Tag Archive for literature

And don’t mind if I address you using the informal you

Jacques Prévert

(This is not a theoretically informed ramble; just a few thoughts on doing translation from the trenches) Despite my last post bemoaning the Peiwen yunfu (which I have a slightly better handle on now – but it’s still awfully scary for a dictionary!), I am enjoying my first formal foray back into translation in a very, very long time.  My education in Chinese at the ICLP took a really different shape than my previous studies of French, Latin, and ancient Greek (Latin & Greek particularly).  In the latter two cases, we spent most of our time translating – if not putting pen to paper, at least verbally going from Latin or Greek to English.  In contrast, at the ICLP, we functioned entirely in Chinese – even in our classical Chinese courses, our “translations” of Warring States classics and poetry were from wenyanwen to modern, spoken Chinese (baihua).  Yes, it was definitely translation of a sort, but going from one language I didn’t have a great grasp on to another language I still didn’t have a great grasp on was quite a different exercise from rendering Horace, say, into my mother tongue.

Even as a historian working with Chinese documents, I rarely sit down and translate a whole document.  I read it in Chinese, mark it up, take notes, pull out a few quotes while I’m putting a paper together and translate those select bits and pieces.  We get warned against falling into the “translation trap”: expending a lot of energy translating things we’ll never wind up using.  So, while I’ve sat down and translated whole things here and there (short poems, slightly longer lyric poems, and so forth), I never had the sort of education on translating that I got in other languages.  Digging into Meng Chengshun, then, is a crash course in translating a whole text from Chinese into English.

Still, I like translation a lot.  I’m still learning the ropes of it in Chinese – and I have a great many things to learn – but it can be quite soothing.  I like figuring out how words and phrases fit together, and how best to render them into English.  I have always been more talented at poetry than prose – I shocked more than one Latin teacher (actually, every Latin teacher or professor I ever had) with my total incompetence with finer points of grammar, while still being able to flit through all kinds of different poems with relative ease (the grammatical incompetence came back to bite me in the ass when we hit more difficult prose; Suetonius felled me).  I always took a pretty hippy-dippy stance on it: poetry generally requires opening your mind and letting yourself slip into it and tease out the complexities, it can’t be manhandled with grammar and logic.  Silly?  Maybe, but I still think that’s the case.

Li Bai by Liang Kai 梁楷 (Song dynasty)

Taking anything from one language and putting it into another can be difficult.  Chinese is a very difficult language to begin with (at least, in a lot of respects), and a very self-referential one, which makes translating that much more difficult.  Especially when one is just learning your way around the whole business of translating.  My translation – about 3/4 of the way done – has as many footnotes as many of my papers do.  “Do I say ‘Bo Juyi’ [a famous poet] or ‘Jiangzhou’s Sima’ [his sobriquet in the text]?” – and that’s an easy one.  I’m translating for a specific, not-necessarily-specialist audience in mind; considering this translation’s hopeful future use, I can’t simply assume that everyone know who the “banished immortal” is (that would be Li Bai).

It seems that almost every poetic allusion has its own history that stretches back hundreds of years or even longer – is it my job as a translator to put a monster footnote every time one of these appears?  Or just for the particularly abstract?  Can we just let the poetic allusions stay as pretty phrases, if it’s not critical to understanding the play if you’re missing a reference to the Lunyu or the Shijing?  How important is it to be literal?  Is it better to be literal (explaining the allusions in footnotes), or capture the essence in a less literal way (also with footnotes, this time laying out the literal)?  Is it possible to convey any sense of the visual element of Chinese characters?  How do you explain – not in a footnote, but with your word selection – the various associations a single character can pull up?  One of my favorite characters in the Chinese language is xiao:

è•­

It has a whole host of mournful associations.  Going through a dictionary (this is one I always look up for an initial assessment of the usefulness of a Chinese-English dictionary) is likely to turn up all sorts of compounds, including the rustling of autumn leaves, the sound of wind in the trees, autumn this, sad that, dying, dying, desolate.  Also the whinnying of horses.  Which may sound like an odd fit, but it can be a terribly mournful sound in many respects.  In Li Bai’s famous “Sending off a friend” (one of my favorite Li Bai poems), he closes the poem – sends off his friend – with “萧萧班马鸣,”  the ponies cry xiao xiao.  How to translate that?  Whinnying doesn’t quite capture it, but xiao xiao means little if you don’t know what character it’s referring to …. I consider myself reasonably talented with English, but perhaps I’m missing some poet’s sensitivity (or perhaps, some of this stuff is just a tad too ephemeral to really nail down perfectly).

This pops up even in modern Romance languages, of course – one of my favorite examples is from the French poet Jacques Prévert and his famous poem “Barbara.”  Prévert is lovely in French, less so in English translation – because his language is so easy and free and, well, French.  It loses some of that in translation.  But the conundrum above (which I’m currently fighting with) was introduced to me clearly here:

Et ne m’en veux pas si je te tutoie
Je dis tu à tous ceux que j’aime
Même si je ne les ai vus qu’une seule fois
Je dis tu à tous ceux qui s’aiment
Même si je ne les connais pas

“And don’t mind if I address you using you.  I say you to everyone that I love, even if I’ve only seen them once.”  There’s really no way to render it well into English, at least not literally – tutoyer means to “address someone using tu,” or the informal (singular) version of “you.”  And he plays on the informal aspect – “I say you to all those who love, even if I don’t know them.”  In English, it just sounds strange.  But of course, translating it “Don’t mind if I address you familiarly” is not literal, although it conveys the meaning much more clearly than “I call you you.”

So I understand sometimes why people say that things “shouldn’t” be translated, or “can’t” be translated; it’s true that you miss a lot.  Vergil forever ruined English poetry for me (rather, poetic devices) when I read a particularly spectacular section in the Aeneid. As he talked about the waves in the sea in the middle of this tremendous storm, you could literally (assuming you scanned the line properly and attempted to read it correctly, word stress and meter stress and all) hear the waves, waves that went up … and down … and up … and down.  Just off the meter and how it interacted with the words.  It was magnificent – and totally impossible to translate that experience into English. It also made all the “wonderful poetic devices” English teachers in high school loved to fawn over totally yawn worthy in comparison.

But I also think it such a silly view point.  I never would have become a Chinese historian if I hadn’t fallen in love with classic Chinese works – both more modern and much older – in translation.  I fell in love with Roman lyric in translation first.  To say that you shouldn’t get to experience things unless you can appreciate them in their original tongue is shortsighted, to say the least.  I am very glad that I can read and enjoy Latin and modern Chinese and French literature, and sort of enjoy older Chinese literature (for the allusions themselves can – and do – fill books, so there’s always a little doubt in my mind to whether or not I really get the whole thing).  I am also glad I can read Tolstoy, the Man’yōshÅ«, Sei Shonagon, and Lady Hyegyong – even though I don’t know Russian, Japanese, or Korean, among a great many languages.

In any case, as I trundle through a translation – simultaneously fighting with the language and how to frame it for the specific audience it is geared to – I have an ever-greater appreciation for those intellectual giants who manage to make it look so easy.

“Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves”

Hu Zhifeng 胡芝風 as Li Huiniang

Despite far flung (some might say a bit schizophrenic, even) interests, academic and otherwise, that usually mean I have my hand in a couple of different areas at any given time, I’m prone to bouts of obsessing – particularly with media (music, games, books, bits of literature).  Of course, it’s cyclical – I can go months without finding myself obsessing over any one song, routinely go months without even looking at a videogame, and usually devour enough literature (both for pleasure and research) that my brain is a jumble of lots of information.

Still, there are lots of things that I find myself circling back to (or getting led back to inadvertently), fueling the obsession.  I joke that the defining character of my career is likely to be mèng å­Ÿ, since it keeps appearing over and over again.  My favorite ancient philosopher?  Mengzi (孟子).  The author of the play I’m currently translating?  Meng Chengshun (孟称舜).  The name of one of my favorite friends and fellow Asian studies scholar (and font of all good things, musically)?  Menghsin (孟莘).  The name of one current research focus?  Meng Chao (孟超).  While you could say that meng is a pretty common character (it is a last name, among other meanings, after all), there are plenty of common characters – so sometimes I can’t help but feel that there’s something with me and meng.  When I get worked into obsessive frenzies, I sometimes stop and think, “Maybe I’m supposed to be hung up on this at the moment.”  Who knows where it might lead?

I stumbled on to Meng Chao with the help of Ye Wa, our utterly wonderful and totally brilliant prof who helps us slog through the difficult bits of Chinese documents while we work on our yearly research projects (back in the halcyon days of coursework).  In the winter of 2009, I was on the hunt for a research topic and came back to one of my favorite Ming dramas (which has proved to be a bit of an obsession over the years, both textually and musically), The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting 牡丹亭).  I initially wanted to look at the status of the classic opera after the Cultural Revolution, but quickly discovered it really had been in need of a revival in the 1990s – it simply wasn’t being performed in the 1980s.  This meant very few sources – not a very promising basis for a research paper!

I went back to square one, sorted through a bunch of post-Cultural Revolution xiju nianjian 戏剧年鉴 (drama yearbooks) and entered every play performed by every kun opera troupe from 1979 to 1989 into a spreadsheet. Despairing over ever being able to look up the hundred plus plays I had now listed out, I asked Ye Wa to take a look at it.  She immediately noticed Li Huiniang‘s presence, and gave me the quick and dirty introduction (famous new edition ghost play from the early ’60s, the play and its author criticized during the early part of the Cultural Revolution, like Wu Han’s Hai Rui Dismissed From Office (Hai Rui baguan 海瑞罢官)).  Going home and checking JSTOR, I noticed that – unlike Wu Han or Tian Han’s stories – very few people even mentioned the play (or the author).  Topic: found!

Meng Chao (1902-1976)

At some point I found myself receptive to Ye Wa’s suggestion that it would be a fine dissertation topic.  I genuinely enjoyed researching the play and its author, I liked the idea of taking on a topic that let me indulge in my fondness for interdisciplinary work and return to my classicist roots (that is, playing with literature – and lots of it).  Besides, ghosts are a pretty sexy topic.  I’ve found myself at more that one gathering with non-Chinese historians, and people’s ears generally perk right up when I say I study Chinese ghosts (which isn’t the most precise way of putting it, but close enough).  Having a topic that doesn’t instantly put people to sleep is never a bad thing.

So that’s how I wound up based in Shanghai, researching ghost operas, kun opera, and their authors and artists – I rather doggedly held to my deep affection for China’s most famous ghost play, and with some help from Ye Wa, found my next ghostly obsession.  Doesn’t sound so obsessive, really, but I’ve found myself coming back again and again to Meng Chao.  Some of it is certainly due to my uncertainty upon being confronted with the whole range of Chinese libraries and archives – I know Meng Chao’s story backwards and forwards.  Using his story as a marker is one way to at least continue making progress when most of me is going “Where am I, how did I get here, what am I doing, and where do I go from here?”. Here’s where having an obsessive streak is probably a good thing: in running down every bit of information I can get my hands on regarding Meng Chao (not just because I need the stuff as sources for my dissertation, but because I must have it, just because), I’ve been running down of every bit of information I can get my hands on regarding his friends, associations he was involved in, things he worked on.  What this means is the number of primary and secondary sources that have only the barest connection to Meng Chao, and some with none at all (ranging from novels and poetry collections to edited volumes on the 1930s literary societies), are piling up daily.

Which leads me to my next obsession (which has been running about as long as I’ve been nurturing my historian’s affection for Meng Chao, and is intimately tied to how I approach this research project) – it’s not an obsession so much as an ever-present bit of literature that I’m reminded of on a near-daily basis.  At the same time I was digging into Meng Chao and Li Huiniang initially, I reacquainted myself with T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, particularly part one, “Burnt Norton,” which has the following lines:

What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                            But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
                    Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

I actually have the last two lines engraved on my iPod.  The poem brought to mind a whole host of associations – from Peony Pavilion‘s famous section, “Walking Through the Garden” (Youyuan 游园 – one of my very favorites), to a bunch of things I’ve read with my Japanese history professor relating to time, to Meng Chao.  I always read it and think of Ye Wa saying Meng Chao was a good starting point to get at a lot of other cultural figures in the early PRC – the other echoes inhabiting the garden, if you will.  And having fallen academically for a mostly neglected figure (most people, even in China, have never heard of him, though many have heard of the play he wrote), I frequently feel that I’m kicking up a lot of dust – and for what purpose, I’m not quite sure yet.

Meng Chao (r) with family (1976)

Obsessions are selfish.  At the moment, I’m selfishly building up my collection of Meng Chao-related materials – partially for the simple reason that I feel really bad for the guy.  A beautiful writer, someone who moved among more famous names and was an intellectual equal, but never hit “household name” status, and someone who (like a lot of others) suffered mightily during the Cultural Revolution – and who seems to have been mostly forgotten by just about everyone.  Why doesn’t anyone remember him?  Where is Meng Chao’s collected works volume?  It seems like practically everyone else in this country has one!  (I continue to nurture a secret hope, that someday, somehow, he’ll get his own wenji 文集)

So while going about my daily business of collecting materials and figuring out what, exactly, I’m collecting materials on, I try to keep in mind a few things: some of this is purely for selfish interest in a person I’ve written on (thus should not be the sole focus of my hunting, which I’ve done a good job of remembering).  Some of this is part of an obsessive collecting spree, but is, in fact, leading to other useful things that gradually spiral away from my little nucleus of a mostly unknown author.  And finally, some of this is the intellectual equivalent of opening doors that haven’t been opened in a long time (if ever), and doors all lead somewhere – if not always to the expected destination.

Other echoes do indeed inhabit the garden, and I intend to follow them – and I won’t mind disturbing a bit of dust along the way.