Click for the World Literature Today write-up of David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything.
Foreignizing Translations in the New York Times
If you are a “China Watcher”–and if you’re reading this blog, you might be–you’re no doubt familiar with the recent trial against Gu Kailai 谷开来, accused murderer and wife of deposed Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai 薄熙来.
I try to steer clear of politics on this blog, but at some point everything is potentially political, especially translation, which I noticed when reading the New York Times‘s coverage of Gu’s trial. As part of their focus, they highlighted a selection of quotations from her book Winning a Lawsuit in the U.S. 胜诉在美国, reveling in the irony of someone who had lambasted American due process in favor of China’s swift justice coming up against the swiftness of a trial lasting less than seven hours: “In a bitter twist of fate,” the NYT reports, “Ms. Gu, herself a lawyer, once expressed an unshakable faith in her nation’s legal system.”
The clincher on their list of quotations culled from her book reads, in the NYT translation,
China practices law in a different way than America; we don’t play with words. We have a principle called “based on the facts.” You will be arrested, sentenced and executed as long as we know you killed someone.
We don’t play with words, indeed. I’m in favor of a fair trial, and I’m not convinced that Gu Kailai received one in China (even Ai Weiwei 艾未未 doubts whether Gu and her husband can get a fair shake), but with translations like this, it’s evident that the New York Times isn’t letting her pick her own representation, either.
In short, the above quotation is not the only way to translate Gu’s statement–an obvious fact even without seeing her writing in Chinese. I agree that the sentiment is dubious at best, but with their specific choices in vocabulary and phrasing, they set Gu Kailai up as shrill, frightening, and unsophisticated. As they do in most of their reporting on China, the NYT comes short in representing the American principle of innocent until proven guilty. How different it would be if the passage read, “Chinese legal practices are different from those in America. We don’t play with words, but rather are fact-based: when we are certain you are guilty of murder, you will be apprehended, convicted, and executed.”
Some translations scholars such as Lawrence Venuti advocate foreignizing translations as the only ethical way to represent difference as difference. In this instance, however, I think we can see how foreignizing, awkward translations can reinforce prejudices and stand in the way of reaching our ideals about the principles of our judgment.
Brief Interview with Zheng Min
The poet Zheng Min 郑敏, the last surviving member of the Nine Leaves 九叶 poetry group, is featured in a brief WSJ interview. Here’s an excerpt:
How would you describe the foundation of your writing?
I started to study philosophy to have a better understanding of literature, because I don’t think you can really understand literature without a background of philosophy. I loved both of them. I think philosophy without literature is too hard. Literature without philosophy has no depth. So you have to combine both.
Also, I think I’m influenced by Rilke, because I had that philosophy background. So I’m tied to German poetry more than contemporary American poetry.
New Issue of Poetry Sky
Poetry Sky 诗天空 30 is here.
Finalists for 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award
The Asia Society has announced the finalists for its Bernard Schwartz Book Award. The only literary author shortlisted is Yu Hua 余华:
- Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land by Joel Brinkley (PublicAffairs)
- China in Ten Words by Yu Hua (Pantheon Books)
- Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra Vogel (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
- Water: Asia’s New Battleground by Brahma Chellaney (Georgetown University Press)
- Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia by Thant Myint-U (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
For more information, including the list of judges, click here.
New Chutzpah 天南
The new issue of Chutzpah 天南, a Chinese literature bimonthly edited by Ou Ning 欧宁, has launched, and with it the English supplement Peregrine, featuring translations by Nicky Harman, Anna Holmwood, Eleanor Goodman, and A E Clark.
Short Takes on Long Poems Website
The website of the Short Takes on Long Poems conference, which I attended at University of Auckland in March, is now live, featuring a video of our “world’s longest poem” and the presentations of Jacob Edmond, Susan Schultz, John Tranter, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, along with others. My presentation on Xi Chuan and Yang Lian 杨炼 is not up [yet], but if / when it appears, I’ll post to it here.
Susan Howe on Chris Marker
Forthcoming from the Poetry Pamphlets series by New Directions, American poet Susan Howe on Chris Marker, French filmmaker whose La Jetée was remade by Terry Gilliam as 12 Monkeys:
The French documentary filmmaker, photographer, and traveler, Chris Marker, was a poet first. Marker’s twenty eight minute ‘La Jetée’, written and photographed during the early 1960s, imagines a third world war. A man, marked by an image from his childhood, travels through some intertranslational fragmented mirror memory to the original line of fracture no translation will pacify. Many pilots, men and women, survived, though they didn’t survive, collective military service during World War II. ‘La Jetée’ (1962) and ‘Sans Soleil’ (1982) are haunted by indwelling flames of spirit. In the beginning of each Marker film jet planes escape the eye of the camera. One is overhead roaring murder. We see the other being concealed under the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. ‘La Jetée’ is called a ciné-roman; ‘Sans Soleil’ a documentary.
On Reviewing Translations
I’ve been thinking about book reviews of translated literature. This is a well-worn topic amongst translators–Words Without Borders has a nine-entry feature of translators discussing the matter, and I’ve been on a panel devoted to discussing the topic–but as I think about how I’d like my translations of Xi Chuan’s poetry in Notes on the Mosquito to be discussed, I notice some of my views changing a bit.
When I review translations I make a point to name the translators and discuss the quality of their work; when I review translations from a language I know, I make a point to compare the source and target texts, and when I don’t know the language in question I do what I can either to find someone who does know both languages or else to situate my comments within larger discussions of translation in general. I think this adheres to most of the points made in the WWB feature and adds some. And when I’m reviewing translations from Chinese literature, which for straightforward reasons is what accounts for most of my reviews, I do what I can do draw on my expertise in the subject and base my judgement on what I think will be useful of what I know of the source subject for the target reader. In other words, I want my review to help readers new to Chinese literature make sense of what they are reading.
That’s not all I want my reviews to do, of course: I also discuss questions of poetics and style in English, and how these not only relate to Chinese but how they interact with what’s available in English writing, as well. Yet as I think about the reviews I know are forthcoming of Notes on the Mosquito–which of course I’m very eager to see!–I notice that so far they are all by writers who know Chinese, who are themselves translators and / or scholars, and whom I expect will write reviews much like I do: they will contextualize Xi Chuan and his poetry within Chinese cultural history, and they will offer their expert judgments on my work as a translator.
I want more reviews of this kind, of course, not only for my work but for translated literature in general. But to some extent, the more reviews of this kind we have, the fewer other kinds of reviews we get: fewer reviews by readers who can judge translations more on the merits of what they do for the target reader than on how they represent the source culture. In addition, the more expert reviews we get, the higher we raise the bar for reviews of translation, which may end up meaning that translations receive even fewer reviews than they now have!
Recently, translation studies has tended to value the foreign, to claim that if translation is to be ethical it must consider the foreign as foreign rather than assimilate it into the dominant logic of mainstream American culture. To some degree this is true, but to some degree, treating the foreign as foreign buffers the foreign from making its inroads into mainstream American culture. These are not complete opposites, of course; when my friends at Montevidayo discuss foreignizing translations, they usually do so with an eye and ear to how foreignization performs within the context of American poetry, rather than in how it represents the source text as such. Nevertheless, the fewer non-expert reviews of translated literature we have, the less time we’re able to spend considering–or enacting–the influence of translation on contemporary literature in English. And imagine where literature in English would be if it had never been influenced by the foreign.
In some ways this relates to a discussion I brought up before on this blog, when I quoted Michele Hutchison on “world literature” and whether Ron Silliman can “get away with [work that is playful and incomprehensible] because he writes in English and refers to the dominant culture?” (speaking of Silliman, when he wrote about Gustaf Sobin’s translations of René Char and called Char an Objectivist, I remember people decrying his imposition of American poetic terms on non-American poetry; perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that Sobin’s translations present Char as an Objectivist, but I would like to see Silliman spend more time considering translation and translations, not less). I have had enough discussions with Chinese poets about contemporary American poetry, full of discussions of how it has influenced and impacted their work, to wonder when conversations with American poets would show the same awareness of Chinese poetry. If we do not allow translation to influence American literature, then we are insisting on the international dominance of American literature, not on the ethical representation of the foreign within English writing.
At any event, I look forward to reviews of Notes on the Mosquito that discuss Xi Chuan’s potential impact on American writing at least as much as I look forward to reviews that discuss the context of China today and how it has produced the poetry I have translated.
Yunte Huang’s SHI: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry
On his blog at Jacket2 Charles Bernstein has posted Yunte Huang’s 黃運特introduction to his 1997 book SHI: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry. Huang has since become one of the foremost figures in Chinese – American literary studies, translating Ezra Pound and Michael Palmer into Chinese, and writing the scholarly books Transpacific Imaginations and Transpacific Displacement, as well as the recent Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History. Here’s how Huang’s intro to SHI begins:
This book is not an attempt to grasp the “essence” of Chinese poetry, nor is it an endeavor to produce an over-polished version of English that claims aesthetic superiority over other works in the same field. It grapples rather with the nature of translation and poetry, and explores poetic issues from the perspective of translation and translation issues from the perspective of poetry. Looking from such a vantage point, translation is no longer able to hide itself in our blind spot; instead, the often-invisible face of translation is being brought to the foreground of poetic texture and the traces of translation’s needle work are being exposed to the reader’s view. With its agenda hidden, translation is too often a handyman for the metaphysical, mystical, or universal notion of poetry. When emerging from obscurity, translation becomes an ally with poetic material and enacts the wordness of the words. And this book strives to strengthen the alliance between translation and poetry through various textual and conceptual means that I will discuss now.