ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Today I attended a very interesting symposium on translation.  The event was primarily intended for translators and there seemed to be university academics as well, but I was welcomed as a blogger who’s interested in translation, not just reading in translation, but also in translation issues.  And there are more of these than might at first meet the eye…

There were presentations from Chi Vu, Nicholas José and Linda Jaivin, and it was introduced by Brian Nelson.  Chi Vu is the author of the novella Anguli Ma;  Nicholas José is the editor of the PEN Macquarie Anthology of Australian Literature, and also an award-winning novelist and author of many books including Paper Nautilus;  and Brian Nelson is the translator of the Zola novels I’ve read most recently, The Ladies Paradise and The Fortune of the Rougons.  Linda Jaivin writes erotic fiction but she was a presenter at this event in her capacity as a translator of Chinese film and author of the forthcoming Quarterly Essay ‘Found in Translation’.

The focus of the symposium was on:

• creative practice, and how translation is a collaborative form of creative art
• diasporic practice i.e. translation from/by communities in diasporas
• translation and film

Nicholas José talked about how new forms of publishing are often collaborative.  He reminded us that books in the 18th century were by subscription, and in the face of new challenges confronting the publishing industry, there are now experiments with this form of subscription publishing (e.g. crowd funding). These ventures hope to capitalise on and support a new interest in world literature, partly driven by the more cosmopolitan nature of modern cities, partly by globalisation, and sometimes deriving from universities.

As an example of collaborative publishing, José gave the example of a Spanish language novel, Down the Rabbit-Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos, who is also a translator himself.  The novel is published by And Other Stories,  a publishing house born out of frustration with the limited opportunities for translated titles to reach the public.  The novel is about a Mexican boy whose father is a drug lord, and because of that the boy Tochtli leads a very circumscribed life.  The author uses a sophisticated mix of Spanish and the indigenous Mexican language to scrutinise the adequacy of languages for expressing thought.  The boy has a very advanced vocabulary for his age,  and the names of the characters are all animals in the indigenous Mexican language e.g. the father’s name means ‘rattlesnake’.   José noted that the absurdist disorientating experiences of the novel are suggested to English-speaking readers by its title, an allusion to Alice in Wonderland, which is also an absurdist work.  This type of helpful cultural approximation is an example of a translator drawing on a different culture in collaboration with the author.

Publishing ventures deriving from a university context include the Dalkey Archive and in Australia, Giramondo.  These are small independents supporting translating and creative writing.    Although José thinks that translation can’t be equated with creative writing – even when it’s self-translation – because there are complex constraints, but he does see the product as a literary creation because the author and translator together  create a new text.

Translation is enabling, and it has a history of prestige in intellectual circles.  For example, in the early 20th century, Chinese intellectuals welcomed translations as a way of being introduced to other ideas and even today Chinese intellectuals welcome the work of such authors as J M Coetzee and his ways of thinking about the right of animals, a philosophy which is very different and striking for Chinese readers.  And for us in the English-speaking world, many of our contemporary ideas are derived from translations, such as ideas from French theoretical enquiry e.g. Derrida’s deconstructionism and post-modernist theory.  Sometimes, José said, translators are critics of the ideas they translate and sometimes the notes and introduction mediate and supplant the original. which is a further form of translations as enablers.

He also talked about poetry, about the forms used in different cultures, an example of which is haiku, but also the sonnet which was originally not an English form.  He says it’s also interesting to see how forms that have evolved in an English context are adapted when they cross over into different cultures.

Someone asked the question: what about the difference between translation which follows the original in a very transparent way even to the point of occasionally being clunky, compared to modern translations more attuned towards the reader.  Constance Garnett’s 1904 translation of War and Peace, for example, uses language closer to the style of writing in Tolstoy’s era, whereas the Pevear-Volokhonsky (2007) is more modern.  It is said that Tolstoy didn’t have a great ‘style’ so his writing adapts well in translation, whereas Flaubert is more literary in style and therefore harder to translate because the translator has to search for approximations.

One of my reasons for wanting to read translations is to learn about other cultures, but I think what you might learn about a culture depends on who’s choosing to publish it.  For example, IMO the prize-winning Korean Please Look After Mom, was chosen for translation into English because that kind of sentimentality sells well in the certain English-speaking markets, whereas the  much more interesting Dalkey Archive Korean books reviewed by Totally Dublin are for a different audience.  José says that this is gate-keeping which occurs with any kind of literature, but I think it’s more so in translations because of the limited number of people who can read the original for the sifting process.

It was lovely to meet Chi Vu and  have a chat before proceedings got under way.  She is the author of Anguli Ma,  a book which I found fascinating (though I now realise that at the time of my reading, there were many complexities which I failed to grasp).  Chitalked about process of writing her novella, and it soon became apparent that it is a very sophisticated creation indeed.  The story derives from a Buddhist folk tale in which a serial killer meets the Buddha and is reformed. The original story wasn’t very long, so there was a lot of room for invention, and she was drawn to the tale because of its theme of redemption.  She was also keen to set her story in the Vietnamese community – it concerns her that Australia’s artistic output doesn’t reflect the diversity of Australian life, but she also didn’t want to write something claiming to be  ‘representative of the whole community’.

What was so interesting about her talk was the way she negotiated between her two languages, and the final form of the novella.  Chi’s first language is Vietnamese, but her dominant language is English.  She can read Vietnamese but not write it.  She remembers the moment when she first thought in English instead of in Vietnamese, a foreign thought in her head, coming from inside her! She said it was liking growing a third arm! She also talked about the concept of a 1.5 generation, that is, coming between the first and second generation, born overseas but growing up here.  1.5 generation writers are in a strange cultural landscape, usually thought to be somewhere between both cultures, but often actually only on the margins of both.  (Chi was quoting someone else here, but I didn’t catch who it was).

Who translates who, Chi said, is crucial.   Historically, there were always unequal power relations between cultures, supported by translation as a one-way relationship.  What she meant by this was that it was colonisers who chose that the ‘foreign’ language would be translated into the language of the dominant partner.  Her insistence that while translation began as a form of communication, but was never neutral and never equal, derives, I think, from her origins in a country colonised by the French.  Someone was translating, someone was being translated, which makes the original the object of the exercise, not the subject.  It involves power relations.  IMO this is not something that would concern most monolingual Australian authors, who would regard translation into English as the norm, and simply practical.  But Chi’s thoughts about this suddenly triggered memories of reading Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book which remixes the Waanyi language into the narrative.  There is no glossary, and why should there be?  Wright is simply expressing her ideas in a language spoken on this continent for 40,000 years or more.  It’s up to us to pay respect to that and make sense of it.

There were many problems for Chi to solve when creating this Anguli Ma: she found that writing it as realism just wouldn’t work.  It couldn’t convey the ‘how’ of the 1.5 experience, and it was also clumsy for providing the content.  She ended up choosing the English genre of ‘gothic’ to portray a spectrum of characters because the genre enabled her to incorporate extremes of moral transgressions, double moral consciousness, and dreams and visions.  She said that she wanted to resist being colonised by the English language, and so she deliberately used some Vietnamese language forms even though it disrupted the flow of the language a bit, and she also used Vietnamese in an impressionistic way as well.  So now her title Anguli Ma is more than a subject from a Buddhist folk tale, it’s a symbol of transformation as well.

Linda Jaivin, whose subject was film subtitles, began by talking about the ‘Bergman Effect’.  The Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman gave the world the impression that Swedes are ‘verbally challenged’ despite the fact that he made many ‘jolly comedies’ for the domestic Swedish market.  But he knew that these comic films wouldn’t translate well and that verbose subtitles would ruin a film – and he wanted to make a name for himself on the international stage.  So the ‘Bergman Effect’ came to mean films that have intentionally less dialogue so that they will ‘work’ in an international context which is dependant on sub-titling.  Jaivin, however, deals with what she called the ‘anti-Bergman effect’ because she translates Chinese film, and Chinese is a very verbal culture.  It’s very literary and very layered,  so that jokes, for instance, can have references to something Mao said that drew on the work of an ancient poet, which in turn drew on an even older culture.  This kind of cultural coding is a great challenge to anyone trying to translate it because, for example,  a four- syllable saying meaning ‘a man who loses his horse’ really is an allusion to a very old, very long story about the ups and downs of life.   She gave another example of a current acronym which references old Mao slogans in an ironic way – impossible to translate so succinctly.

Jaivin told many funny anecdotes about the naming of films and characters.  Sometimes it’s appropriate to name a character with a literal translation, and sometimes it’s not.  For example, Mr Money can be appropriate, but an old peasant name like ‘Two Necks’ isn’t because it would be a distraction to English viewers who would be wondering why he was called that.  (Conversely in English, if you tried to translate Linda literally it would mean ‘snaky’ whereas it doesn’t have that connotation in English).   On the other hand, some names are coded for social backgrounds and historical moments e.g. a name like ‘Great Leap’ means the person was born during the Great Leap Forward.  But sometimes a translator just can’t convey such complexity in the short space of time that a subtitle flashes across a screen, and film makers just have to accept compromises.

Movies: we watch them, we listen to them, and with foreign films, we have to read them.  And that takes time.   If someone is speaking slowly subtitles can be longer, but they are mostly only on screen for a second or two, so some content has to be omitted.  But Jaivin gives viewers credit for being able to deal with this and to ‘read’ other aspects of the film to make sense of it. Of course, sometimes, with more sophisticated films, there are conflicts between what’s on screen and what’s being said, and that’s deliberate.  But it can look ‘wrong’ when the subtitles don’t match the action and although a native speaker understands why the action is different to the dialogue, a person reading the subtitles thinks the translator has got it wrong.

Linda says that there is resistance to foreign films, and often trailers obscure their foreignness by not showing any dialogue. This amused me, and I shall watch out for it next time I’m at the Palace….

I don’t watch much film, and very little of that is Chinese films, but this was a very entertaining talk, and I shall look out for Jaivin’s Quarterly Essay on this topic.

Many thanks to Elaine Lewis from AALITRA for facilitating my attendance at this interesting event.   It was very refreshing to be in a room full of bilinguals, people who don’t think there’s anything odd about reading, writing and thinking in another language!  I hope I haven’t misrepresented anything that was said, and will cheerfully correct any errors that I’ve made.

27/12/13 An apology

Revisiting this post when writing my review of Found in Translation, in Praise of a Plural World (Quarterly Essay no 52) I realised that I had spelt Linda Jaivin’s name incorrectly throughout it.  I have now corrected my mistake, and offer my sincere apologies to Linda.