Aug. 2nd, 2007 12:19 pm
Delayed gratification #2: Reading Chinese
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muckefuckIt's been over a week since I promised more kvetching about my attempts to read Chinese, and I'm finally getting around to delivering. For a while, I was concentrating on a pair of bilingual Lu Xun (魯迅) short story collections that I'd bought at a bookshop on Howard. But I began to worry about the pitfalls of depending on a single source, more so after reading this quote from William Hannas in Asia's orthographic dilemma:
My first foray into alternative authors was a story from 柔石 (Rou Shi) called《為奴隸的母親》[**], which my bilingual edition translates as "The Hired Wife"; a more literal rendering would be something like "The Mother Who Was Made a Slave". Unfortunately, this distortion is rather typical of the accompanying translation. In fact, when![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu asked to borrow the book, I frankly told him he'd be better off with my collections of Shen Congwen short stories. The next story in the book after Rou Shi's is, as it happens, Shen's "The Husband" (丈夫), but before I could start on it, I realised I had it in in Traditional in a bilingual edition of his work, so I'll read it later when I'm no longer cramming for China.
The primary failing of the Foreign Languages Press bilingual edition is that it tries to maintain parity between the Chinese and English text. There's nothing inherently wrong with this--the Chinese University Press Bilingual Series in Modern Chinese Literature edition of Shen that I have does it too. The difficulty is that, at comparable font sizes, Chinese is more compact that English, so discrepancies pile up quickly. The editors at the CUP handle this by inserting breaks in the Chinese text to keep parallel sections aligned. Those at the FLP, on the other hand, solve the problem by trimming the English translation.
Often, this takes the form of reducing colourtext. For instance, at one point in "Hired Wife", Rou tells us (in my clumsy translation[***]), "Spring snapped at winter's tail and summer's feet are always close at spring's back." The translation is "Once more it was summer." Thus, the gist is preserved, but at the cost of the writer's art. Elsewhere, heavily culture-bound explanations (a headache for even the most conscientious translator) are shortened and summarised for the foreign reader, such as a long paragraph on the process of naming a child that omits most of the original references to traditional naming customs.
But occasionally, this tactic undermines not only the pleasures of reading but also the sense of the piece. I was startled to discover at one point dialogue in Chinese which didn't appear--even in summary form--in the English, even more so when I realised the import of the missing passage. Some background: The old wife has been jealous of the "hired wife" since she first arrived at her doorstep and gradually grown less and less reticent about concealing this. Finally, the young woman gives birth. In the English we read simply, "The household was so excited that no one cared about supper." We hear no mention of the older wife's reaction until the next paragraph where she is describes as "now acting like a granny".
Has she finally come around? You could be excused for thinking so. However, reading the Chinese, you'd find, in place of that solitary line quoted above:
The positive side to the inadequacy of the translations, however, is that it's more encouragement for me to beaver away at the Chinese, lest I miss out on something valuable. I've since moved on to Yu Dafu's (郁達夫) "Intoxicating Spring Nights" (《春風深醉的晚上》). So far, I'm enjoying it a lot more than "Hired Wife" since it contains something that that dour (but undeniably effective) piece of social realism conspicuously lacked, namely wry humour.
[*] Of course, it's possible 便 biàn is a colloquial term in some dialects; however, this isn't true of Putonghua/Bejing vernacular, and that's all that matters in this context.
[**] Yes, those are Traditional characters. What can I say besides "Old habits die hard"?
[***] Original text on request.
[****] Literally "small cat head" (小貓頭). I'm not sure if this is a term of endearment or a deprecatory reference to the insult 貓頭鷹 "owl" applied by the scholar's wife to the hired wife in a previous paragraph.
The inability of Chinese writers to distinguish clearly between modern and premodern states of the language, which, I argue, is a product of the character writing system, was identified early on by such proponents of writing reform as Lu Xun (1881-1936) and Hu Shi (1891-1962). These same reformers seem to have been unaware how much their own writings were influenced by the stylistic patterns about which they complained. (pp. 128-9)I had already picked up on some literary features of Lu's writing, such as his consistent use of the adverb 便 biàn where the modern spoken standard would have 就 jiù[*] or his frequent preference for 彷彿 fǎngfú over more colloquial expressions like 好像 hǎoxiàng. But I'm sure there were many others I was missing but assimilating into my active vocabulary all the same.
My first foray into alternative authors was a story from 柔石 (Rou Shi) called《為奴隸的母親》[**], which my bilingual edition translates as "The Hired Wife"; a more literal rendering would be something like "The Mother Who Was Made a Slave". Unfortunately, this distortion is rather typical of the accompanying translation. In fact, when
monshu asked to borrow the book, I frankly told him he'd be better off with my collections of Shen Congwen short stories. The next story in the book after Rou Shi's is, as it happens, Shen's "The Husband" (丈夫), but before I could start on it, I realised I had it in in Traditional in a bilingual edition of his work, so I'll read it later when I'm no longer cramming for China.The primary failing of the Foreign Languages Press bilingual edition is that it tries to maintain parity between the Chinese and English text. There's nothing inherently wrong with this--the Chinese University Press Bilingual Series in Modern Chinese Literature edition of Shen that I have does it too. The difficulty is that, at comparable font sizes, Chinese is more compact that English, so discrepancies pile up quickly. The editors at the CUP handle this by inserting breaks in the Chinese text to keep parallel sections aligned. Those at the FLP, on the other hand, solve the problem by trimming the English translation.
Often, this takes the form of reducing colourtext. For instance, at one point in "Hired Wife", Rou tells us (in my clumsy translation[***]), "Spring snapped at winter's tail and summer's feet are always close at spring's back." The translation is "Once more it was summer." Thus, the gist is preserved, but at the cost of the writer's art. Elsewhere, heavily culture-bound explanations (a headache for even the most conscientious translator) are shortened and summarised for the foreign reader, such as a long paragraph on the process of naming a child that omits most of the original references to traditional naming customs.
But occasionally, this tactic undermines not only the pleasures of reading but also the sense of the piece. I was startled to discover at one point dialogue in Chinese which didn't appear--even in summary form--in the English, even more so when I realised the import of the missing passage. Some background: The old wife has been jealous of the "hired wife" since she first arrived at her doorstep and gradually grown less and less reticent about concealing this. Finally, the young woman gives birth. In the English we read simply, "The household was so excited that no one cared about supper." We hear no mention of the older wife's reaction until the next paragraph where she is describes as "now acting like a granny".
Has she finally come around? You could be excused for thinking so. However, reading the Chinese, you'd find, in place of that solitary line quoted above:
No one in the whole household was in the mood for supper; over an insipid repast, the scholar's wife told the servants, "For the time being, let's keep this hush-hush; to keep bad luck away from the owlet[****], if others inquire, say that she gave birth to a girl." They all nodded their heads, smiling.To me, at least, this implies that her attitude hasn't changed at all and she's pettily trying to deny the young woman the respect that would naturally accrue to her upon the birth of the male heir which she was unable to provide. Latter developments bear this out. Even if I'm wrong about the meaning of this section, I would still rather have it there to draw my own conclusions from.
The positive side to the inadequacy of the translations, however, is that it's more encouragement for me to beaver away at the Chinese, lest I miss out on something valuable. I've since moved on to Yu Dafu's (郁達夫) "Intoxicating Spring Nights" (《春風深醉的晚上》). So far, I'm enjoying it a lot more than "Hired Wife" since it contains something that that dour (but undeniably effective) piece of social realism conspicuously lacked, namely wry humour.
[*] Of course, it's possible 便 biàn is a colloquial term in some dialects; however, this isn't true of Putonghua/Bejing vernacular, and that's all that matters in this context.
[**] Yes, those are Traditional characters. What can I say besides "Old habits die hard"?
[***] Original text on request.
[****] Literally "small cat head" (小貓頭). I'm not sure if this is a term of endearment or a deprecatory reference to the insult 貓頭鷹 "owl" applied by the scholar's wife to the hired wife in a previous paragraph.