Machine translation has been in the news lately, so I thought it might be interesting to conduct an experiment. I've chosen four different Chinese texts (excerpts from a novel, a film and two newspaper interviews), translated them into English with Google Translate, and added my English translations (three of which have appeared on Paper Republic in the past year). I'm sure most of the translators in our forum have their own machine-translation stories...hope you'll share. That's not to say that machine translation is pointless: ten years from now, we will be taking this a lot more seriously. But in the meantime, we might as well have our bit of fun.
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By Cindy M. Carter, March 11, 9:50a.m.
Jia Pingwa's novel Qin Qiang (The Writers Publishing House, 2005) won last year's Mao Dun Literary Prize and is another masterpiece by the prolific author, whose works are still mostly unknown and untranslated. What is there to appeal to translators and potential readers in the book? When are we going to see it in translation?
From the first half of the book, romance, rats and local politics in rural Shaanxi:
I still remember the rat that crawled out of the sewer. I raised him as a pet. He'd climb on the ceiling rafters and dance for me. After he was tired of dancing, he'd look down at me. His eyes were all pupil, dark black pupils that glinted with mischief. Cats knew not to venture close to my home. After my father died and I was left alone, nobody knew how I spent my time. But the rat knew. Each morning, I'd wake up and place three sticks of incense in front of the portrait of my deceased father, then sit down to write in my diary. In Qingfeng Jie, I was probably the only one who was writing away at a diary. From the incense burner, a ribbon of dark smoke slowly curled upward. It lengthened, reaching up to the rafters, where the rat watched me write. The rat thought it was a string and he leapt out, hoping to slide down it, to the table. Pow, he crashed down into the incense burner.
I've heard people say that rats are smart but they can be pretty dumb, too. This rat was rather fond of me, actually. But one of the reasons he stuck around for so long was because my house always had something to eat. I heard that last year when Mao Dan from Dong Jie got sick, he had to sell everything to pay the doctor bills. Every rodent that had previously made a home in his house escaped as soon as the food was gone. What I wanted to say is: this rat was civilized. He even chewed up the pages in my diary, the ones about Bai Xue. I looked at him in wonder, You know that I miss Bai Xue? Rat, if you can understand me, run to Bai Xue and tell her how I feel. He immediately took off to Xia Tianzhi's home and Bai Xue's bedroom. The rat climbed up and down the mosquito netting that was wrapped around her bed. Bai Xue looked up, "A little thief, eh?" She used an empty makeup box to trap the rat inside. The box still had a bit of foundation powder inside. With the powder spread over his fur, the rat pitifully squeaked, "Yin Sheng misses you! Yin Sheng misses you!" Bai Xue didn't understand what my rat trying to tell her.
After a while, the rat wandered into the main room of the house, where he found something else to chew on: one of Xia Tianzhi's scrolls of calligraphy. The one that my rat chose to chew had been scrawled by the director of the county's cultural research insitute. When Xia Tianzhi discovered the holes in the scroll, he shut up the windows and the doors and trapped my rat inside the room. He tossed the rat to the mute to look after. The mute carried the rat outside, doused the tiny body with kerosene, set it on fire and tossed it to run in the big courtyard in front of the theatre. The rat immediately burrowed into a heap of wheat straw. The straw immediately caught on fire.
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By Dylan Levi King, February 19, 10:30p.m.
Here's an excerpt from Liu Cixin's novel Ball Lightning, translated by Joel Martinsen.
Ball Lightning, one of the best Chinese science fiction novels of the past few years, is a fast-paced story of what happens when the beauty of scientific inquiry runs up against a push to harness new discoveries with no consideration of the possible consequences.
By Eric Abrahamsen, February 10, 1:29a.m.
More reading material: a sample translation of the first chapter of Sheng Keyi's Northern Girls.
From the promotional materials we took to Frankfurt 2009:
"Sheng Keyi's first full-length novel, Northern Girls is drawn from her experiences as a job-seeking migrant in the early 1990s. Its main character, Hong, is no different from the thousands of other country girls who are moving to Shenzhen to seek work, with one exception: she has an extraordinarily full bosom. She finds herself caught up in the chaos of Shenzhen, a city that hardly existed ten years previously, where the mad rush of economic growth has destabilized moral norms and shredded the fabric of society. With hardly a thought in her head but to make her way in the world, she discovers that her body has already opened some doors and closed others, shaping her fate before she's even had a chance to gain her footing.
"After arriving in Shenzhen Hong and her friend drift at the edges of society, working in hair salons, shops, factories and hotels, owning absolutely nothing in the world but their labor and their bodies. As migrant worker girls they are doomed to be scorned by local women and humiliated by local men, but as Hong's companions slowly begin to turn down the path of least resistance, Hong herself sticks to her own idiosyncratic principles, stubbornly insisting on her own brand of integrity, and the bosom that has caused her so much grief becomes a symbol of her irrepressible vital force."
By Eric Abrahamsen, February 8, 6:54a.m.
The Grayhawk Agency in Taiwan is calling for translation sample submissions for Mai Jia's book Decoded. Any translators interested in submitting a sample for this book, please email a query to submissions@paper-republic.org, and we'll send you two novel extracts to choose from, as well as more background information on the book and author. Please send your inquiries within the next two weeks.
The Grayhawk Agency will be accepting samples through the first week of March, following which two translations will be chosen (one for each of the two extracts) to be used with the promotional package, and recommended to publishers. Translators whose samples are chosen will be paid $300.
The Grayhawk Agency's most recent sale is Zhang Ling's Gold Mountain Blues.
By Eric Abrahamsen, January 28, 9:52a.m.
The Guardian reports that Jean-Jacques Annaud will be directing the film adaptation of the novel Wolf Totem by author Lu Jiamin - better known by his pen name of Jiang Rong. (See full article).
A quote from the Guardian piece:
The Associated Press reported that Annaud would be forced to make an apolitical interpretation of the novel in order to pass Chinese film censorship, with the Beijing Forbidden City Film Company's statement about the project avoiding the book's political messages to describe it as "an environmental protection-themed novel about the relationship between man and nature, man and animal".
This sounds like the real deal, but it does bring back some memories: anyone recall a few years back, when rumours of a Peter Jackson/Weta adaptation of Wolf Totem were flying fast and furious? One imagines that the Jackson version would have been heavy on computer graphics and special effects, while Annaud plans to spend 18 months raising and training the wolves himself.
I'm curious about the screenplay adaptation. Will it be based on the French translation of the novel (Le Totem du loup, by translators Yan Hansheng and Lisa Carducci), or the English translation by Howard Goldblatt, or will they start from scratch and work up a screenplay based on the Chinese novel? Will the film itself have Mongolian dialogue, or Chinese, or both? Not English or French, certainly.
I'm sure we'll be hearing more about this in the months to come...
By Cindy M. Carter, August 22, 7:09a.m.
Announcements have been made for the 2009 PEN Translation Grants, though the press release has not yet appeared online, we'll link to it when it does. The only Chinese-language grant went to my translation of Wang Xiaobo's collection of essays, My Spiritual Homeland. You can download a PDF translation of "The Silent Majority", one of the essays from this collection, by clicking here. This essay was originally published in the Asia Literary Review.
By Eric Abrahamsen, April 22, 3:28p.m.
The second annual Sino-English Literary Translation training course ended last Friday night, the conclusion of a week of workshops and seminars so tightly-packed that those of us present hardly had time to post. I hope other participants might chime in here with their thoughts, but I wanted to make a brief report.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, March 24, 11:19a.m.
An excellent podcast features Bill Marx of Public Radio International/PRI World Books interviewing John Donatich, director of Yale University Press. Topics include the Margellos World Republic of Letters, a newly-endowed fund to support the translation of foreign literature into English (C-E translators, take note!), the dearth of book coverage in mainstream western media and the role of university presses in publishing and promoting translated literature.
By Cindy M. Carter, February 27, 10:02a.m.
Howard Goldblatt has graciously allowed us to publish this essay of his on the openings of Chinese novels.
In the Beginning
"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife."
How could anyone not want to keep reading, at least for a while, with an opening line like that?
Or:
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, and then again, as a teenage boy."
Or, finally:
"'Sons of bitches.' Lituma felt the vomit rising in his throat. 'Kid, they really did a job on you.'"
From Melville to Tolstoy and beyond, all the way to Ha Jin, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Mario Vargas Llosa, novelists in the West have assumed that, like a flashy cover, an arresting opening line can go a long way toward starting those pages turning.
When he wrote…
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."
…Nabakov knew he'd get our attention.
We don't, however, see many opening sentences of that nature in novels written in Chinese. After more than thirty years of translating Chinese novels into English, I cannot readily call to mind any I've worked on that provide a riveting, provocative, even outlandish opening. That's not to say they don't exist, or that the rules aren't changing, as cultural globalization gains momentum; it's just that a different, and equally valid, narrative strategy, a more tradition-bound beginning has been the norm in recent decades. I've often wondered what that says about the contemporary Chinese novel. Beyond that, how do expectations and standards of enjoyment or acceptance between Chinese and Western readers of fiction differ?
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By Eric Abrahamsen, November 10, 2:32p.m.
Poorly Managed, Occasional Bright Spots
I could swear those long-legged seraphs were headhunted from the professional model community in Shanghai and Dalian, but what do I know?
The “18th World Congress of the International Federation of Translators” (Shanghai August 4-6) featured dozens of seminars with over 200 speakers from all over the world—and an opening banquet starring those women, performing what was billed as a Tibetan folk dance.
My neighbors, two immaculately coiffed, fluent English-speaking Iraqi women in China for the first time, were blown away by the spectacle. They couldn’t have cared less where those “Tibetans” came from!
But I wasn’t in town for the dancing. I paid RMB4,000 for entry to the conferences + RMB1,660 for a round-trip air ticket between Shenzhen-Shanghai + RMB800 for 3 nights in a hotel, in the hopes of hearing a host of speakers deliver their (hopefully unique!) presentations.
In the event, most of the seminars were rather disappointing, because:
- Each speaker was strictly limited to 15 minutes, and most Q&A were put off for 30-45 minutes, i.e., until all speakers had first presented;
- Many speakers chose to read out their research papers word-for-word, projecting text-heavy PowerPoint slides virtually identical with their scripts;
- Ironically, only a handful of seminars—this was an international translation conference!—offered simultaneous interpretation;
- There were often 10 or so seminars on at one time on two different floors of the meeting center, each featuring 3-6 speakers, but no obvious way of learning when a given speaker would appear. No list outside the door of each seminar venue, for instance, stating the names of the speakers, their topic, and the order of their appearance.
Nor was much attention given to informing us which scheduled speakers would be absent. I learned only belatedly that Turkish scholar Bengu Ergin would not be presenting “What do we observe in the Chinese translation of Orhan Pamuk’s novel, ‘My Name is Red’?” What a pity!
Ah, well. Here’s a quick list of topics/speakers/e-mail addresses for those topics that might be of interest to Chinese-English translators: “法国对中国现代作家选择之思考” (高方, gaofangparis8@126.com); “Creating the Self-image of New China: ‘Outward’ Literary Translation in the First 17 Years of Socialist China (Ma Shi-Kui, mashikui01@sina.com); “The Chinese-English Parallel Corpus of ‘Hong Lou Meng’: A Working Report” (Liu Ze-Quan, zqliu@ysu.edu.cn); “A Dialectical view of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Non-Chinese’ Features in Chinese Translation Theory” (Tan Zai-Xi, than@hkbu.edu.hk); “A Translation Anthologist’s Reflections on the Ideological Complexities of Translating China” (Martha Cheung, marthach@hkbu.edu.hk).
By Bruce Humes, August 10, 12:37a.m.
Han Dong's book 《扎根》 (published in 2009 as Banished!, was long-listed for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize.
There were a number of things which convinced me I wanted to translate Banished! I liked the fact you can read the novel at different levels. He describes village life carefully, sometimes lovingly, but there is an underlying sense of political tension. There is humor, often scatological, but the depiction towards the end of the book of Tao, the frustrated writer, is bitter and painful. The language is occasionally lyrical but usually appears quite plain; then again, there are parts which are enigmatic to say the least, especially when they come from the unnamed ‘I’ voice. The emotional relationships are understated, but there is real warmth in the adults’ protectiveness of the child, young Tao, and the latter’s feelings for his father. I hope that this excerpt at least gives a flavor of some of these qualities.
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By Nicky Harman, August 1, 10:01a.m.
Xiao Ding sat at the narrow, cigarette-scarred wooden table with his head cradled on one arm, wondering whether or not he ought to scream. But of course, he didn't; he only went through the motions, noiselessly opening and closing, opening and closing his mouth. In the dim light of the bar, the faces of the hostesses clustered behind him looked sickly, almost green. Xiao Ding found himself distracted by their Sichuanese-accented chatter, drawn into their conversation and flung out again, like some traveler stranded on a highway bound for Sichuan.
He stood up and headed for the exit. As he passed the bar, the hostesses fell silent. One of the girls swiveled around to stare at him, her big, heavily-lipsticked mouth parted as if to speak. Xiao Ding gazed back at her uncomprehendingly, and took another step toward the door. Unable to hold back any longer, the large-mouthed girl called after him: Hey, you haven't paid your bill yet! Without bothering to answer, Xiao Ding reached the door and pushed it open, ushering in a wave of noontime summer heat. Seen from the perennial darkness of the tiny bar, the city outside was dazzling, a blaze of light. There were a few pedestrian stragglers, tongues lolling out of their mouths, panting in the heat. Xiao Ding surveyed the scene for a moment before allowing his hand fall to his side, and the door to swing closed on its spring hinge. He returned to his original seat and lit up a cigarette.
A short while later, the large-mouthed girl approached and handed him his check with feigned politeness: Excuse me, sir, but if you wouldn’t mind settling your bill...Why should I? Xiao Ding asked, an edge of hysteria to his voice. The hostess seemed startled: What do you mean, why? I mean why do I have to pay first? Xiao Ding demanded belligerently. Afraid I'm going to make a run for it, is that it? Shocked by his rudeness, the hostess began to stammer. The longer she stammered, the more pronounced her Sichuanese accent became. Xiao Ding was, if anything, even more shocked by his own behavior; he bowed his head and fidgeted uncomfortably. The hostess hesitated a moment and began to walk away, but Xiao Ding called her back and promptly paid the amount indicated on the bill. The moment the hostess had the money in hand, her fear seemed to dissipate. She turned away with a snort of derision and flounced back to the bar.
After this, Xiao Ding had no desire to remain in the bar, but if he left right away it would seem even more humiliating, like he'd been driven away. At that moment, he was seized by an overwhelming urge: Man, did he ever have to take a shit. The call of nature was a timely one for which he couldn’t help but feel grateful. As Xiao Ding stood up to leave, he experienced a moment of dizziness, and the room went black. He waited until the sensation had passed, then proceeded to grope his way to the back of the bar. Man, was this place ever dark. He located the restroom door and went inside, stopping in shock when he realized it wasn't a restroom at all, but an outside stairwell piled with construction debris. Naturally, he experienced an initial pang of disappointment at having made an exit when he had so clearly intended to make an entrance, but the stairwell was so hot—and his need to defecate now so intense—that he soon forgot about everything else. Fuck, he thought, at times like these, you might as well die and get it over with. Assuming he didn't intend to follow through on this and keel over on the spot, however, he had little choice but to follow the arrows on the wall and hope they led to a toilet.
Skirting a heap of broken ceramic tiles, Xiao Ding climbed the stairs to the second floor and made his way to an unbelievably filthy restroom at the end of the hallway. He quickly chose the stall that looked the cleanest—although it was still squalid beyond compare—and squatted over the hole. The stall was so tiny that he could hardly squat without his head touching the graffiti and sputum-covered wooden door. Xiao Ding tossed his hair and tried to take a step back, but found his retreat blocked by a pile of blackened and congealed feces. Gingerly, he reached out a hand and pushed open the wooden door to give himself more space. Across the way, he glimpsed a row of four yellowing urinals. The two far right urinals had been taped over with rough brown construction paper, upon which someone had scrawled in pencil: "Out of Order". As the stall door began to swing back of its own accord, Xiao Ding pushed it open, only to have it close again. Finally, he used his left hand to prop open the door.
As Xiao Ding labored to take a shit in the unbearable heat, the position proved too exhausting. He withdrew his hand and allowed the door to swing back and rest against his forehead. By now, his shirt and trousers were soaked with sweat and clinging to his skin like a plaster. The task he had hoped to complete as quickly and painlessly as possible seemed to be taking ages. To make matters worse, the scar on his belly was starting to itch again. Two flies buzzed around his head, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about them. After a while, his annoyance was replaced by a strange sense of familiarity, a feeling bordering on affection. Fuck, he thought, how come I never noticed before how close humans are to flies? At that moment, the flies seemed like pretty little songbirds, tiny buzzing pets he had been nurturing for years without even knowing.
Just then, someone opened the restroom door. Xiao Ding heard footsteps followed by a loud splash, as the newcomer trod in the puddle of stagnant water at the entrance. Xiao Ding glanced down at his own feet and saw that his cloth shoes were half-soaked. He heard the man cursing and stamping his feet as he walked over to the urinals. The familiar clink of a belt being unbuckled. A very long silence. No sound of urination. Locked in a stalemate with his own bowels, Xiao Ding could only squat passively in his stall and try to guess what was happening over at the urinals. As the silence stretched on, he began to get nervous; god only knew what sordid business the man might be getting up to. He certainly hadn't left the restroom, because his presence was palpable. Xiao Ding was tempted to open the wooden stall door and take a peek, but it seemed inappropriate, somehow.
At that moment, he was startled to hear the stranger speak: Fuck, can you believe this weather? This heat is murder, know what I mean? Xiao Ding wondered if there might be a third party in the restroom, although he could swear he'd heard only one person enter. When no one answered, the man repeated himself: This heat is murder, you know? Know what I mean? Xiao Ding experienced a moment of confusion. He plugged his nose and lowered his head to peek beneath the partitions on either side. Both stalls were empty. He must be talking to me, Xiao Ding thought, and answered grudgingly: Yeah, yeah, sure. Sighing, the stranger continued: It’s gotta be torture trying to take a shit in here. Worse than a fucking prison, eh? Wiping the sweat from his brow, Xiao Ding kept his reply perfunctory: Yeah, worse than a prison. He could hardly believe it when the man, apparently hell-bent on continuing the interrogation, pressed on: So why are you taking a shit, then? At this point, Xiao Ding was on the verge of pulling up his pants and leaving, but for some reason he answered the man automatically: N-no, see, I just happened to be passing by... Unsatisfied with this rather lame answer, Xiao Ding felt obliged to expand: Had I known what a pit this place was, I’d have never stopped in here to take a shit. The man gave a derisive snort: Fuck, I wasn't asking why you came in here to shit, I was asking why you'd bother to take a shit at all. By now, Xiao Ding's forehead was wet with perspiration. He wiped the sweat from his brow and flung it to the ground. His fingers grazed the floor and came away dripping with some unidentifiable goo. Recoiling in disgust, he reached out automatically for the toilet paper.
In that instant, Xiao Ding experienced two terrible realizations: (1) There was no toilet paper in the stall and (2) He had neglected to bring any of his own. Perspiring profusely and starting to panic, Xiao Ding raised himself on his haunches and patted his trouser pockets. But what was he hoping to find there? His trousers didn't even have pockets. So uh, why are you taking a shit? The man calmly repeated his question. Although Xiao Ding was now seething with fury, some small corner of his mind registered the fact that he might have to ask this rude stranger for a favor, and soon. He composed his response carefully. Um, what's that? he asked, trying to mask his annoyance, how do you mean? The stranger snorted again: Bet you forgot to bring toilet paper, didn't you? It's like they say: The wise man thinks of everything, but even a sage slips up now and then. Wow, how'd you know I forgot toilet paper? Xiao Ding answered. It's so weird that you knew. Just as he was about to push open the stall door and ask the man for a scrap of toilet paper, he felt his bowels begin to move. The urge to shit was overwhelming. Lowering his head and gritting his teeth, he tried desperately to hold back the flood. At the same time, he began mentally composing his plea for help. Ha, I knew it, I just knew it! the man exclaimed smugly. Xiao Ding heard several sharp staccato bursts of urine, followed by a long, satisfied groan. One of the buzzing flies alighted on his kneecap and sat there, as if pondering the same question as Xiao Ding. Just as Xiao Ding was about to ask the stranger for some toilet paper, the man beat him to the punch: Fuck, I'd like to see how you get out of here! Before Xiao Ding could react, the stranger bolted for the restroom door. Judging by the clatter, he’d nearly tripped over himself in his haste to make an exit. When the noise had subsided, a disheartened Xiao Ding raised a fist and pushed open the wooden stall door. The row of urinals across from him was unchanged, the restroom as seedy as ever, but the place was deserted.
By Cindy M. Carter, July 9, 1:04p.m.
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...
(click "more" for the Chinese lyrics)
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By Cindy M. Carter, June 16, 3:41a.m.
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, 2:07a.m.
An unfortunate bit of news: we’ve been asked by the State University of New York press to take down our samples of Wang Xiaobo’s Golden Age, since the samples apparently conflict with the English-language translation rights they hold for Wang in Love and Bondage. Frankly, I’m not in the least convinced that this is legally viable, but I’m also very unwilling to get into a fight about it. The prospect of a practically penniless university press suing a group of actually penniless translators over stories few are ever likely to read is too depressing to bear consideration, so down they come. We’re leaving the stubs up; if you want to read the longer samples email us.
By Eric Abrahamsen, February 15, 5:19p.m.
Just ran across some poems in the archives, early translations I thought I'd lost. The first three are from Gu Cheng's 2005 (posthumous) collection《走了一万一千里路》. The other poems are from a 1995 edition of Gu Cheng's collected works《顾城诗全编》- also posthumous. Pretty free-wheeling translations, but there are some good moments. I think there's something here everyone can joyfully disagree on...
Truisms
The vase says: I’m worth a thousand hammers.
The hammer says: I’ve smashed a hundred vases.
The artisan says: I’ve made a thousand hammers.
The master says: I’ve killed a hundred artisans.
The hammer says: I've bludgeoned one master to death.
The vase says: I now contain that master’s ashes.
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By Cindy M. Carter, November 12, 8:48a.m.
My previous post on niubi was actually prompted by a bit of reading I’ve been doing: Feng Tang’s 十八岁给我一个姑娘 (which I persist in calling Given a Girl at Age 18, though I think he prefers ‘Chick’). Here’s the first couple pages of the book, which I held on to until after I’d posted on niubi, as a kind of fig leaf for the brazen cop-out at the end of the third paragraph below. Yes, I am ashamed of myself, but I can’t help it.
Zhu Shang
Long before I moved into this building, I’d heard Old Lecher Kong Jianguo talk about Zhu Shang’s mother. Old Lecher Kong Jianguo said that she was his one true passion. The first time I met Zhu Shang I made a decision: I would do everything I could to spend the rest of my life with her.
When you’re only eighteen years old you’ve got no sense of time. ‘The rest of your life’ so often means forever.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, November 8, 9:10p.m.
It was really getting on her nerves that so many fit and healthy men came to her for treatment, not because there was anything wrong with them, but because they wanted a look at the slag. I was the exception because my back genuinely looked like Pigsy had dug a couple of trenches in it and, even if I was pretending it hurt, those wounds were a good enough reason to see a doctor. They gave her some hope that she could get me to agree she wasn’t a slag. One person acknowledging that she wasn’t was hugely different to no one acknowledging it at all. But I had to go and disappoint her.
By Rachel Henson, September 2, 7:19p.m.
I'm blowing off deadlines left and right, so don't have time to do a full translation of this chapter. Even though I'm not really in the game, just wanted to toss in a few low-denomination chips and support the translation of this tremendously influential and unfairly neglected Chinese author....long live Wang Xiaobo! And wansui to Brendan, Eric and Feng37 for bringing his words to life.
Her reasoning went like this: although everyone said that she was a slut, Chen Qingyang felt that she was not, because to be a slut you had to sleep around, and she had never slept around. Although her husband had been in jail for over a year, she had never slept around in his absence, nor had she slept around prior to his imprisonment. For this reason, Chen Qingyang simply couldn't understand why people insisted on calling her a slut.
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By Cindy M. Carter, August 9, 10:05a.m.
All the needles in the brigade clinic were worn down and bent crooked, and they tended to take chunks of my skin with them. Eventually my back came to look like I’d been caught in some crossfire; the scars still haven’t faded since.
By John Kennedy, July 28, 9p.m.
I suppose everybody hears the author's voice slightly differently when they're reading a novel. The translations in Wang in Love and Bondage didn't speak with the voice I'd heard when I read Wang's writing, and I thought it would be an interesting exercise to organize a group effort to re-translate 黄金时代, the novella that Wang was fondest of. Wang's widow 李银河 Li Yinhe kindly gave her permission, and so we were off.
Truth be told, she even admired whores a bit. It wasn’t a question of whether whores were good or bad; it was that she simply wasn’t one, the same way a cat isn’t a dog. If everyone goes around calling a cat a dog, the cat’s bound to start feeling out of sorts, and now that everyone was calling Chen Qingyang a whore, she was completely unnerved, as if she didn’t even know who she was anymore.
Download this as a PDF. [No longer downloadable, sorry]
By Brendan O'Kane, July 28, 8:56a.m.
Before we get started here, a disclaimer: we didn’t start this site to snipe at existing translations, or hint haughtily that we could have done better ourselves, had only the gods of publishing smiled on us, rather than some other. Sour grapes have we none. And yet, the pain of seeing a favorite book or author to which justice has not been done… O, how the fingers itch to make amends! And so some of us have put together our own versions of the first chapter of Wang Xiaobo’s 黄金时代, not because Wang in Love and Bondage was so terrible, or our translations so much superior – think of them rather as fond tangents sprung from a work we found adept enough for inspiration, but not satisfaction. We offer them in the spirit of giving. They are also short, so as not to bore.
That spring, the team leader said I’d blinded his dog’s left eye, and now she looked at you cock-headed, like a ballet dancer. Since then he’d been making life difficult for me.
This download has been removed.
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 28, 8:38a.m.
Back in 1990, long before I had even begun studying Chinese, I remember Chalmers Johnson - in an undergraduate politics class about revolution, of all things - commenting that "the Chinese have a very scatological sense of humour." At the time, I had no reference point, no way of assessing the veracity of his claim, so I chalked it up to the amiable ramblings of a brilliant professor lulled to boredom by sleepy undergraduates, San Diego's balmy clime and the interminable weight of tenure.
Now, 17 years later, I find myself working on three excerpts by three very different Chinese authors - Yu Hua, Zhu Wen and Li Er - that have inspired me to revisit Chalmers Johnson's observation. In each of these passages, feces plays a starring role. While I'm in no mood to make generalizations about scatology or humour in China, this is marvelous excuse to introduce translations from a few favorite authors.
Yu Hua's Brothers
Protagonist Li ("Baldy") Guangtou sits atop his gold-plated toilet dreaming of his impending voyage into space on a Russian civilian shuttle and remembering his youth. Oh, the hazy crazy days of peeping at female asses through the partition of a public toilet...
Zhu Wen's What is Love and What is Garbage:
On the worst day of his life, protagonist Xiao Ding finds himself (1) the laughingstock of bar hostesses (2) a refugee who flees a bar only to enter the most ungodly toilet imaginable (3) a man without a shred of toilet paper (4) the butt of a prank by an unkind stranger standing at the urinals. On days like this, you might as well just call it quits...
Li Er's Truth and Variations:
While some might see Doctor Bai as a freak or a fetishist, he is in fact an expert in all things excremental: a scholar of shit, a doyen of dung, a professor of piddle, piss and poop. We say this with all due respect to his academic background, interests and credentials.
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By Cindy M. Carter, July 20, 10:15a.m.
Bashi Niandai Fangtanlu (八十年代访谈录), Sanlian Shudian, 2006. 453 pages.
With a roster of interviewees that includes poet Bei Dao, author Ah Cheng, rock musician Cui Jian and filmmaker Tian Zhuangzhuang, Zha Jianying looks back on the cultural, artistic and social legacy of 1980s mainland China. Essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary China, the book is also filled with fascinating trivia: Who knew that poet/essayist Mang Ke once worked in a paper factory? Or that before cycling around Beijing to make their deliveries, he and the other founders of the influential samizdat literary magazine “Today” took the precaution of altering their bicycle license plates in case they had to make a quick getaway? The interviews are generally very frank, and yield some candid admissions (film critic Lin Xudong’s reservations about Jiang Wen’s films, for example, or his championing of Wang Bing’s “West of Tracks” and Jia Zhangke’s “Xiao Wu” as the two finest Chinese films to emerge in this decade) as well as some startling omissions (Bei Dao’s refusal to discuss contemporary Chinese poetry in any detail).
Unfortunately, the book is not yet available in English translation. Here is a blurb (translation mine) from Zha Jianying’s e-mail interview with poet Bei Dao:
Zha Jianying: Some contend that the 1980s were an era of mainland Chinese idealism, and that the present age is one of pragmatism and materialism - an era in which the vast majority of mainland Chinese intellectuals, artists and writers have either been co-opted by the status quo, seduced by wealth and fame, or simply lulled by the prospect of security and respectability. Would you agree with this assessment? In commenting about a Chinese artist who had traded in a rebellious youth for a career in business, you once wrote: “In the end, commerce trumps everything.” Do you think that the commercialization of our society has eroded rather than nourished, corrupted rather than sustained, contemporary Chinese art and literature?
Bei Dao: I think that’s a bit of an oversimplification. The 1980s posed their own problems; they also gave rise to the 1990s crisis. What you’re implying is that the idealism of the eighties failed to take root. In the 1980s, intellectuals born and raised during the Chinese Cultural Revolution were just beginning to make their mark, but they had yet to establish their own traditions. Nor had they managed to overcome the obstacles that prevented them from carrying on the traditions of the May Fourth Movement (1919), a period in history that constitutes a cultural lifeline for Chinese intellectuals. Any nation in the process of modernization will, at some point, be afflicted by commercialization. The question is: how do we maintain our principles in such a constantly shifting environment?
Zha Jianying: Do you ever feel nostalgic for the 1980s? What are your hopes for the future of Chinese poetry?
Bei Dao: No matter what, I will always feel a certain nostalgia for the 1980s, despite the various crises we weathered. Every nation prides itself on a certain cultural or literary high watermark: the “silver age” of Russian literature in the early 20th century is but one example. I think that the 1980s represented the high point of 20th century Chinese culture. I fear that we may have a long wait before we see such a flowering again, and that our generation may not live to see it. The renaissance of Chinese art and literature in the 1980s grew out of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. As the saying goes, “seismic cataclysms unearth new springs”; were it not for the Cultural Revolution, the eighties would never have played out the way they did. But more important is the way the curtain fell: in the tragi-heroic finale to the 1980s, we witnessed the vitality of an ancient culture, its aesthetic and artistic significance and its latent potential. For all these reasons and more, we have just cause to be proud.
By Cindy M. Carter, June 28, 10:01p.m.
Just bought Li Hongqi's novel "Lucky Bastard" (李红旗 《幸运儿》). It was the back cover blurbs that caught my eye: high praise from Han Dong and Zhu Wen; few first-time Chinese authors can ask for better that that.
In Zhu Wen's amusing preface to the book, he admits that although he has been "lazy" about writing lately, he was pleased to write a few paragraphs on behalf of Li Hongqi, a young poet-novelist who first came to Zhu Wen's attention with his poem "Friends".
I liked "Friends" so much that I translated it on the spot:
Poem: Friends
Poet: Li Hongqi
In the autumn of 1994,
many people were engaged
in the study of sexual intercourse.
That's about the time I learned it.
Naturally, prior to that autumn
there were a good many people
who'd been having intercourse for years,
and of course a whole lot more
who hadn't mastered it,
even by the autumn of 1994.
If all those interested alumni
of the sexual intercourse
circa autumn 1994
could only find some way
to re-establish contact
with one another,
who knows...
everyone might just end up
making a friend.
(Click "more" to see the original poem in Chinese)
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By Cindy M. Carter, June 24, 7:28a.m.
It's Duanwu Jie 端午节, the Dragon-Boat Festival. If we were in Hong Kong or Taiwan, we'd get a day off. No such luck here, so I'm blogging on my lunch break in honor of the holiday instead.
The Dragon-Boat Festival commemorates the death of 屈原 Qu Yuan, China's first poet. Qu was a minister in the pre-Chinese state of 楚 Chu during the 战国 Warring States period, and after arguing for more reasonable policies he was slandered by jealous court insiders and exiled by the king of Chu, to whom he was intensely loyal. Heartbroken, his faith in mankind shaken, Qu dashed off a few more poems and then walked into the Miluo River holding a stone. The dragon boats from which Duanwu Jie gets its English name are supposedly rushing to retrieve his body before it could be eaten by the fish, though in reality it's a separate tradition that just happened to get associated with Qu later on.
Qu is the first poet whose name is known, and there are a few works (particularly 离骚 'On Encountering Trouble' ) that are attributable to him with a fair degree of certainty. Others are traditionally attributed to him but clearly the work of later poets, like the poem 怀沙, 'Embracing Sands,' which Qu supposedly wrote immediately before chucking himself into the river. The great Han-dynasty historian 司马迁 Sima Qian recounts the events leading up to Qu's suicide as follows:
Qu Yuan wandered in his banishment, murmuring poems as he walked along the bank of the Miluo River, disheveled and emaciated.
A fisherman saw him and asked:
Aren't you His Excellency the minister? What has laid you so low?
Qu Yuan replied:
For all the world is muddy and I alone am clean; for all men are drunk and I alone am sober -- it is for this that I was exiled.
The fisherman said,
A sage does not stay apart and aloof, but adapts to his environment.
If all the world is muddy, why not beat up the mud and stir up waves?
If all men are drunk, why not lap at their lees and drink their dregs?
Why get yourself exiled because of your deep thoughts and noble aspirations?
Qu Yuan replied,
I have heard that who has rinsed his hair then brushes his cap; who has washed his body then shakes his clothes.
One does not sully his own cleanliness with filthiness.
I would rather jump into the river, bury myself in the bellies of the fishes,
Than suffer my own purity to be covered by the dirt of the vulgar world.
Hearing this, the fisherman smiled and began row away, singing as he went:
When the river water runs clear and fleet
It's fit to rinse hat-tassels in.
When the river water's full of murk,
'Twill still suffice to wash my feet.
And he went on his way without saying anything more.
Happy Dragon-Boat Festival.
(Click the title to see the original Chinese text)
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By Brendan O'Kane, June 19, 7:47p.m.
This may be beyond the ken of our literary website, but singer Liang Long (of the Chinese rock band Second Hand Rose) writes some of the wittiest, most cunning lyrics around. Here's a sample translation, good fun for all. Click for posting that includes both Chinese lyrics and English lyrics in translation:
"Let the Artists [be the first to strike it rich]"
...I’m a packet of STD meds
That the spouse opens when your back is turned
I’m a demigod who broke all of heaven’s rules
And got kicked back down to earth...
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By Cindy M. Carter, June 13, 9:32a.m.
A very short translated excerpt from the first page of Yan Lianke's 2006 novel, Dream of Ding Village (丁庄梦). When he is at his best, Yan is an extraordinarily lyrical writer who uses rhyme, rhythm, repetition and cadence to great effect. The first chapter of Dream of Ding Village is a joy to read aloud in Chinese - musical and prose-poetic, it establishes the tone of the entire novel and introduces refrains that the author returns to again and again. I am not sure that I have done this justice in my translation, but it is a labor of love and a work in progress.
"A day in late autumn, a late autumn dusk, the dusk of a late autumn day. Because of the autumn, because of the dusk, the sun that sets above the East Henan plain bloods up into a ball, making red of earth and sky..."
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By Cindy M. Carter, June 12, 2:49a.m.
A light boat rows with short strokes, and the West Lake's good.
The limpid waters gently wend;
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By Brendan O'Kane, April 7, 6:41a.m.
New Comments
on Google Translator: Making the World a More Baffling Place?
To be fair, Google has gotten noticeably better for Chinese over the past few years. The big problems seem to be that their parallel text corpus is just nowhere near the size of corpi for European languages, and that since ...
posted by Brendan
Just so I don't forget this anecdote: On the ten-hour train ride from Wuhan back to Beijing two days ago, I passed a gas station with the following sign:
加油站 onlinetranslation 加油站 onlinetranslation
posted by Canaan Morse
Several things about Google Translate.
I didn't know about until 6 months ago. For someone who often depends on translation for a living, that is pathetic.
Now that I do, I must say that like those examples cited above ...
posted by Bruce
...That being the case, I would expect that something like Google Translate, which seems rather Euro-centric and handles translation between European languages fairly well, will soon be much better equipped to handle modern Chinese than it is right now. I ...
posted by Bruce
Google translate will soon spell the end of translation memory such as Trados, which is great because it's a horrible, cumbersome piece of software that is artificially made difficult so that translators can claim Trados expertise.
I don't ...
posted by ff
on Quotes: Highlighting "local color" or "Chinglish"?
@ #12 Martin
That article is interesting, but I feel like it doesn't apply the same way to translations. Usually, you would want the translation to sound as idiomatic as the original.
posted by GAC