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.

 

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)

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.

Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, an introduction to his Filipino poetry in translation

 

Kristine Ong Muslim recently translated Hollow (original title, Guwang), a collection of some of Arguelles's early poems written in Filipino. Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles’s works and interests encompass books, conceptual writing, translation, film and video, installation, found objects, and text-based experimentation and the poems in Hollow range from ekphrasis to Philippine history. One sample poem, "Deep Well" can be read in Asymptote [https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/mesandel-virtusio-arguelles-deep-well/] and another, "Curse", in Circumference Magazine [http://circumferencemag.org/?p=3073]

Here, in a guest post for the Translation blog, she offers the Introduction to Hollow, written by Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III and translated by herself.

‘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.’

Making the effortful seem effortless: Nicky Harman interviews this year’s winner of the Bai Meigui Translation Prize 2021, Francesca Jordan

It has always struck me that the sign of a good translation is that it should read as if doing it was easy. Of course, I know that is an illusion. All the same, I was impressed not only by Francesca's beautiful prose but also by her description of the sheer hard graft and hard thinking that went into it.

A bit of background: the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing, an inspirational resource for working and would-be translators alike, has run the Bai Meigui Translation Prize annually since 2015, offering texts which range from fiction for adults and young readers, picture books, and poetry and non-fiction. This year’s winner was Francesca Jordan, and the piece, by Yang Shuangzi, is from a novella, The Season When Flowers Bloom, about a girl growing up in Japanese Taiwan.

NH: Can you tell me a bit about how you got into translation from Chinese?

FJ: I studied Chinese at SOAS and moved to Beijing about a year after graduation. While at uni I had developed an interest in Chinese contemporary art, which was just starting to really catch the world’s attention at that time. Once in Beijing it wasn't long before I found a job at Chinese-art.com, a website that aimed to be a window into the Chinese art world for English speakers. So I honed my translation skills on a lot of art criticism, curators’ essays, and artists writing about their own work. Plenty of art-specific vocab to get familiar with of course, but the socially engaged nature of contemporary art meant that these texts were a great way to delve into all kinds of topics – the changing city, the loss of history and tradition to modernity, the new possibilities brought by technology, the disorienting shift in visual culture from political propaganda to consumer advertising, cultural trends and taboos and so on. Contemporary artists don’t shy away from exploring the difficulties of changing roles and relationships, whether we’re talking about painting and photography, state and individual, or rural and urban China.

For a translator then, it’s a pretty interesting field to specialise in, the main challenges being writers who are overly dry and academic, and those who write ‘art bollocks’. The latter put you in the same quandary as those poor interpreters and translators who had to tackle Donald Trump’s speeches, that quandary being: do I, or do I not, translate twaddle as twaddle? Will the audience realise the original is gibberish, or will they assume it’s a poor translation? Fortunately there were relatively few purveyors of art bollocks (back then at least) in the Chinese art scene, compared to their western counterparts.

NH: Before you translated the competition piece, did you know anything about Japanese Taiwan? Did anything surprise you?

FJ: I had only a basic knowledge of Taiwan’s period under Japanese rule before starting this translation so it was a great opportunity to learn some more of that history – I possibly spent as much time reading the interesting articles that turned up during research as I did translating. I was aware of the cultural and linguistic Japanization of Taiwan imposed under colonial rule, and the Japanese names in the extract were the first clue that the story was set during that period; then of course later in the extract dates are given and Hatsuko’s parents’ emigration from Japan to ‘this island’ (as Taiwan is generally referred to in the novella, while Japan is ‘the mainland’) is explained. The novella is peppered with Japanese loanwords, some quite specific to this cultural and historical context, effectively conveying the effect of Japanization on Taiwan’s language. With standard Chinese-English dictionaries drawing a blank on these unfamiliar terms, I often turned to a Japanese dictionary instead. So I felt it was important for the translation to reflect as much as possible the Japanese language environment the characters inhabited, in the personal names and styles of address and especially place names (Tanabe Bookstore, Nishiki-chō etc.) as these are all real places that existed in 1930s Taichung.

I guess the novella is basically a coming-of-age story, full of hope and loss and disillusionment as those often are. Hatsuko longs for a life less ordinary, regarding university, work, independence and travel as vastly more attractive than marriage. Her sense of social inferiority (though she is attending an elite high school, her family are not well off) prevents her from believing that such things are achievable for herself, so she displaces that longing onto her wealthier and more glamorous classmates, pinning her hopes on them escaping the traditional restrictions placed on women’s lives by family and society. Discovering that the two classmates she admires most (one of whom, Yang Hsueh-ni, is ambitious and confident with strong feminist ideas) have an intimate but secret friendship, Hatsuko begins to obsessively snoop on their meetings in the library – and self-disgust at her furtive behaviour compounding her feelings of inferiority. Too shy to ever talk to her classmates in person, Hatsuko feels a deep sense of loss after graduation, one that makes her physically ill, knowing she may never see the two ‘brilliant friends’ again or know how their lives turn out. When she suddenly discovers that even Yang Hsueh-ni, the most ambitious girl in their school, is prevented from following her aspirations by family circumstances, Hatsuko’s sense of loss turns to painful despair.

Introverted Hatsuko has no special friend to confide in – the extract describes her longing for the unaffordable magazine ‘Girl’s Companion’, but we can infer, from the way she buries herself in the novels of Yoshiya Nobuko, that what Hatsuko really longs for is the kind of intimate, affectionate friendship she witnesses her classmates sharing. Yoshiya Nobuko was one of the earliest writers of yuri (baihe in Mandarin) – ‘lily’ or ‘girls’ love’ – fiction, the genre that Yang Shuang-zi also considers herself to be working in. This novella though, is more of a tribute to Yang Ch’ien-ho, made clear by the author borrowing the title (and premise) of Yang’s 1942 novel The Season When Flowers Bloom. Yang Ch’ien-ho, like the character Yang Hsueh-Ni, was a native Taiwanese born under Japanese rule, and a fascinating figure who broke through social barriers of both sex and (colonial) class, becoming Taiwan’s first female journalist at the age of 19, and even demanding to be paid the same as her Japanese colleagues. 

NH: Your translation reads effortlessly. Was it effortless? What were the challenges in translating it?

FJ: The translation of character’s names provided some of the trickiest challenges. First there were some simpler decisions to be made such as whether to write Japanese names family name first, or in the Anglicised format with family name last. Reading on in the text, the character Sakiko mentions that because her full name is Matsugasaki Sakiko she was nicknamed ‘Saki-Saki’, the sense of which would be lost if her name was given family name last. So, preserving the Japanese/Chinese order was the obvious choice and luckily would have been my preference anyway. Further on in the text again, the author herself indicates (by including romanized Japanese in the text) that the Chinese form of address tóngxué (classmate or fellow student) is being used as a stand-in for the Japanese honorific suffix –san, so that’s another decision effectively made for the translator. As for the Chinese personal names and other proper nouns, these I gave in Wade-Giles rather than pinyin romanization because pinyin, not developed until the 1950s, would have felt anachronistic, not to mention geographically inappropriate as pinyin still isn’t used much in Taiwan.  

The trickier parts had to do with the meanings of names. In two instances the most accurate translations would read awkwardly or seem nonsensical to English reader. Firstly the sentence “Her given name, Hsueh-Ni, meaning ‘snowy earth’, was an allusion to a classical Chinese poem – a very elegant and poetic name.” The more literal translation of Hsueh-Ni is ‘slush’ or ‘snowy mud’, neither of which sounds remotely elegant or poetic, particularly with the connotations of that English idiom about somebody’s ‘name being mud’. The poem referred to, one that describes the ephemerality and arbitrariness of both human lives and the traces they leave, is Su Dongpo aka Su Shi’s He Ziyou mianchi huaijiu so for inspiration I turned to this excellent article that compiles a host of English translations.  . Eventually I settled on ‘snowy earth’ as being close enough to the text but conjuring a more pristine image, one of new-fallen snow lying lightly on the dark earth (before they combine into muddy slush). 

Secondly there was a sentence that could have been translated as ‘their only son was named Ryuichi after his father’, but as we know the father’s name is Takao this sounds wrong in English, as we expect people ‘named after’ someone to have basically the same name. The problem here is that Japanese kanji can have different pronunciations in different combinations. In the Japanese/Chinese text it is clear that the names Takao 隆夫 and Ryuichi 隆一 share a particular kanji, so I ended up translating in a way that just described that: ‘The name of their only son, Ryuichi, shared a kanji meaning ‘prosperity’ with his father’s.’ For that paragraph it felt necessary to give the four children’s names in romanized Japanese (as would be conventional in English) and also translate the name meanings, which would be opaque to English readers otherwise. Knowing the meanings of the names gives the reader important information about the Yamaguchi family’s culture and values; in this case that they tend to choose the most obvious and unimaginative names for their offspring (certainly in Hatsuko’s view!). This was probably the paragraph I fiddled around with longest as it was quite challenging to slot in the extra info (I slipped a little ‘1920’ in there too, so that readers didn’t have to take a break to google which year ‘ninth year of the Taishō Emperor’ corresponds to) without weighing down the text too much or making it read choppily.

Of course the translation wasn’t effortless – if only! – but it’s gratifying to be told that all the struggling and polishing and ‘hmm, maybe if I do it this way…? Nah, it was better the way it was’ is invisible in the finished product. Every literary piece poses unique challenges: as well as aiming for accuracy, there are voices that the translator must do her best to recreate and sustain – the voice of the author, and the voices the author creates for her characters. There was only a tiny bit of dialogue (or interior monologue) in the extract, still I made a point of reminding myself that teenagers in 1930s Taiwan wouldn’t talk like 2020s British teenagers, or 1980s American teenagers etc. Overall, I tried to be as historically accurate as I felt the author would want me to be – and I know from reading around that Yang Shuang-zi and her sister spent a lot of time researching 1930s Taichung in preparation for writing this novella – and to capture the youthful melancholy of the piece, the fight between romance and realism that pervades it.

Julia Lovell's new translation of Monkey King: Journey to the West is a tour de force

 

STOP PRESS: FOR PAPER REPUBLIC'S EXCLUSIVE PODCAST WITH JULIA LOVELL TALKING ABOUT HER TRANSLATION, CLICK HERE

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Monkey King: Nicky Harman on a new translation of an old favourite.

Of all the posts I’ve written for Asian Books Blog, this one has to have been the most fun to write. Working out why a translation that’s really funny is funny… what’s not to like? To be truthful, I would have found it hard to write a more conventional review of Journey to the West. I have never read the original and although I acquired the three-volume translation by WJF Jenner many years ago, my second volume is suspiciously clean and I clearly never opened the third at all. But in any case, translator Julia Lovell, in her introduction, has done a much better job than I could ever do, in explaining where this epic novel came from, and how, over the centuries, it has been many things to many people.

Journey to the West was written (allegedly) by Wu Cheng’en in the sixteenth century and its hero, the sometimes eponymous Monkey, has enjoyed enduring popularity ever since. In addition to the stories in the Journey to the West, Monkey and his friends have featured in spin-off stories, cartoons, cartoon films, ballets, shadow plays, video games and much more, as you can see in the illustration above. 

Tripitaka, a pious Chinese monk, sets off to India in search of precious Buddhist sutras, in the company of bodyguards Monkey, Sandy and Pigsy. A brief extract from Lovell’s introduction gives a flavour of what is in store:

In the course of their travels, they encounter murderous Buddhists, perfidious Taoists, expanses of rotten persimmons, and monsters of all shapes and sizes (femmes fatales, rhinoceroses, iguanas, scorpions). They are serially captured, tied up, lacquered, sautéed, steamed, and impregnated, and come very close to being diced, boiled, liquidized, pickled, cured, and seduced by various fiends. Eventually, after eighty-one such calamities, the pilgrims reach Thunderclap Monastery, the stronghold of the Buddha in India, and are rewarded with armfuls of sutras and posts in the Buddha’s government of immortals.

Phew! It doesn't seem much of a reward for all their travails.

Julia Lovell’s new translation is about a quarter of the length of the original, including all the chapters that bookend it, and selected chapters in between. ‘The novel zings with physical and verbal humor,’ she writes, and the translation certainly does. Reading it made me wonder which of the comedic effects can be matched to the original text, and which arise from the translator’s creative use of English. Here is what Lovell says about the translation process:

Literary translators have two responsibilities: to the original text and to readers of the target language. Whichever languages translators work between, satisfying both constituencies can be difficult, but when working between two literary cultures as remote chronologically and geographically as sixteenth-century China and the twenty-first-century Anglophone world, the challenges are redoubtable. Sometimes, a translator has to sacrifice technical, linguistic fidelity to be true to the overall tone of a text.

 There is an abundance of humour in the original. Journey to the West is a fantasy novel, but the monsters and demons live in a recognisably bureaucratic society: Buddha has a government, sinecures are offered to Monkey, the demon king has ministers and flunkeys. In this exchange from the beginning of the novel, Monkey’s future is being decided (or so his divine superiors fondly imagine):

‘Majesty,’ the Spirit of Longevity from Venus ventured, ‘given that this monkey is a child of heaven and earth, of the sun and the moon, that he walks on two feet and has attained immortality, I propose that we treat him as we would a human. I humbly suggest you offer him an amnesty, summon him to Heaven and give him a government job. Once he’s inside the system he’ll have to behave. If he accepts, we can bamboozle him with sinecures; if he refuses, we can apprehend him. In any case, such a strategy will save us a military campaign and bring an unruly immortal to heel.’

 (It has to be said that Lovell has reduced this paragraph with an unapologetic panache that Monkey would have applauded. 105 words, as against Jenner’s 160 words for the same paragraph. But, hey, ‘bamboozle him with sinecures’ says it all! Here is the Chinese, for anyone who wants to have a go at it.

太白长庚星俯伏启奏道：’上圣三界中，凡有九窍 者，皆可修仙。奈此猴乃天地育成之体，日月孕就之身，他也顶天履地，服露餐霞； 今既修成仙道，有降龙伏虎之能，与人何以异哉?臣启陛下，可念生化之慈恩，降 一道招安圣旨，把他宣来上界，授他一个大小官职，与他籍名在箓，拘束此间；若 受天命，后再升赏；若违天命，就此擒拿。一则不动众劳师，二则收仙有道也。’ )

 And more divine bureaucracy: ‘Monkey told them what had happened in his dream and how he had persuaded the kings of the underworld to cross all their names off the ledger of death, at which news his subjects kowtowed with ecstatic gratitude. And from that point on, most mountain monkeys never got old, for the Underworld no longer had their names and addresses. … 

Precisely what is in the Chinese (自此，山猴多有不老者，以阴司无名故也), just with ‘and addresses’ added.

 Journey to the West uses a judicious mixture of register (and bathos), both in the original and in the translation. Here is Monkey being (unusually for him) respectful and formal – and the Patriarch cutting to the chase:

‘Monkey was overcome with regret. ‘I have been away from home for twenty years. Though I yearn to see my former subjects again, I hate to leave you before I have repaid your kindness to me.’ ‘Forget it,’ said the Patriarch. ‘Just don’t drag me into any of your messes.’ 

Which happens to be exactly what the original says: ‘ 祖师道：’…你只是不惹祸不牵带我就罢了！’

 On the other hand, quite a lot of the comedy in Lovell’s translation exploits the comic potential of English, rather than that of the Chinese. Monkey muses and fulminates. Tripitaka needles and wheedles, when he’s not blubbing in terror. The monkeys shriek and chatter. There are delicious dashes of alliteration. In chapter 15, Monkey calls the horse-eating dragon a ‘Lawless loach!’ Alliteration does not work in the same way in Chinese, so this is the translator’s voice, but entirely in the spirit of the original.

 I was particularly taken with the anachronisms[1]. They are superlatively funny. I was hard-put to choose from so many examples but here is a sample:

 ‘Lucky Monkey!’ The crowd of disciples giggled. ‘If you master this, you can get a job as an express courier. You’ll always be able to make a living.’ (This is actually only a small departure from the original, which has the job as an army or government messenger).

‘Once Monkey had explained his latest marvel, the crowd of monkeys spent the rest of the day playing with their new toys.’

‘Heaven runs a cashless economy.’ And so on…

Sometimes, the Dragon and Monkey sound like Jeeves and Wooster -- not entirely contemporary but instantly recognisable:

‘Now that I’ve adopted this magic staff, I feel rather under-dressed. If you could rustle up some armor to go with it, I’d be much obliged.’

‘I’m most dreadfully sorry, but I don’t have anything suitable.’

‘I don’t want to be a bother to someone else. I’ll sit it out here till you come up with the goods.’

‘I suggest you try another ocean. You might have more luck there.’

Elsewhere, the dialogue is bang up-to-date: 

‘Are you forgetting who rescued you from that stone casket beneath the Mountain of Two Frontiers? You owe me, Monkey! Get me something to eat before this pestilential mountain finishes me off.’

And here are Monkey and Pigsy as the sparring duo:

Witnessing this at a distance, Tripitaka was speechless with horror. ‘Oh, well-played, Monkey!’ chortled Pigsy. ‘Three murders and it’s not even lunchtime.’

Julia Lovell’s translation is a delight and a tour de force. I hope that in taking a translator’s tweezers to it, I have managed to convey some of my admiration for its creativity and joie de vivre.

 If you want to read around the subject, here are some more links to entertain you:

Minjie Chen in Monkey Craze! examines iterations of Monkey in the modern period.

A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi, by Sean Bye looks at the art of changing connotations and registers in translation

And on the journey by the real Xuanzang/Tripitaka, Chasing The Monk's Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang, by Mishi Saran, reviewed on Asian Books Blog here

 

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[1] A useful definition: words and phrases that are felt as anachronisms are those that are more strikingly modern than the other …. language around them.