Food glorious food – a feast of stories from Read Paper Republic

Nicky Harman writes: Paper Republic is a registered charity/non-profit website dedicated to promoting enjoyment and understanding of Chinese literature in translation. I am one of its volunteer workers and trustees. As part of our mission, we publish Read Paper Republic, occasional series of complete, free-to-read short stories (or poems or essays) translated from Chinese to English. 

This year, after our foray into Covid stories, entitled Epidemic, which explored how some of China’s best writers have been personally affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, we decided on a more upbeat theme. The current series, entitled Food Glorious Food, is made up of six contemporary pieces all based on or around one of China’s favourite pastimes: eating. 

In Food Glorious Good, we have featured well-known authors from the Chinese-speaking world, including Xu Xiaobin, Hong Ying, Wu Ang, Sabrina Huang, Yang Shuangzi, and Zheng Zhi, all translated by up-and-coming literary translators. The stories range from historical fiction exploring complex relationships and social inequality to a clever, unnerving tale of kidnap at the hands of a food delivery driver. And it is this last story which we have chosen as a splendid climax to our series. The story is called ‘Winter is Coming’ and the author is Wu Ang. 

Singaporean writer Soon Ai Ling's stories are translated, transcreated and adapted by Yeo Wei Wei. An interview with Nicky Harman

 

Diasporic and Clan are two volumes of short stories by the sinophone Singaporean writer Soon Ai Ling, translated, transcreated and adapted by Yeo Wei Wei. Yeo has done a translation of Soon stories in Diasporic, and then transcreated and adapted them in Clan. As a translator myself, I was intrigued by this adventure in story-telling, so I asked Yeo Wei Wei to tell me more.

NH: could you tell me how you came across Soon's stories and what attracted you to them? 

WW: I received an email from Ailing one day out of the blue whilst I was in Norwich doing my MA in Creative Writing. She had asked Eva Tang about my translation of the subtitles and song lyrics for Eva’s documentary The Songs We Sang. She liked my translation very much and wished to approach me to ask if I would translate her fiction. After I finished my MA, I returned to Singapore and I looked for Ailing’s book of short stories in the National Library. I read them and I also watched Eva’s short film that was based on Ailing’s story “Chef Tham”. Ailing’s stories are set in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. The Chinese diasporic contexts in these different countries are the basis of the rich story worlds found in her fiction. She is unique for this reason, amongst Singaporean Chinese authors. I was also attracted to the predicaments of her protagonists. Very often, her stories deal with the private struggles of men and women in traditional Asian family settings. They are individuals torn between personal desires and family history, hierarchy, family values and expectations.  

Jin Ping Mei rides again

When, years ago, I studied Chinese at Leeds University, there was a set of volumes that resided only in the stacks downstairs in the Brotherton Library. It was the famous erotic novel, Jin Ping Mei (JPM), also known as The Plum in the Golden Vase, or The Golden Lotus. I have no idea whether it was in translation or in the original Chinese as I never ventured down there to find out. But about fifteen years ago, I was in Hong Kong airport and picked up the complete 1939 Clement Edgerton (and Lao She) translation which, though old, had just been reissued. I read it and enjoyed it enormously. 

For anyone wanting to know more about JPM, there is an extensive Wikipedia entry, which helpfully summarises the story as ‘ostensibly set during the years 1111–1127 … it centers on Ximen Qing (西門慶), a corrupt social climber and lustful merchant who is wealthy enough to marry six wives and concubines…. After Pan Jinlian secretly murders her husband, Ximen Qing takes her as one of his wives. The story follows the domestic sexual struggles of the women within his household as they clamor for prestige and influence amidst the gradual decline of the Ximen clan.’

So much, briefly, by way of background. However, I am not reviewing JPM itself in this post, but a fascinating and detailed collection of essays about the novel, delightfully called JPM – A Wild Horse in Chinese Literature. This is an impressive work of scholarship, with more than thirty contributors from all over the world. The essays shed a fascinating light on Chinese culture and society in the period in which the novel is set and in which it was written – the early seventeenth century. It looks at its travels in translation into the rest of the world, and the processes and challenges of that translation.

JPM is noted (notorious?) for its graphically-described sexual episodes, even though its defenders point out they account for only a tiny proportion of the total text, around 20,000 Chinese characters (汉字). One of the most interesting essays in Wild Horse traces its treatment in China post-1949. Marja Kaikkonen (Chapter 13), writes: ‘The literary histories of the PRC left out any mention of JPM, nor was the book presented in literature classes at universities…. In the early PRC, no one dared to publish JPM until Mao Zedong …had encouraged it. Mao’s comments on JPM are cherished even today: who else would have dared to do it? At a 1957 meeting with high-level cadres, Mao is quoted as having said: “JPM can be used for reference, but the episodes where women are humiliated are bad. Province Party secretaries can have a look at it.”’ By the 1980s, ‘People of the rank of senior editors and above were allowed to buy the book,’ though the extortionate price must have limited its circulation. Although unexpurgated versions are now available in the PRC, Kaikkonen concludes: ‘Whatever those reasons may be, Jin Ping Mei remains as sensitive as a thorn in the flesh.’ This is borne out by Wu Gan’s comment in Chapter 24 of Wild Horse, that JPM ‘…inevitably had some naturalist depictions of sex (some of which are essential for characterization). Such depictions, which take up fewer than 20,000 Chinese characters, can be considered a minor flaw of the novel.’ [my emphasis] 

The same moral sensitivities have faced translators and their publishers: Clement Edgerton translated all the erotic descriptions not into English but into Latin. Confining access to the novel to Province Party secretaries (in China) or those who can read Latin (in the UK) seems to follow the same logic: writing which endangers social morals must only be available to males, and only as long as they are of the educated ruling class. (I can’t help being reminded of the words of the judge at the obscenity trial of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover: ‘Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’) 

Wild Horse also includes essays on the sexual vocabulary used in Chinese, the puns and innuendo, and ways of analysing the occurrence of selected words by using corpus linguistics tools. As for the translation process, Keith MacMahon, in Chapter 14, writes: ‘Problems of translation are also a matter of the lack of equivalent words and images, or the mismatch between them. It is safe to say that the repertoire of the language of sex in late Ming China is richer than that of the contemporary English-speaking world, whose lexicon tends to either scientific terminology… or else profanity.’ On the subject of which, Lintao Qi, in Chapter 15, writes amusingly about how JPM has on occasion been adapted/abridged and re-written as pure erotica in English, the exact opposite approach to that of bowdlerisation.

There are essays about the translators of JPM into other languages. The first translation was into Manchu ‘…. in the course of [the Qing dynasty’s] assiduous efforts to adapt to Chinese culture’ (Martin Gimm, Chapter 20), only a century after it first appeared in Chinese. But who knew that the first German translation, completed in 1869 by Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, was from the Manchu not the Chinese? Or that the first part of the German translation by the Kibat brothers (both of whom taught themselves Chinese) fell victim to Hitler’s book-burning and had to be done again, in secrecy. 

On a completely different aspect of the novel, Lucie Olivová, a Czech translator, looks at ‘The Architecture of Ximen Qing’s Residence’ in Chapter 23. Translating the most basic terminology, like the word for ‘home’, she says, poses a challenge: ‘In the Czech tradition, house (dům) means a single building, large or small. In sharp contrast, the traditional Chinese house (siheyuan 四合院) is made up of several courtyards arranged along a central axis, with small single buildings surrounding one or more square and oblong courts (Olivová 2008: 82–85). In other words, the traditional house is a compound composed according to given rules that Europeans are usually not familiar with. It would therefore be misleading to use the word dům.’ And that is before she addresses the many different garden features for which we have no equivalent: ‘…lou 樓, ge 閣, xuan 軒, ting 亭, juanpeng 卷棚, etc.’ I know from my own experience as a translator that visualizing a scene and understanding the geography in a novel can be a huge challenge. Whether it is the loess plateau, with its particular geographical features, in Jia Pingwa’s novels and stories, or the ancestral home at number 8, Xi Shu Yuan Street in Nanchang that Rao Pingru visited as a child and describes in his memoirs, Our Story.  It is tantalising when you know that the author has a perfectly clear image in their head, if only they could transmit it to you. But for Olivová and other translators, the author has been dead for centuries. Compounding the difficulties is that fact that: ‘the information that can be extracted from the novel is meagre, fragmentary, and scattered across the text.’ 

In English, the Egerton/Lao She translation has withstood the test of time: it has been republished with the Wade-Giles transliterations replaced with pinyin and the Latin passages translated into English, as The Golden Lotus: Jin Ping Mei (Tuttle Classics), with an introduction by Robert E. Hegel. That was the one I picked up in the airport. There is also now a new and highly-praised translation by David Tod Roy, entitled The Plum in the Golden Vase, in five volumes, (Princeton University Press, 1993-2013), a complete and annotated translation of the 1610 edition of JPM. For anyone making a foray into either of these versions, I recommend Wild Horse as a companion. It will enrich your reading and may even make you smile.

 

"Owlish". Nicky Harman reviews a new novel by Dorothy Tse, translated by Natascha Bruce

 

Owlish is the story of Professor Q, a university lecturer in the city of Nevers. He is not a happy man: his wife refuses intimacy with him, his students protest, then disappear, and he is visited by sinister authority figures. He takes refuge in a fantasy world and his life is briefly illuminated by his passion for Aliss, a doll who is introduced to him by the mysterious Owlish. But as the story progresses, the sanctuary he has found for their love affair, an abandoned church, is raided, the doll is destroyed, and his wife Maria reclaims him. In the final pages, it is not the forces of political repression but Maria and their doctor who seal his fate: ‘Professor Q thought of the sky-blue pills he would no longer have any reason to take and almost felt like laughing…He was fast asleep, his upper body collapsed onto the sofa. Maria came to stand over him, regarding his body as she might a placid lake. The sleeping pill had worked quickly…’

This novel draws the reader in on many levels. It is suspenseful: can the Prof find a new life? What will happen to the doll? It is political; there is no attempt to disguise the parallels between the fictitious island, its communities and languages, and present-day Hong Kong – in that respect, it’s wonderfully cheeky. And the language is beautiful – more on that later.

Nicky Harman reviews two new translations of Lu Xun

Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881 - 1936) is the leading figure of modern Chinese literature of the early twentieth-century. He pioneered writing in vernacular Chinese (as opposed to classical Chinese, hitherto the written language for the educated), producing short stories, literary criticism, essays and poetry, as well as translations from Russian. 

Two translations of Lu Xun's collection of short pieces called, in Chinese, 《野草》(Ye Cao) dropped into my Inbox recently.

One is brand-new: Wild Grass and Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk, translated by Eileen J Cheng, edited by Theodore Huters, Harvard University Press (September 2022)

The other is recent: Weeds, translated by Matt Turner. Seaweed Salad Editions (2019)

Both of these are splendid volumes. The differences are largely that Eileen Cheng's includes many more pieces, as its title suggests. Matt Turner's is bilingual, useful for those who would like to consult the Chinese, which appears alongside the English. Both have detailed and informative introductions to the man and his work. Speaking as a translator, I am encouraged that two excellent versions of this collection should have appeared at almost the same time.

It is easy to see Lu Xun as a perpetually angry writer levelling savage criticism at the society he lived in. Geremie Barmé, in a piece that is well worth reading because it situates Lu Xun among his fellow writers, says, 'As with his fiction, Lu Xun used his essays to convey a message and to educate his readers, especially the growing youth readership.' Stories and novellas like The True Story of Ah Q come to mind; these were the ones that were on our university reading list, and are probably the most influential of his work, even today.

But the pieces in Wild Grass /Weeds are very different. Less polemical, more inward-looking and ruminative. (Sometimes they are even outright funny.) In these stories/essays, the narrators do not shout with rage. They hint, they meander, they tease, they dream. To understand the nuances, the reader has to concentrate hard (or read the introductions to both volumes, which are very useful).

One example is a powerful story translated by Cheng as Tremors on the Border of Degradation, and by Turner as Trembling Decay. This is how it begins:

[Cheng] I dreamed of myself dreaming.
I don't know where I am, but before me is a night scene inside a small, tightly sealed cottage. Yet I can also see the forest of dense greenery on the rooftop.
The lamp chimney on the wooden table, freshly wiped, lights up the room, making it exceptionally bright. In the bright light, on the dilapidated bed, beneath the unfamiliar, hairy, burly lump of flesh is a thin, frail body, trembling from hunger, pain, shock, humiliation, and pleasure.
The full figure's flaccid yet supple skin is smooth, both pale cheeks flushing lightly, like lip rouge coated on lead.

[Turner] I dreamt I was dreaming. I didn't know where I was, before my eyes, late night, the confining interior of a small hut ó and I could also make out a dense forest of stonecrop on the hut's roof.
On the rough-hewn table the lampshade had just been wiped clean, and the room was bright. In the glare, on the broken couch, under an unknown yet familiar hairy, fierce chunk of meat ó a thin body trembling from hunger pangs, shock, humiliation, and ecstasy. Yet the skin was relaxed, radiant and smooth; the pale cheeks reddened like liquid rouge over lead.

As Cheng describes it in her Introduction, '[The] woman sells her body to buy food for her young daughter. Jolted awake, the I-in-the-dream enters a second dreamscape, a continuation of the earlier dream, but after many years have elapsed. The now grown daughter, ashamed of her mother's sordid past, heaps scorn and abuse on the old woman. Amid the jeers of her daughter and her family, the old woman walks out of the shed at night, deep into the boundless wilderness.' This story is hauntingly beautiful but requires attentive reading to understand that the first paragraph is describing a prostitute and her client. Those words never appear anywhere in it.

This is also the moment, since I have quoted the two versions side-by-side, to say that the translators have done a very fine job. You will see significant differences in the paragraphs quoted above, from the use of the present tense and the past tense, to the specific term 'stonecrop' and the more general 'greenery'. I think it proves the point that I regularly make to students, that there is no such thing as a single definitive translation from Chinese. There are always several excellent and perfectly correct ones.

To return to the interpretation of the stories in Wild Grass/Weeds, one that I found most enjoyable is called After Death. This is the musings of a man who is definitely dead but is still able to think, and be annoyed with an importunate bookseller and a ticklish ant. I loved it and highly recommend it but I confess I still have no idea if it has any deeper meaning.

As you will have gathered, I am not a Lu Xun scholar -- my knowledge of his work has been largely limited to his appearance on our university syllabus. But I am going to take this opportunity to mention the piece which does not appear in these volumes, but which drew me to Lu Xun decades ago, when Ah Q simply depressed me. It is the speech entitled 'What Happens after Nora Walks Out, A talk given to Literature and Arts Society at Beijing Women's Normal College, December 26, 1923'. In it, Lu Xun introduces the students to Henrik Ibsen's The Doll's House in these words, 'At the outset, Nora is living contentedly in a supposedly happy household, but eventually she is awakened: she is her husband's puppet, and her children are her puppets. So she walks out, and the play ends with the sound of the front door slamming shut.' And he comes to the bleak conclusion that 'Logically, Nora really has only two options: to fall into degradation or to return home.'

What I found most appealing about his talk, and still do, is the effortless, conversational tone, and the many issues he touches on in a mere couple of pages. I was also struck, re-reading it again this week, by his ending, which reads as ominously today as when it was written ninety-nine years ago. He writes, 'Unfortunately, it's too difficult to change China: blood will flow just by moving a table or mending a stove. And even if blood does flow, the table isn't necessarily going to be moved or the mending carried out. Unless a great whip lashes her back, China will never consider budging. I think such a whipping is bound to come. Whether for good or bad is another question, but it is bound to come. When it will come and how it will come, however, I cannot exactly tell.'

 

Bridging two cultures. Nicky Harman interviews London-based, Beijing-born Alicia Liu of SingingGrass

 

NH: Can you tell me briefly where you come from and how long you've been in the UK?

Alicia Liu: I was born in Beijing and moved to the UK to study in 2003. Although I considered myself a Beijinger, my family was a mixture of northerners and southerners from China. My dad was born in Inner Mongolia and my mum was born in Shanghai and grew up in Beijing. My grandmother was originally from Guangzhou and grew up in Hong Kong in the 1920s. I have fond memories of hearing her speaking a mixture of Cantonese and Mandarin while growing up. Since moving to London as a teenager, I've managed to spend an equal amount of my life in the East and the West.

NH: What is your company SingingGrass? (where did the name come from?) and what are its main activities

AL: My company name was inspired by the book The Grass is Singing by the British author Doris Lessing. My grandfather, a renowned literary critic and translator in China, had written the preface to the book when it was first translated and introduced to China in the 1950s. One of my favourite quotes in the book is "he knew how to get on with natives; dealing with them was a sometimes amusing, sometimes annoying game in which both sides followed certain unwritten rules."

I set up Singing Grass Communications in 2013 with the aim of guiding our clients in their engagement with China through arts, culture and lifestyle. We provide in-depth market research and insight, advise on business strategy and local partnerships for content brands such as the LEGO Group and international publishers such as Hachette Children's Group to maximise their potential in China. We also support international PR for important trade fairs such as Beijing International Book Fair and Shanghai International Children's Book Fair. (https://www.singinggrass.com)

Curiouser and curiouser – Nicky Harman tells the marvellous story of 'Alice in Wonderland' and its Chinese translator

 

What do cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast have in common? They’re all comfort foods that Alice thinks of when she’s in Wonderland. I was very curious to find out how the first, and possibly greatest, translator of Alice into Chinese rendered them.

You may have noticed a common theme running through my blogs. I have mentioned Alice before, in connection with a student exercise inback-translation, and in my September 2022 blog, I wrote about the translation of Chinese food into English. What inspired me to write this particular post, apart from my fascination with the Alice books and their language games, was reading, ‘How Jane Austen’s early Chinese translators were stumped by the oddities of 19th-century British cuisine’, a fascinating essay by Saihong Li and William Hope. Early-twentieth century Chinese translators had to deal with mince pies, brawn and Stilton cheese, and Li and Hope observe that, ‘The world was not as globalised as it is now and information not so accessible.’ I would add that the dictionaries the translators had access to were (as they still are), only as good as the people who compiled them, and some were quite bad. The translators of Jane Austen were definitely at sea when it came to mince pies. ‘Although early mince pies contained meat, they became sweeter and more fruit-based in the 18th century as sugar imports increased,’ Li and Hope note. However, Chinese translators (mis)-translated mince pies in different ways, including as steak, steamed buns, and meat pies. Oh dear me.

Saliva Chicken and Ants Climbing Trees: Nicky Harman on Translating Chinese Food names

It is all-too-easy to ridicule the translations of Chinese dishes that you see in restaurants. There’s an entire blog post from BoredPanda devoted to it, in which a dish called ‘Germany Sexual Harassment’ is one of the less rude howlers.

Most of these horrors can be attributed to restaurants (mis-)using machine translation to create their menus. (Well, at least they tried! How many London restaurants translate their menus for foreign visitors?) But seriously…. Finding translations for food is a huge challenge, whether it is for a cookbook or a novel. By definition, there are rarely exact equivalents to specialist and local dishes anywhere in the world. And it matters. The doyenne of Chinese cookbooks, Fuchsia Dunlop, writes: ‘Learning another cuisine is like learning a language. In the beginning, you know nothing about its most basic rules of grammar. You experience it as a flood of words, or dishes, without system or structure.’ She doesn’t underestimate the difficulties: ‘Think, for a moment, of the words we use to describe some of the textures most adored by Chinese gourmets: gristly, slithery, slimy, squelchy, crunchy, gloopy. For Westerners they evoke disturbing thoughts of bodily emissions, used handkerchiefs, abattoirs, squashed amphibians, wet feet in wellington boots, or the flinching shock of fingering a slug when you are picking lettuce.’ (Dunlop, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A sweet-sour memoir of eating in China, 2008:135)

I have never translated a whole book about food, but in Jia Pingwa’s novels, local Xi’an snacks abound. There are hundreds of them. In The SojournTeashop (Sinoist Books, 2022, forthcoming), translated by myself and Liu Jun, there are a dozen different types of noodles ( 面, mian ) alone. It clearly would not do the author or the dishes justice to translate them all simply as noodles. We had to think of ways of giving the reader an impression of each snack which managed to be vivid but did not get in the way of the story by being over-detailed. We can assume that most readers will have tasted few, if any, of these specialities – a lot of them were unfamiliar to me – but we regretfully dismissed the idea adding pictures, or links to them because this is after all, a novel not a cookbook. Here is a sample paragraph, the result of much discussion between Jun and me, from The Sojourn Teashop:

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Prosper Street is the place for snacks. It is lined with stalls and eateries, selling mutton paomo, wonton, soup-filled tangbao buns, hand-pulled noodles – flat chemian and thick latiaozi –  steamed dumplings and pot-stickers, whole hulu chickens, minced beef steamed with rice meal or wheat, sweet barley wine, rabbit heads, maocai hotpot, stinky tofu, mung bean cake, sweet rice wine, and hot and numbing mala soup. This Xijing street is one long dining table, where vendors of snacks and specialities from across China jostle for space. There are always throngs of customers and businesses flourish. Over time, changes have taken place: where once the eateries made their own steamed liangpi noodles and shaobing flatbread, nowadays these are made offsite and delivered on three-wheelers. 

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In getting this passage into English, we chose to mix our methods. For example, we have translated: steamed dumplings; transliterated with no added explanation: hulu chicken; transliterated with a gloss: hot and numbing mala soup; and substituted a word the reader would be familiar with: wonton (actually from the Cantonese). 

My co-translator Liu Jun makes an important point about food in her Translator’s Foreword for the novel: ‘[The Sojourn Teashop] … is like a mini-encyclopaedia of Chinese history, culture and society. One can catch glimpses of local snacks, learn to appreciate tea, and see how business deals are closed over dinner or mahjong.'   

So, food is an integral part of a community's culture. And as with so much translating of cultural concepts, a lot of head-scratching and debate was involved. Liu Jun goes on: ‘Learning the ingredients, recipe, history and how locals eat a snack helped us find the best solution. [For instance]…a pasta called mashi (麻什), brought to China by Muslim merchants from the Middle East many centuries ago. In Turkic language, it’s called “tutmaq”. The book also describes how this pasta is made. So I used an Italian term “conchiglie”, as it’s shaped like a sea shell. But Nicky decided that rather than confusing readers with Turkic and Italian words, it’d be better to stay with the Chinese pronunciation mashi, and describe it as “cat’s ear”, its nickname in China.’ 

I should add that I would have been quite happy to use the term tutmaq if it had been widely accepted in English, in the way that ‘wonton’ is, but it isn’t yet. And conchiglie is problematic because tutmaq/mashi is not exactly the same animal, even though it is a similar shape. 

It would be a mistake to think that only translators from Chinese have these problems. Although many words for foreign food have become common currency in the UK and other English-speaking countries (think pasta, tapas and brioche) there is still plenty to tax the translator from other languages. I recently approached Josephine Murray, a translator from French, currently completing her MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia (tweets as @MsJHMurray) and was delighted to get the following response:

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‘I think that readers of translated literature are increasingly accepting of words left in the original language, particularly in this globalised age when TV, film, the internet and globalisation means people are regularly exposed to foods from other countries. If an editor is concerned that leaving words untranslated could negatively impact the reading experience, a workaround is to include a glossary of those words which have been left untranslated. I think footnotes do impede the flow of reading fiction, but I think they’re fine in non-fiction. Another option is to use a one or two word translation after the source text word on first mention, and to use the original language term on subsequent mentions and rely on the reader remembering what it means. Japanese to English translator Anthony Chambers does this in the Tanizaki story ‘The Children’. On first mention of ‘oden’ he adds the English word ‘stew’ after it to suggest to the reader what kind of a dish ‘oden’ is. On subsequent mentions he leaves oden in italics. He told me this was so readers who want more information can look it up. For me this is one of the key reasons for retaining a source text word in a translation; it enables the reader to research online to find out what the food consists of, looks like and its connotations in the source culture. I translated a short story of which food was a key part for the University of East Anglia MA in Literary Translation Anthology. It’s called The Three Christmas Eve Masses, ‘Les Trois Messes Basses’, a short story from Contes du Lundi by Alphonse Daudet, published in 1873. This involved researching different types of game birds, and also finding out what a medieval roasting spit sounds like!’  [personal email]

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Finally, I couldn’t possibly sign off without telling you what Saliva Chicken and Ants Climbing Trees actually are. 

According to Chinese Food Wiki, Saliva Chicken is so called because ‘a lot of prickly ash [Sichuan pepper] is added [to the braised chicken], and you will feel numb of mouth and water flows out unconsciously after eating it.’ In other words, it’s mouth-watering.

As for Ants Climbing Trees, it’s basically vermicelli served mixed with minced pork, the grains of which allegedly resemble ants climbing trees.

Bon appetit!

 

Being upbeat about being downbeat: Nicky Harman reviews "I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokpokki"

I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokpokki, by Baek Sehee, translated from Korean by Anton Hur. (Bloomsbury, 2022)

 

Baek Sehee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house but feels persistently anxious and self-doubting, and is also highly judgemental of others. She hides her feelings well at work and with friends, and has learnt to be adept at performing calmly and easily, as her lifestyle demands. But the effort is exhausting, keeps her from forming deep relationships, and threatens to overwhelm her. She is aware that this is not normal, and seeks help. During a series of therapy sessions, a psychiatrist diagnoses Baek Sehee with dysthymia – a sort of chronic, low-grade depression. The book consists of a record of their discussions, apparently verbatim, and includes her inner thoughts on how she wants to love and accept herself better. Each session is summed up in a chapter heading: 1. Slightly Depressed 2. Am I a Pathological Liar? 3. I’m Under Constant Surveillance 4. My Desire to Become Special Isn’t Special at All 5. That Goddamn Self-esteem… and so on.

In Praise of Readers' Reviews: The Story of the Stone on Goodreads

 Nicky Harman peruses Goodreads for reviews of a classic Chinese novel.

As a translator, I’ve always been fascinated by how readers react to their first foray into translated Chinese fiction. The Leeds Centre for Contemporary Writing runs an excellent section with readers’ reviews of contemporary novels; but what about the classics? I have a personal favourite (I’m currently half-way through my second reading), The Story of the Stone, also known as A Dream of Red Mansions, or The Red Chamber Dream, an epic family saga written and set in eighteenth-century Beijing. By way of an experiment, I decided to trawl through the Goodreads review sections. 

Translating literature – not such a lonely business after all

 Nicky Harman writes: Literary translation, like writing, is traditionally a one-woman or one-man job. At most, two people might work together to translate a book. Large-scale collaborative translation projects are a thing of the past, the far distant past when the Bible and the Buddhist scriptures were translated. But literary translators are resourceful folk and have begun to get together in mutual support groups. Here, I interview Natascha Bruce and Jack Hargreaves, both of whom are active in such groups and agreed to tell me more about them.

 

Natascha Bruce translates fiction from Chinese. Her work includes Lonely Face by Yeng Pway Ngon, Bloodline by Patigül, Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong and, co-translated with Nicky Harman, A Classic Tragedy by Xu Xiaobin. Forthcoming translations include Mystery Train by Can Xue and Owlish by Dorothy Tse, for which she was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim grant. She recently moved to Amsterdam.

 

Jack Hargreaves is a translator from East Yorkshire, now based in Leeds. His literary work has appeared on Asymptote Journal, Words Without Borders, LitHub, adda and LA Review of Books China Channel. Published and forthcoming full-length works include Winter Pasture by Li Juan and Seeing by Chai Jing, both of them co-translations with Yan Yan, published by Astra House. Jack translated Shen Dacheng’s short story ‘Novelist in the Attic’ for Comma Press’ The Book of Shanghai and was ALTA’s 2021 Emerging Translator Mentee for Literature from Singapore. He volunteers as a member of the Paper Republic management team and releases a monthly newsletter about Chinese-language literature in translation.

Can a machine translate a novel? Nicky Harman wonders.

 Rather to my surprise, I found myself at a discussion of this very question at the Literary Translation Centre, in last week's London Book Fair 2022.

This is not my first brush with computer-aided-translation (CAT) tools. Back in the day (2000-2010, so quite a few days back!) I used to teach a CAT tools module on the Translation and Technology (Scientific, Technical and Medical) MSc, at Imperial College London.

First, let’s define some terms: CAT tools do many different things. Translation Memory (TM) apps create a database of segments (sentences or phrases) from the work of previous human translators and offer them up when the human translator comes across identical or similar phrases in a subsequent translation. TM apps are regularly used by companies producing instructions manuals and their translators. Imagine, for example, someone translating an instruction manual for a washing machine where most of the text for different models is repeated, but the spec differs. Note the human agency.

There’s Machine Translation (MT), something we scarcely touched on back then because the results were laughable even between European languages. But things have changed. Roy Youdale, of Bristol University, UK, who was one of the speakers at this talk, writes in a recent article ‘Can Artificial Intelligence Help Literary Translators?’ that ‘A game-changer …. has been the incorporation of machine translation (MT) into CAT tools.’ He goes on: ‘MT basically uses a computer to search and compare the words in a source text with very large databases (billions of words) of texts already translated into the target language. In addition to the translation of individual words, the computer searches for corresponding sequences of words or ‘strings’, a process known as ‘string matching’.’ Anyone who has used DeepL or Google Translate to get the gist of an online article written in a language they can’t read, will know that the results are often quite clear and well-worded.

Everything you always wanted to know about Chinese literature in translation, by Nicky Harman

Full disclosure: I’m devoting my blog this month to a personal project, The Paper Republic Guide To Contemporary Chinese Literature.

Translations from Chinese – from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and beyond – have proliferated in recent years. With so much choice now available, we at Paper Republic decided to put our heads together and produce a guide for enthusiastic and adventurous readers, to be published on 1st March, 2022.
 

Paper Republic, as many of you will know, was founded in Beijing in 2007, and is now a UK-registered charity (aka non-profit), with a mission of increasing the quantity, quality, and visibility of Chinese literature in English translation. Formed around a core team of volunteers, of whom I am one, it draws on the expertise of many of the leading literary translators working in the field. Its website provides free-to-read translations of the best of new Chinese stories and poetry, as well as a database of Chinese literature and its translation. 

‘Shen Yang does not legally exist.’ Nicky Harman reflects on a memoir by a victim of China’s One-Child Policy, and its unexpected impact on readers.

More Than One Child: Memoirs of an Illegal Daughter (Balestier, 2021) is Shen Yang’s story of growing up as an ‘excess-birth’ or ‘illegal’ child. She was born as a second daughter during the years of China’s one-child-per family policy (1980s to 2015). Although the policy was strictly enforced, a traditional preference for boys meant that families determined to produce a son and heir, often tried for more than one pregnancy. Baby girls were often aborted, abandoned, or adopted overseas. However, numerous second, third, and even fourth daughters survived, and grew up to suffer the consequences of their illegal status. 

 Shen Yang does not legally exist. Her official ID is still the fake document obtained so that she could attend school, by the aunt and uncle who fostered her. 

There is very little literature documenting the experiences of ‘illegals’ like Shen Yang. As a result, those who can read English (Shen Yang’s book has not yet been published in Chinese) are surprised, and often shaken, to find themselves and their lives reflected in her book. Shen Yang told me yesterday how the audience reacted at the launch of More Than One Child at the Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai. 

13-11-2021, Shen Yang launches her memoir at the Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai.

She writes: ‘The audience was hooked by my speech from the beginning to the very end, and some even cried. One girl in the front cried twice, which distracted me a bit and I almost forgot my lines. She was also an excess-birth child who had been adopted away from her family. I managed to give her a huge hug after the event. It was very moving. Then later another girl approached me, and told me she was also adopted. She makes documentaries now, and she wants to make a documentary with me about excess-birth children.’

Translating together, part 2.

 Nicky Harman continues the story of a co-translation project: Jia Pingwa's new novel, The Sojourn Teashop

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In my September blog, I wrote about co-translating a novel by a contemporary author, Jia Pingwa, in tandem with Jun Liu, a New Zealand-based translator who knows Jia’s work well. Since my last blog, we have been revising our translation and debating some knotty stylistic problems – and talking about the process at the Gwyl Haf Borderless Book Club, held to celebrate International Translation Day this year.

 

Jia Pingwa (1952- ) stands with Mo Yan and Yu Hua as one of the biggest names in contemporary Chinese literature. A prolific producer of novels, short stories and essays, he has a huge readership on the Chinese mainland, as well as in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Jia Pingwa's fiction focuses on the lives of common people, particularly in his home province of Shaanxi, and has hitherto been largely based in the countryside (Shaanxi Opera, forthcoming, and Broken Wings, 2019) or in the lives of workers from the countryside who have moved to the big city (Happy Dreams, 2017).

Jia’s most recent novel, The Sojourn Teashop (Sinoist, 2022) is very different: it is about a dozen women in Xijing (Jia’s fictionalised version of Xi’an, his home city) and their struggles to run their businesses, battle with bureaucracy and corruption, and find personal happiness.

In our collaboration, Jun did the first draft, I did the second draft, she commented, I commented on her comments, and we are now at the stage of going over the whole translation separately, and picking up any further problems, infelicities, or (perish the thought) mistakes.

More than one cook improves the broth. Nicky Harman gives a shout-out for literary team translation.

There are famous historical precedents for translators working as a team. This is especially true in religious texts. One of the greatest projects of all time, the translations of the Buddhist sutras from Sanskrit into Chinese, was carried by teams of translators working in a government department. The British Library not only has a collection of sutras in Chinese, their website also has an interesting article about the translators and the translations.

In more recent times, the Bible (notably the St James’ version) and bible commentaries have been translated by committees. So what are the challenges? I found this useful comment from one of the translators of Hermeneutics in Romans: Paul's Approach to Reading the Bible by Timo Laato. ‘Translating as a team is a difficult process. I find it to be a deeply personal endeavor and every translator I know attacks projects and translation problems differently. [On] taking over [my predecessors’] work…[t]he first thing I had to do was read the original and their translation in tandem, to see what their word and style choices had been for translation. A translation is going to suffer more than continuity if a second translator decides to use a slightly different word than the one originally used. Often a translator can choose from up to five or six words all with different shades of meaning to use for almost every word on a page.’

Down the rabbit hole – Nicky Harman takes a look at Bristol Translates Online Summer School

I have taught many summer schools in translation, and I have run translation workshops online. But I have never, until last week, taught an entire summer school online. It was of course, Covid which dictated it. Last year’s school was cancelled but this year, it happened, all credit to some brilliant and determined organizers.

The students certainly had faith that it was going to work. There were groups for eleven languages, and several had so many applicants that they divided into two, or even three, groups. There were twenty-four people translating from Chinese into English, so we had two groups.

I am a firm believer that literary translation is a skill you learn by working on it. And did we work! There was a buzz of collective creativity from beginning to end. We discussed the minutiae of language in painstaking detail, from the meaning of the individual words we were translating, to the overall style and how to recreate it, to the ethics of translation and the translator’s responsibility both to the author and to the reader.

We missed the socializing, the face-to-face meetings, during and after workshop sessions. But there was an upside to running the course online: our participants translating from Chinese came from all over the world and several different time zones, from the Americas, to the UK and various European countries, and China and Hong Kong. It is likely that not all of them would have been able to attend had the summer school been run in the traditional way, in Bristol.

One of the joys of translation workshops is that the tutor learns too. We worked, amongst other pieces, on an excerpt from Happy Dreams, where a migrant worker hangs onto his green builder’s safety helmet despite the ribald jokes about his wife cuckolding him (戴绿帽子, putting the green hat on him) in his absence, and one student pointed to the man’s grinding poverty – he had no other possessions to hang onto, something I had not thought of. And there were many other illuminating insights. As one would expect from a diverse and highly-motivated group, some of whom, with great determination, not to say heroism, were getting up at the crack of dawn or staying up until the small hours, to attend it.

Anyway, after three days of intensive hard work, the last session of the last day is traditionally a time to do something a little light-hearted. So I picked a short piece in Chinese translated from a classic English novel, made a very feeble attempt to disguise what the original book was, and asked them to translate it back into English. It was Alice in Wonderland,

and in case you have not read it recently (and there’s an exhibition on at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London which should encourage anyone to go back to the book), it is full of the most wonderfully liberating and mind-bending language. Not an easy task to translate into any language, especially the nonsense rhymes.

The Chinese version I asked them to back-translate from is itself a classic. It is the work of Zhao Yuanren (also known as Yuen Ren Chao, 1892-1982) a Chinese-American linguist, scholar, poet and composer.

As Minjie Chen writes in her Earliest Chinese Editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at Princeton, “In the preface he wrote for the first Chinese edition of Alice, Chao acknowledged the challenge of translating the book. As he rightly observed, Alice was neither new nor obscure by the time he decided to give it a try–the book had been out for more than fifty years and entertained multiple generations of children in English-speaking countries. The reason why no Chinese version existed, he figured, was the formidable challenge posed by word play and nonsense in Carroll’s writing (Chao 10). In fact, the only “Chinese version” that Chao was aware of was done, albeit verbally, by Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston (1874-1938), tutor to Puyi (溥仪), the last Emperor of China. The Scot had told the story of Alice in Chinese to the lonely teenage boy in the Forbidden City. Chao decided that his translation project with Alice, carried out in the midst of Chinese language reform movement, would be an opportune experimentation with written vernacular Chinese ….. In Chao’s trailblazing Chinese translation, we witness how Alice encompasses both general challenges and unique Carrollian tests for a foreign language and how the translator meets them head-on through a creative and imaginative employment of the Chinese language.”

So… not a task for the faint-hearted then. But back to my students. They worked on a  nonsense rhyme from the jury scene in chapter 12 of Alice in Wonderland. We played around with updating the White Rabbit, giving him a mobile phone instead of a pocket watch, but I present here, with their permission, a snippet from the end of this beguiling poem. The White Rabbit is reading….

她还没有发疯前，

你们总是讨人嫌，

碍着他同她同它，

弄得我们没奈何。
　　
 她同他们顶要好，

别给她们知道了。

你我本是知己人，

守这秘密不让跑。

In pinyin, that reads,

Tā hái méiyǒu fāfēng qián,/nǐmen zǒng shì tǎo rén xián,/àizhe tā tóng tā tóng tā,/nòng dé wǒmen mònàihé./Tā tóng tāmen dǐng yàohǎo,/bié gěi tāmen zhīdàoliao./Nǐ wǒ běn shì zhījǐ rén,/shǒu zhè mìmì bù ràng pǎo.

I did not indicate any kind of rhyming scheme to the students. I gave them no guidance at all. They just had to do their best with the Chinese verses in front of them. This is how they translated it back into English,

Back before she went insane
You were always such a pain
To him, to her, to everyone
Pray tell, what could we have done?

She and the guys get on so well,
As for the ladies, hush, don't tell!
Good friends we'll be for all our days,
If this secret between us stays.

After they had finished, I showed them the English. Carroll wrote,

My notion was that you had been
(Before she had this fit)
An obstacle that came between
Him, ourselves, and it.
 
Don't let him know she liked them best,
For this must ever be
A secret, kept from all the rest,
Between yourself and me.'

 Lewis Carroll and Zhao Yuanren would have been proud of the Bristol Translates students. I was.