Last night I met the translator of Mò Yán’s 莫言Red Sorghum紅高粱家族 (English translation by Howard Goldblatt) into Romanian. Copping to the Translator’s Invisibility I’ll leave the Romanian translator unnamed—I hesitate to speak with that authority when I haven’t conferred with him about what I’ll be writing, and I’m not sure I could spell his name correctly anyhow—but I will say that he’s primarily a scholar on the Wénxīn diāolóng 文心雕龍 (Carving Dragons from the Literary Mind) and his previous translations into Romanian include the Lǎozǐ老子, or the Dàodé Jīng道德經.
Instead of using hanzi directly, let's invent a new system-- we'll call it yingzi, "English characters"-- that would work for English exactly as hanzi works for Chinese.
*The following is the translation of a blog post by Li Yinhe (李银河), widow of the writer Wang Xiaobo (王小波).
Some publishers came to talk about a manuscript, and left me one of their own books as a sample of their work. The writer's name is Feng Tang, both of which characters you can find in the Hundred Names [a compendium of the most common surnames in China]. My guess is that his father was surnamed Feng and his mother surnamed Tang; I've met other people who got their names that way. The title of the book is You Live and Live and Then You're Old (活着活着就老了), which caught my eye. I looked through it and it's excellent, I couldn't put it down once I'd started, and read it all the way through in a day and a half.
Apart from a few later pieces about Beijing and Hong Kong that weren't that good, and apart from a few places where the same phrases were used repeatedly in different essays (was the writer too busy to read the whole thing through before publication?), and apart from some harsh evaluations of Wang Xiaobo, the book was very, very good.
In it he mentioned laughing out loud twice while reading Wang Xiaobo's books. Reading someone's books and laughing however many times: I'll borrow this phrase, and say that I laughed out loud seven or eight times while reading his book. I developed asthma after I came back to China in 1988, and though it got better it never entirely went away: I have an athsma attack every time I have a laughing fit; listening to crosstalk is a risky business for me. This book nearly did me in; there were eight times I almost had an attack. If I ever have the opportunity to meet this person I'll have a bone to pick with him.
In the book he divides writers into those who "spit out" one book, those who "spit out" two books, and those who "spit out" many books. His use of the word "spit" hit me like a thunderclap: I had once imagined that real literature might be in my future, but the word "spit" dispelled my fantasy for good. I asked myself if I really had anything I needed to spit out, and concluded that I should just stick to my sociology, and enjoy life in my spare time.
They say that the media is in the hands of the generation born in the 1970s. Of the people mentioned in Feng Tang's book, I've read the writing of Luo Yonghao [whose Bullog blog site was recently shut down] and He Caitou; they must be approaching 40 now. They're 20 years younger than us, a whole generation. They've already become the pillars of modern China's intellectual world; we should have respect for our juniors.
“Depending on how you read it, China’s biggest publishing sensation in years, Wolf Totem, is a moving novel of nomads and settlers and their relation with wolves on the Mongolian steppes, a guide to doing business in New China, an ecological handbook, or a piece of military strategy.” So says The Independent’s Clifford Coonan in his review of Wolf Totem (狼图腾), and he’s right.
Thanks to Howard Goldblatt's translation, English speakers worldwide can hear the wise old Mongol Bilgee tell the young Chinese city-dweller that the Han have "lost the virility of their ancestors." But what about the impact of Wolf Totem on China's management thinking?
I’ve received plenty of emails from people wishing me a “happy niu year.” The phrasing represents a kind of translation that I can’t imagine having happened much twelve years ago: since 1997 Chinese and pīnyīn have become much more pervasive and available in the English-speaking world, while knowledge of and the importance of English has grown in China.
But translation, or something like it, also happens within languages. I guess I mean the misfiring, the falling offs, and the avoidance of them that make some people say translation is impossible. In Chinese, homophones and puns take on a sometimes cosmic significance: fish and bats are auspicious because yú魚 [fish] sounds like yú餘 [plenty] and biānfú蝙蝠 [bat] contains the sound of the word fú福 [fortune] (I’ve been translating a poem recently in which a certain transition hinges on the notion of bats as good omens). But it cuts both ways: sometimes you don’t want to say something because something sounds like something else. These days, a kind of prohibition has arisen, given the bosses’ propensity for layoffs amidst the current global economic slowdown, against saying gōngxǐ fācái恭喜發財 [“happy new year,” but literally “congratulations on how much money you’re getting”], because cái財 [“wealth”] sounds like cái裁 [“to get fired”]? And especially against saying cáiyuán gǔngǔn財源滾滾 [“may your wealth and resources come rolling”], since it sounds like cáiyuán gǔngǔn裁員滾滾 [“may you get laid off and may your head roll”]. These phrases, and their homophonic evil twins, are hard to translate, but they exist as their own kind of translation—belles infidèles, or beautiful infidelities—already.
Zhang Cheng-Zhi (张承志), the white-hot Red Guard who mastered Mongolian and Japanese—and then converted to Islam—has just launched En las Ruinas de la Flor: Viajes por al-Andalus (鲜花的废墟). His new Chinese-language travelogue takes us through Moorish Spain, Portugal and Morocco in search of the golden age of Islam in Europe (8th-15th centuries). To view the English synopsis...
Though nearly 50, Yu, who wears his hair short and spiky, looks relatively young. He speaks in emphatic bursts, his face often flushing red, and he is quick to laugh. It was, in fact, his boisterous laugh that almost got him into trouble on the morning of the solemn announcement of Mao’s death.
Is translation an inherently political act? I suppose that depends on your definition of "inherent."
But if nothing else, though, translation--like so much else--provides an opportunity for censorship. One latest example, as many have noticed, is a certain government's censorship of Obama's inaugural speech. Here's the New York Times article about the issue, and here's the China Digital Times report, including a clip.
As my first post on Paper Republic, I want to be very serious. No "fooling around," indeed.
As a follow-up to an earlier post on 折騰, here's what my dictionary has to say:
折騰 zhē teng
1. (翻來倒去) turn from side to side; toss about
2. (反復做某事) do sth. over and over again
3. (折磨) cause physical or mental suffering; get sb. down
Based on this definition, this entry--and Paper Republic in general--seems to be an example of def. 1, because we're certainly 翻來倒去, or, to mistranslate that phrase, "translating over and over."
Launched in 2003, CipherJournal aims to be something new in the domain of online literary journals.
We believe in the place of translation to inspire stronger literature; without cross-fertilization, no growth can last. We aim to focus on literary translation in its broadest sense, cracking open this often-neglected field by melding the invisibility of the translator with the identity of the artist.
Frequent charges of plagiarism--one confirmed in court--don't seem to be impacting Guo Jing-Ming's status as Number One. Meanwhile, the first volume of The Tibet Code (藏地密码) and three subsequent tomes (!) are all in the top-selling 30.
At a recent forum in Shenzhen, pundits zeroed in on 2008's major trends in China's book publishing industry.
The global economic chill has made titles in macro-economics hot, hot, hot. Since the stock market is in the doldrums, investment tips have little practical use and have given way to primers on economics. All the fancy financial terms have served as pointers for more systematic knowledge in how to run an economy, or avoid running it into the ground.
“In the early 1980s there was little difference between the salaries of authors and labourers. No one had any money,” says Wang Ruiqing, a senior editor at People’s Literature Publishing House who oversaw the introduction of the Harry Potter series to China. “Back then, the government invested in publishing and it didn’t matter if the books succeeded.”
The following is a translation of this blog post, which came down the feed reader a day or so ago.
Soon after President Hu, at a very formal meeting, said the words "do not waver, do not slacken, do not mess around" (不动摇不懈怠不折腾), this phrase started to get popular. It was a bit of a shocker to hear something so slangy as "mess around" (折腾, zhéteng) come out of the mouth of a solemn, venerable personage like the General Secretary, and soon everyone was saying it.
They underestimate us! A little phrase like this doesn't need a language maven to figure out, it's a piece of cake. According to the rule of 'crude for crude, elegant for elegant', I can think of a few translations: "no fooling around", "no messing around" or, if you want to get crude, "no fxxcking around" (these are all verb phrases). The translators aren't translating it, and everyone's talking around it, simply to keep from embarrassing President Hu. They're keeping it as "bu zheteng" because they have no other choice.
What's hilarious is that some retards in the Chinese media have written puff pieces saying that the Chinese 'bu zheteng' might even become a catchphrase in English. They shouldn't get their hopes up; the answer would be "No thanks. We've got plenty of words of our own, quit messing with our language." The way I see it, compared to 'bu zhengteng', some other suggestions from netizens' like 'not to huqiunong' (the Shaanxi version) or 'don't xiaqiunao' (Shandong version) have a better chance of making it into English.
Anyway, I suspect Hu Jintao was straying from the script when he said this, it doesn't sound like the sort of a thing a scriptwriter would come up with. Now everyone's elated that a Party boss could talk this way, they though they were off the hook as well. But in olden times they used to say you have to both listen to a man's words and observe his actions – I for one remain deeply skeptical. If a political party that makes a rule of "messing around" were to suddenly straighten up and fly right, they'd have no clue where to even start. Besides, before long they're going to roll out another movement, either "compulsory" or "optional"; they may say they're not "messing around", but it sure looks like it to me.
The One Way Street Bookstore is putting on a talk with A Cheng this weekend at its Wanda Plaza location. A Cheng is renowned as a free spirit and a bit of a contrarian; I've run into him a few times, though, and he's usually just seemed crotchety and confused. Still, he's a Personality, and the event ought to be interesting.
Update: The Bi-Cultural Freak went to this event, and wrote a bit about it, plus pictures. We hereby steal one of her pictures, though stealing with permission takes most of the fun out, doesn't it.
Her write-up is in Chinese, but here's a translation (of her transcription) of A Cheng's ramblings:
Art arises from witchcraft. It has no religious faith; it's good at dispelling all that. It dispells stress. Errenzhuan [a kind of two-person song and storytelling routine from northeastern China] is a kind of witchcraft. In ancient times witchcraft was a primary form of performance. There were all types and kinds. Many artists suffer now. It used to be that if you were a painter you just painted… Now it's about politics, publication… You work all day, then struggle all night. Errenzhuan: it's a soporific; the northeast; jumping rope. One person says: I'll make your Granny appear, the other: okay, no problem.
And it really sounds like his grandmother's voice. All the bystanders get involved. I worked in a labor team in the northeast when I was young, it snowed starting in September, so what could you do but listen to errenzhuan? Errenzhuan's got these robes, and they squat and waddle around – that's all witchcraft. And it makes you laugh out loud, it can make you laugh at anything, like that Zhao Benshan [a comedy actor from the northeast] – it's a soporific. Art. It has a hold on everything, on every craft.
[The Chinese word for art, 艺术, is made up of two characters which roughly mean "art" and "craft". 术 by itself, however, is closer to "magic", here "witchcraft".]
As I said: a little crotchety, a little confused.
PS: Can someone weigh in authoritatively on the A Cheng vs Ah Cheng vs Ah-Cheng issue? My fingers type something different every time.
The NEA Literature Fellowship Translation Project grant is due January 9 (sorry, we should have said something earlier), and can net you either $12,500 or $25,000, so get online and apply!
The American PEN deadline is January 16, and you can also apply online.
