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.

Audition by Ryu Murakami Review - A Japanese Horror Love Story

Since it’s Halloween season I decided to review a Japanese horror novel. Audition by the writer Ryu Murakami, is a story about a man finding a perfect woman, only to discover he’s fallen for a mask.

 

Aphrodisiac Foods From Distant Lands: Tse Hao Guang on Jay Gao's 'Imperium'

Editor's note: Pardon the overlong hiatus in the poetry column – which can be attributed to my having been on reservist training for the latter half of September. We return this month with an incisive review of a keenly-anticipated new Carcanet collection, by the Singapore poet Tse Hao Guang (previously featured here). 

The Chinese love our imperial imagery. We feel good surrounded by gold, and dragons, and jade. The more expensive our restaurants are, the more they try to recreate the feeling of an emperor’s banquet hall or pleasure garden. This is to say that there are many different empires spanning time and space, that different peoples have different relationships to the ideas of empire, and, in fact, a total rejection of the imperial seems to be a distinctly contemporary tendency. Indeed, the word imperium has come to mean more than simply “absolute power”, and could also refer to legal authority, as well as power derived from wealth, political office, or religious influence.

Jay Gao’s debut, so-named, promises poetry that disturbs singular ways of looking at or dealing with power. Imperium’s references and touchstones range across time and space (from Angkor Wat to Odysseus to the Vietnam war), admirably managing to reckon with such an epic sweep of ideas through the lens of the lyric “I” (disguised, sometimes, as the lyric “you”), in a relatively slim volume of poems. The best of these escape the ponderousness of their ideas and flow through the touchstones and contexts, emerging as artifacts in their own right rather than commentaries.

Indie Spotlight: Cozy Mystery Author H.Y. Hanna on How She Chose Self-Publishing and Found Success

Indie Spotlight is a column by WWII historical fiction author Alexa Kang. The column regularly features hot new releases and noteworthy indie-published books, and popular authors who have found success in the new creative world of independent publishing.

Today, British cozy mystery author Hsin-Yi Hanna (pen name H.Y. Hanna) shares with us her thoughts on growing up with Asian parents who wanted her to choose a "practical career" while she dreamt of becoming a writer, and how she surmounted the pressure of family expectations, chose the route of self-publishing, found herself and found financial success to become a full-time USA Today Bestselling author. 

A prolific writer (with her cat Muesli as her assistant), Hanna’s works include the super popular The Oxford Tea Room Mysteries, The English Cottage Garden Mysteries, Bewitched by Chocolate Mysteries, Barefoot Sleuth Mysteries, and Paws by the Beach series. Her stories are a fun, delightful breath of fresh air, and her profitable sales enabled her to expand her reach to German and French readers with translated editions of her books, as well as the audiobooks market.

Now, over to Hsin-Yi . . .  

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!

 

Blog Closing for August

Asian Books Blog is closed for a summer break from today, Monday August 1,  until Monday September 19. Happy summer reading!!!!

'Possibility and Communion': An interview with Jonathan Chan

Editor's note: When I arrived at the launch of his debut collection going home a fortnight ago, the first thing that struck me about Jonathan Chan was his voice; thoughtful and even, but with a hint of the self-assuredness that characterises so much of his writing. In the days since, I've been fretting about whether you – the reader – will be able to "hear" his responses to my questions as I hear them, with the same gentle conviction. But reading the interview in full, I realise I needn't have worried: the responses speak for themselves.