Category Archives: Ruminations

Fact-checking Translations

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A new book whose provocations seem to be helping it make the rounds is The Lifespan of a Fact, by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal (click here for a critical NYTimes review), where D’Agata argues that facts are often irrelevant in the pursuit of art, and that “nonfiction”

essentially means ‘not art,’ since the word fiction is derived from the Latin fictio, which itself means ‘to form, to shape, to arrange’ — a pretty fundamental activity in art.

I agree with NYTimes reviewer Jennifer McDonald about the bogusness of this argument–not only does it fall for the “etymological fallacy,” it’s also an ethnocentric claim that has no time for other cultures and their definitions of art from yesterday or today. According to Stephen Owen, for instance, while Euro / American poetry in the 19th and 20th centuries would be considered fictional, pre-modern Chinese poetry was taken as factually true.

Discussions about the nuances of such statements aside, the role of fact-checking in poetry and translation is a complex one (see here for another moment in which I ponder accountability to reality in Chinese poetry and translation). I noticed this recently when I posted Wang Ping’s translation of Xi Chuan’s “Books” 书籍. A couplet in her translation reads,

“All books are the same book,”
pale Mallarmé said with confidence.

But Xi Chuan’s Chinese lines read,

“所有的书是同一本书”
女性化的雪莱几乎这样说道

or what I would translate as “‘All books are one book,’ / an effiminate Shelley almost said.” Perhaps Xi Chuan changed his original between its first printing and the time Wang Ping translated it. Or perhaps Wang Ping found out that Shelley didn’t say this at all, that it was in fact Mallarmé (I’ve searched online to see if either one of them said it, but all my hits end up pointing me back here!). But this raises a question: when translating, is the translator accountable to reality, or to the original poem? If the fact-checker doesn’t have a role in editing the original poem, does he or she have a role in editing the translation? I’m afraid I don’t have the answer to these questions.

锁柱子喜欢管闲事

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My friend Eric Abrahamsen, founder of Paper Republic, has a new article on the International Herald Tribune blog about guǎn 管:

Originally meaning “pipe” or “flute” — the feathery bit at the top is the bamboo radical, indicating a section of bamboo culm — guǎn later evolved into a verb meaning “to manage” or “to be in charge of.” If I were given only one word to capture Chinese society, guǎn would be it.

It’s a fun and informative article, and reminded me of the line of Xi Chuan’s I translated, 我管不住我的心, which I translated as “I can’t control my heart.”

Ernesto Livon-Grosman on Jerome Rothenberg’s anthologies

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Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania, Second edition, Revised and ExpandedOver at his Jacket2-hosted blog, Charles Bernstein has posted Ernesto Livon-Grosman’s commentary on Jerome Rothenberg‘s anthologies, particularly Technicians of the Sacred. I’ve offered my criticisms of anthologies, particularly anthologies of contemporary Chinese poetry, but I wanted to post Livon-Grosman’s points about the place of translation in Rothenberg’s anthologies, as a way of pointing to what else might be possible with anthologies–and with translations–even when not dealing with broad samples selecting from many writers, but with single-author collections, such as for instance soemone like Xi Chuan:

For an anthology that recovers, makes visible, and associate texts that were never seen before together, Technicians is less concerned with the search for an origin or the construction of a genealogy than with a practice. It is the search for a “know how,” for the techné that is anticipated in the title, that would make possible to read multiple texts not only together but in conjunction by way of those hinges that Jerry created. It does so by reconnecting Dadaist and Maori poetry and bringing together for the first time poets such as Lorca and Klebnikov for whom translation is one more way of writing. In fact, translation is for this anthology the meeting point of theory and practice where the way we read the poems is also the way we write the anthology and by doing so it retrieves a use value without ever loosing its metaphysical value. This is crucial because it would be tempting to confuse collecting with accumulating but what prevents this from happening is precisely the techné that shows that the sacred is always material, that there is no separation. Translation is for this anthology what supports its view of poetry as synchronic coexistence that frees us in the reading of the poems, among other things, of national boundaries.

Paul Mason’s top 10 books about China

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Mine in north-west ChinaEnglish novelist and Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason has compiled a top-ten list of books on China he found helpful for his novel Rare Earth (here’s a review of the novel by scholar-translator Julia Lovell), comprising five works of fiction in translation (including Lu Xun 魯迅, Mo Yan 莫言, Gao Xingjian 高行健, Wang Xiaobo 王小波, and The Plum in the Golden Vase 金瓶梅–and he mentions the translators!) and five works of social science or historical or literary scholarship (including a work by friend and follower of this blog, Charles Laughlin).

It’s an interesting list. I’m glad to see literature in translation so well represented. As a novelist, it makes sense that Mason would be so drawn to fiction, but I wonder what it would take for works of Chinese poetry to make it onto such a list. Certainly I think Xi Chuan can be helpful for readers looking to know more about China, though of course the instruction does not travel in direct lines.

Ron Silliman & Chinese Poetry

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Still one of the best go-to spots on the internet for poetry-related news, Ron Silliman’s blog has posted a couple of Chinese-poetry related items in the last couple days. Yesterday on his list of “books received,” he featured–by which I mean of all the books he received, these were two of the three books whose cover images he posted–Red Pine‘s re-release of his Sung Po-jen 宋伯仁 translations (Copper Canyon Press) and a new book titled Chinoiserie by Karen Rigby. I don’t know if Ron’s torqued juxtaposition was intentional or just the product of happenstance simultaneity overdetermined by language (the other book with a pictured cover is Basil Bunting‘s collected translations from the Persian, so it’s hard to think the assertion of “orientalism” is an accident… but at any event, the relationship between title and content in Rigby’s book seems indirect–I haven’t read more than one sample piece, but it’s not about the nineteenth-century representation of Chinese aesthetics; I do note, however, that her bio states that she was born in Panama “to a Chinese mother and a Panamanian-American father”), but it did ring oddly against what Ron posted in his list of Coming Events, pictured above (we all make typos and other mistakes). As you probably know, the poet’s name is Bei Dao 北島, not “Bao Dei.” What you may not know is that this event with Gander, Wright, and Weinberger is at the Poet’s House event at the AWP in Chicago, not in New York.

The 85 Project

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A while back I published an excerpt from “The 85 Project,” linking medieval Chinese verse with Talmudic mysticism, on CipherJournal; a few years later, I ran into Robert Majzels and Claire Huot at a conference in New Orleans. I came across the fuller presentation of their works online, and I pass it on to readers of this blog interested in poetic takes on Chinese writing and its connections around the world:
The “85” project is a poetic multi-media investigation into the reception of the Chinese language and culture into English. The operation involves several transfers: from the original Chinese text into a literal character-for-word translation, then into 85 English letters, and into a visual poem. The visual poem is subsequently read aloud, and that reading is videotaped. Readers struggle to assemble words and phrases, creating if only for a moment the strange experience of speaking another culture. Concomitantly, the potential of reading English is unlocked by the permutation of letters. The reader of an 85 becomes a writer who manipulates language in its materiality.

Xi Chuan’s “Books”

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Looking at the tumblr posts in which Xi Chuan has been mentioned, I noticed an often-repeated, and re-tweeted, quote:

The lofty bookshelves sag
Under thousands of sleeping souls
Silence, hopeful—
Every time I open a book, a soul is awakened.

(It even shows up in Spanish, as well as German, above). It’s beautiful, and takes on a special weight in age of e-books–perhaps, ironically, why it has been spread so readily on the internet–and yet, interestingly, I could not place the quote. I knew it was not my translation (despite the fact that Goodreads thinks that it comes from my Tinfish chapbook Yours Truly & Other Poems), which means that Xi Chuan and I had not selected it for inclusion in Notes on the Mosquito, and I couln’t find it in Michael Day’s translations on the DACHS archive… so where did it come from, and how was it phrased in Xi Chuan’s Chinese?

 A bit more googling turned up the quote again as an epigraph to a chapter in Inkspell, by German  children’s author Cornelia Funke, which attributed the quote to “New Generation“–more than a hint that it might be from the Wang Ping-edited anthology, New Generation: Poems from China Today (Hanging Loose Press, 1999). And indeed, on pp. 145 – 146, in the poem “Books” 书籍, I found the source, as translated by Wang with Murat Nemet-Nejat.

And yet the quote as it’s been disseminated is not completely accurate–between lines two and three of the section another couplet is missing, which to my mind separate two moments of high lyricism and rescue the poem from overstated melodrama. At any rate, here is the poem in full as it appears in New Generation (click here for the poem in Chinese):

Books

Books should be illuminated by torches,
just as the Incas illuminated their city.

Torches shone on its
woven fabric, pears, gold and silver utensils–

objects that time uses to express itself
from opposition to unity, revealing the secret of fate,

like Hercules and Plato
attracted by the same spring bee.

“All books are the same book,”
pale Mallarmé said with confidence.

All mistakes are the same mistake,
like Ptolemy’s research into earth and stars,

his precise calculations
that only led him to absurd conclusions.

Books create a space larger than books.
The life of fire ends in its own flame.

Emperor Qin Shi haunted the library hallway
and Aldous Huxley,

robbed of the past by a fire,
clarified the rest of his life in a single lecture.

I see a rose
covered with dust; what else can death do?

The lofty bookshelves sag
under thousands of sleeping souls.

We live together,
hiding beneath the spirit’s torch.

Silence, hopeful–
every time I open a book, a soul is awakened.

A strange woman walks
in a city I’ve never seen.

A funeral is taking place
in a dusk I’ve never entered.

Othello’s anger, Hamlet’s conscience,
Truth spoken at will, muffled bells.

I read a family prophecy.
The pains I’ve seen are no more than the pains themselves.

History records only a few people’s deeds:
The rest is silence.

Cécile Lagesse’s review of Once on a Moonless Night

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200Modern Chinese Literature & Culture has just posted my friend Cécile Lagesse’s review of Dai Sijie’s 戴思杰 novel Once on a Moonless Night, as translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. The review presents a detailed look at Dai’s transnational story, in which “the Chinese language is associated with pain,” even as “one might feel that his novel’s historical references fit almost too well the pre-conceived expectations that his western-educated audience could have of China.” Nevertheless, between these poles, Cécile writes:

Aside from its use of historical reference, Once on a Moonless Night also pays tribute to the long tradition of translation that has played a crucial role in shaping Chinese culture. The novel is built around the search for a missing Buddhist sutra, but it is less the fact that the document is Buddhist that is essential to the understanding of the story and more that it represents a historical relic, the trace of an important moment in Chinese history when translation of Buddhist texts by missionaries was prevalent.

A well-written review, and I look forward to reading the novel in full.