body; he encouraged students to do a little writing that “you don’t show your teachers” after graduation – keeping a diary or posting online. This sort of private writing would be essential in allowing them to form their own characters. He also said that students should be allowed to read what they pleased, and spoke positively about the ease with which young people could publish and read on the internet.
There’s something a little heartbreaking about Mo Yan speaking to these students, the scions of a nation which has given its people no peace for two generations, on the eve of one of the most grueling mass experiences many of them will ever undergo, and telling them, “try to make a little space for yourselves.” You can practically hear him add, under his breath, “you’re going to need it.”
By Eric Abrahamsen, March 10, 9pm
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