by Madeleine Campbell. This article was originally posted here on the Translation Studies @ Glasgow blog and is being reprinted with permission. — Our guest writer Madeleine Campbell attended a ‘literary duel’ between two translators of a poem by Chiew-Siah Tei. Starting with the titles, the English renditions of the Chinese work were dissected line by line to reveal challenges […]
March 16, 2015by Madeleine Campbell. This article was originally posted here on the Translation Studies @ Glasgow blog and is being reprinted with permission.
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Our guest writer Madeleine Campbell attended a ‘literary duel’ between two translators of a poem by Chiew-Siah Tei. Starting with the titles, the English renditions of the Chinese work were dissected line by line to reveal challenges arising from translating poetry between this language pair, raising theological and linguistic questions along the way.
Malaysian-born novelist and poet Chiew-Siah Tei participated in the 2014 Dundee Literary Festival (22-26 October) in two different capacities. Firstly, she was invited to discuss her second novel, The Mouse Deer Kingdom, with Scottish PEN’s Rosemary Burnett. Chiew, who writes in English and Chinese, also volunteered one of her poems for the Translation Slam, in which the poem’s two translators, Esther Tyldesley and Yueshi Gu, were to ‘pit their linguistic wits against one another’. Chaired by Rosemary, the Slam started with Chiew-Siah Tei’s account of her writer’s residency in Sicily, a month-long experience she shared with other writers and artists in Palazzolo Acreide. At first she found that she was being stared at. Surmising that the local population didn’t often see people from East Asia, she reflected that, although invaded often, Sicily had never been invaded by people from the Far East. Chiew came to Scotland ten years ago and since then has been writing in English. As she walked the rocks and hills around Palazzolo Acreide, however, a poem came to her in Chinese rather than English. The slam, facilitated by Rosemary, proceeded line-by-line through the ‘rival’ translations of this poem.
From the two versions of the poem’s title it was already apparent that Yueshi’s translation style was more literal than Esther’s. Yueshi’s intention was to be as faithful to the source as possible, while aiming for every line to read as verse. Her title read: ‘I Heaved the Weight of Five Thousand Years to Meet You’. Esther explained that she wanted her version of the title, ‘A Meeting Delayed by Five Thousand Years’, to be short and also that she didn’t want to repeat it in the first line, which in the source text is identical to the title of the poem. When asked for her opinion as author, Chiew remarked that it was difficult to comment: as an English speaker herself, her own translation wouldn’t be a translation but rather a rewrite—but in this instance she would probably have left out Yueshi’s ‘to meet you’. For the first line of the poem Yueshi kept the same text, as did Chiew in Chinese, while Esther’s version read: ‘With the burden of five thousand years I came here to you […]’. Chiew noted that ‘five thousand years’ represent the weight of Chinese history, and hence in this sense the word ‘burden’ is superfluous.
Discussion of the third line held the promise of an interesting theological digression, with Yueshi translating : ‘The gods were resting also, on this Sunday afternoon’, while Esther, observing that God rests on Sundays in Catholic countries, offered: ‘God too was resting on that Sunday afternoon’. However, Yueshi’s alternative was based on dual considerations, neither of which strayed into deep esoteric territory: from the grammatical point of view, the Chinese language doesn’t distinguish between singular and plural forms, even for ‘God’, therefore she was able to interpret quite freely. Further, in the context of the poem, which several lines later recounts how the UNESCO World Heritage Site to which the poem referred was conquered by ‘soldiers of ancient Greece, of Rome, of Arabia, of Normandy and Spain’, the plural form seemed appropriate. Although Chiew confirmed that she was in fact invoking a Christian God, Rosemary reiterated that in matters of translation, it is a decision-making process where there is no right or wrong answer. Esther, who teaches Chinese at Edinburgh University, concurred and acknowledged how full of ambiguity some of this ancient language can be. She also noted that in Chinese, tenses act as way-markers rather than serving a central semantic function, which leaves plenty of scope, for example, between active and passive forms.
The Q&A revealed the translators’ background and approach to poetry to be quite different, and this was reflected in their differing versions of the text. Yueshi, a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese who provides Chinese language services (www.silkword.co.uk), studied interpreting at Heriot-Watt University and has written poetry in both Chinese and English. Esther, who has a BA in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MA in Applied Translation Studies (Chinese) from Leeds, doesn’t write poetry but translates novels and biographies. Esther observed that every word, every line is a decision, and you can balance unattainable nuances in one line with more accurate equivalence elsewhere in the text. Yueshi flagged up the importance of taking the target audience into account. One question from the audience related to whether the translator should be cited in publications, drawing a parallel with the art world, where print makers, who were not acknowledged in the past, now increasingly tend to be named contributors to the published product. Chiew stressed that she had great respect for translators and noted the encouraging example of a recent literary festival in Penang, Malaysia, where a special session for translators took place, and was likely to become a regular feature. Rosemary thanked the participants for an enlightening session, both for their versions of Chiew’s lovely poem and for an insight into the process, which highlighted a range of features of specific interest when translating from the Chinese language.
Rounding up, Rosemary announced that PEN Scotland was committed to promoting translation and to holding more such events in the future. This was a fascinating session for readers and writers, translation practitioners and poets alike. Knowledge of Chinese was not necessary to appreciate how the two translators’ creative and imaginative resources were brought to bear in distinct ways to address the challenges they faced. The author’s presence and generosity of spirit in giving the translators free rein underlined the divergent tensions and loyalties under which translators operate: every translation is an original contribution, yet its genealogy is de facto dependent on the author’s text and on cultural context in both the source and target languages. As Yueshi concluded, ‘translation is a re-creation, but without the source there would be no translation’. It is only fair that translators and authors should both be acknowledged.