It’s not often that I, as a
translator, get to do research on the place where a particular author’s novels
are set. In fact my recent visit, with Dylan King, to Shaanxi province to Jia
Pingwa to look at where his novels Shaanxi Opera (AmazonCrossing, forthcoming)
and Broken Wings (ACA, 2019) were set, was a first. We arrived with a list of
questions of the ‘What does that tool do?’ and ‘What kind of a gate entrance is
that?’ variety. We were primarily motivated by wanting to get the words right
in translation. But it led Dylan and me into discussing the wonderful
BBC/British Museum radio series, the History of the World in a Hundred Objects, and what
follows is (with apologies to Neal MacGregor) a small meditation on what a
particular tool can tell us about a place and how people live there.
The tool: a stone object in
two parts that grinds up grain and spices, and produces soybean milk from the
raw beans. There are two variations: 碾盘nian3pan2,
also known as碌碡liu4zhou, consisting of a
base stone and a cylindrical roller; and 石磨shi2mo4 or 磨盘 mo4pan2, made up of磨扇mo4shan1，two circular stones, one atop the other, the bedstone
(下扇) which stays still，and the upper stone (上扇) which moves around. In both versions, the top
part is pushed around by a human or a beast. At least that’s what used to
happen.
