We are native English speakers living in mainland China and dedicated to the translation of Chinese literary fiction into English. Every one of us has learned Chinese by living on its streets and among its people, puzzling through its texts, using it to survive.
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With the publication of his first novella I Love Dollars in 1994, Zhu Wen gained a reputation as the nihilistic, post-1989, post-Tiananmen voice of Chinese youth. His frank depictions of sexuality, anxiety, hedonism, materialism and corruption struck a chord with readers and critics alike. His literary debut was followed by several successful short story collections (Little Brother’s Big Performance, Because We Were Lonely, Sweating Like A..., Do the People Really Need Saunas?) and a novel (What is Love and What is Garbage).
In the following excerpt, from the first chapter of What is Love and What is Garbage, we meet protagonist Xiao Ding on what well may be the worst day of his life: the weather outside is sweltering, he is drinking alone in a darkened bar at noon, the knife scar on his belly is starting to itch, and he desperately needs to take a shit.
A year or two ago I went to a exhibition on Wang Xiaobo’s life at the Lu Xun Museum. Along with the entrance ticket they gave you a DVD with a half hour or an hour of footage of Wang Xiaobo, including an interview he once did for CCTV. I just recently found this interview on Youtube, and am linking to it here, along with a translation of the conversation. This is from 1995, remember, an era caught between the hit-him-with-a-stick Cultural Revolution, and the can’t-be-arsed-to-wag-a-finger 2000s. CCTV, we should note, had not yet achieved the high standards it boasts today.
The interviewer, Liu Wei (刘为), starts off civilly, but by the end he’s nearly given himself a hernia trying to paint Wang as a salacious destroyer of other people’s morals. Observe, particularly, his craftiness as he traps Wang into admitting his books are all autobiographical, and his beautiful parting shot.
This song, which appeared on Cui Jian’s 1994 album “Balls Under the Red Flag” (红旗下的蛋) was the first Chinese song I ever attempted to translate. Many years and countless failed revisions later (and newly inspired by a documentary-in-progress about Chinese rock and roll), I’ve come back to it. As anthems go, it’s pretty damned good...a political commentary cloaked in sexual imagery and double-entendre. If I had to reach for a western equivalent, I’d choose The Guess Who’s “American Woman” and add a sprinkling of Bob Dylan, just for good measure.
I suspect that some of our translation colleagues have, at one time or another, translated this song into English and tucked it into their desk drawers. If so - if you’re one of the proud, the reticent, the scholarly, the bored or the intrepid who have riffed this song and filed it away somewhere for posterity or inclement weather - please post your translation. The song raises some interesting language questions, and seems to defy most attempts at literal translation. As you can see, I’ve played these lyrics fast and loose.
Amnesty (宽容)
Both eyes closed, leaning on you
All hands down, stroking me
I want this satisfaction
and need you to respond
I want to tell you everything
just don’t be mad with me
It’s never love or hate with you
you’re no more than what you are
I’m exhausted and it’s pointless
but I have to go on fighting you
Fuck you, I say, fuck you
I’ll talk behind your back
In the end, we’ll see who wins
who holds out to the last
My eyes are open now and angry
I see what you’ve become and I can’t speak
I want to sing an amnesty
for all that’s happened here
but my voice sounds strange to me…
I originally sent this as a comment on Eric’s piece about Ma Jian’s recent articles, but am now posting it with a few added comments:
On Tuesday 3 June, I attended an English PEN event in London entitled “Chinese whispers… are Chinese writers free to face up to the difficult issues facing their society in the twenty-first century, or are they forced to speak in a whisper?...” [this was one of several suggested topics, but basically the only one discussed in the short time available.] English PEN says it “campaigns to improve the understanding of freedom of expression as a fundamental human right” so you would expect the discussion to be focussed more on politics than on literature, as indeed it was. All the more important, then, that the debate should be balanced and well-informed.
The three Chinese speakers were Ma Jian, Liu Hong Cannon and Diane Wei Liang (the latter two write in English). I was disappointed, not to say frustrated, by the evening’s event: it was dominated by a rant from Ma Jian, similar in tone and content to his 30 May Times article. I wrote down the following sentence (Ma Jian said it in Chinese, Flora Drew interpreted): Chinese writers can only do three things in China today - collaborate, remain silent or leave the country. This is a misleading and skewed statement in my judgment, and insulting to many writers in China. Why does it matter? Because Ma Jian is probably the most politicised and most vocal of diaspora Chinese writers. People do listen to what he says. Some of the audience came knowing very little of what life is really like in China - and went away knowing just as little, it seemed to me. (For example, towards the end, someone asked whether the three speakers were able to return to China. Diane and Liu Hong looked at each in some surprise, and said, yes, they go back every year. Even Ma Jian said that he could go back, just not publish there.) With the number and the quality of cultural events on China available this year in the UK, we should surely be able to leave the Cold War behind and talk about China as it really is, in all its complexity. A one-dimensional rant does nothing to increase understanding. (In fairness, please let me emphasise that Diane and Liu Hong expressed completed different views, when they could get a word in edgeways. Also, Ma Jian writes much better than he speaks - it is obviously more difficult to engage in debate where everything needs to be interpreted for you, no matter how good the interpreter.)
Can there ever be a well-informed debate about China when most of the participants are non-specialists? Well, take for example, the discussion which followed Jonathan Spence’s first Reith lecture this week on Confucius, on BBC Radio 4*. Index on Censorship, Amnesty and the church were all represented in the audience, and the basis of the lecture may have been historical, but the ensuing discussion focussed on contemporary moral and political issues. It did not matter that those who asked questions had clearly come prepared to say their piece, no matter how distant the link to Confucianism; the discussion was interesting on many levels, and one hopes it succeeded in opening up the debate about China in people’s minds.
*Still available here as a podcast; a half-hour lecture was followed by half an hour of questions.
Yiyun Li, award-winning author residing in America, has an essay in the San Francisco Chronicle, describing her relationship with censorship, and the filming of one of her stories, 'A Thousand Years of Good Prayers'.
How very fascinating, I remembered thinking. Chinese censorship has never been a secret, but as a fiction writer my imagination could not be satisfied by that simple explanation. Behind every machine there are many human faces, and for a while I would think about the people who decided my interview was not appropriate for my fellow citizens.
Ma Jian’s been doing quite a lot of speaking out recently; first there was his May 30th piece in The Times, condemning Chinese writers for their cowardice, and then this op-ed in the New York Times recently. Between the two of them I liked the New York Times piece better – it’s less shrill and better balanced, a realistic look at the state of Chinese society that is both furious and sorrowful. The bit from The Times, attacking writers, is a bit nasty:
Although officially they are government cadres, they refuse to admit their complicity with the repressive political system. One famous writer compares politics to a fly. “If its noisy buzz disturbs me, I can just shut the window and concentrate on my art.” When he travels to the West on book tours, he portrays himself as a dissident writer. He doesn’t realise that what he shut out was no mere fly. It was an entire landscape of morality.
…
There is little need for literary censors these days. The writers have learnt to do a proficient job of censoring themselves. Chinese fiction is in the main a fiction of compromise.
Reading something like this gives me an instant attack of the moral relativities. From a loftier moral standpoint than most of us can muster of a Tuesday morning, he’s absolutely right: China’s writers as a whole have failed the Chinese nation, and helped perpetuate the illusion that there is nothing deeply wrong with the country.
On the other hand, it’s unclear what, exactly, he’s asking of these writers. To push a little harder? Some writers are doing so, though not enough. To leave the country and lambast it from abroad? Several have taken this road; few of them have the slightest tangible impact on the advancement of freedom within China. To stand up and denounce the emperor for having no clothes? For a writer inside China to do that would mean self-immolation, and not the kind of bright funeral pyre that serves as a beacon for others, but the kind you find in the crematoriums, where the door seals tight and no one even notices the smoke. If Ma Jian had been inside China when he wrote those words, we would never have read them – it’s likely we would never have read anything he wrote, ever again.
The Guardian’s Hay festival coverage starts off with a big picture of Yan Lianke, looking like he’s pretending he belongs there. The first of their excerpts from Hay-festival attendees comes from Julia Lovell‘s translation of his novel Serve the People. We’re going to see if we can post some comments from Yan himself on the whole Hay experience, once he’s back in China.
Edit: That picture seems to have been taken in China. He belongs there after all, guess that’s just his regular expression.
Historian and translator extraordinaire Jonathan Spence will give the prestigious 60th anniversary BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures.
The series of four lectures, entitled Chinese Vistas, will be broadcast weekly at 9.00am on Radio 4, beginning on 3 June 2008. (Nice date for a lecture series on China, don’t you think?)
Interview with the mainland Chinese translator of “The Kite Runner”
By Bruce Humes
“The Kite Runner” /《追风筝的人》:
An Afgan Childhood Re-Packaged for the Middle Kingdom
It was an intriguing sentence alluding to censorship in the translator’s post-script that initially piqued my curiosity:
原书个别不合国情的地方，译者酌情在措词上加以改动，意思仍一概如旧 (1)
(My translation): There are certain places in the original text [of The Kite Runner] which are incompatible with Chinese sensitivities. Measuring his words ever so carefully, the translator has polished the copy while maintaining the original meaning.
Now what could there possibly be in a childhood story of friendship, betrayal and a belated but moving coming-of-age, set in Afghanistan – a country hardly figuring on China’s world map – that would ruffle “Chinese sensitivities,” I wondered?
I inquired by e-mail, and the very courteous, frank and highly efficient translator, Mr. Li Ji-Hong (李继宏), kindly told me the answers and much more (see Q&A in full, below).
Indeed, official Chinese censorship has altered “The Kite Runner” (追风筝的人) (2) in some rather odd ways, and I detail them here. But much more significant in shaping the reading experience for the Chinese audience is the translator’s strong preference for what translation scholars dub “domestication.”
Ever wonder what happens to a best-seller in the West when it crosses into Chinese territory? Read on.
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’!
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 kerfuffle: 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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…
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”!
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.
