Sly Gingkoes and the Global Bully Language: Featured Poetry Translation

Sly Ginkgoes and the Global Bully Language: Featured Poetry Translation

Li Haipeng with Henry Zhang and Ana Padilla Fornieles | Feb 24, 2019 5:00 pm | Add a comment | 508 reads

With temperatures still firmly below zero, there’s no better poem to comment on than Li Haipeng’s ‘Winter Monogatari’, translated by Henry Zhang. This poem is a veritable challenge. To help us approach it, I asked the translator himself to explain his methodology.

Henry Zhang: With the political economy of Chinese-English translation being a fraught one, and the target language here being the global bully language, for the most part one such translator gets an incredible amount of leeway.

However, this does not mean that translating things ‘literally’ is a kind of ‘faithfulness’ to the original texts. ‘Literal translations’ have a long and Orientalist history (…) Behind my translations, I am always thinking – how do we establish hypothetical equivalents between signs in different languages? Who do those equivalents benefit, and who do they hurt?

Why I want things to sound ‘good’ in the target language tends to be political, as well as aesthetic.

Allow me to explain some of Zhang’s concepts. The need for faithfulness and the perils of literal translations are often simultaneously urged upon translators in training. One should not stray from the original meaning, yet at the same time sticking too close to it could potentially bring trouble. It is a fraught balance where the beauty of translation can also be found! However, rarely do we get to discuss this balance in depth. Where there has been a relation of power and submission between different countries, their cultures, and languages, the discursive representation of those foreign languages in translation has a damaging and conflictive tradition of ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignisation’. After all, these translations have contributed to the issue that Edward Said raised in his Orientalism – the institutionalization of knowledge.

Now let’s take a look section by section. The poem is presented again in its complete form at the end.

Note: For small screens, try landscape view to minimize scrolling or line wrapping.

一

还有什么可用来遮掩的: 当前方狡黠的杏树
贮存起足够过冬的热量，就摘下秋日里
火焰的面具
灰雀退下旧的羽毛。两个月来，我每天
穿过树林，反复搜寻你隐秘的行踪。被人们不断
呼出的寒冷，止息了喷泉的上升，从高空跌落的
树巢中的喧响。我停下，静待着时光中
匿名的线索; 视线里，枯枝缠绕，呈现诡异的谜团。

What else to use for cover: sly gingkoes
storing heat for winter, unmasked
of autumn’s fire?
gray sparrows shed old feathers.
each day these last two months I’ve
walked through a forest
searching for your traces, cease-
less cold that we breathe out,
which stops the fountain short, snuffs the cries
issuing from the top of nests. I wait for time’s
anonymous clues. dried branches –
strange rebus– block my vision.

I like Henry’s approach to this poem because it shows off that beautiful balancing act he talks about above—being faithful versus being literal. I have found, for example, instances of active wording in the original Chinese becoming more passive and meaning being aesthetically condensed, yet preserved, in the target text. Look at how the ‘sly gingkoes’ (方狡黠的杏树, jiǎoxiá de xìng shù) are ‘unmasked of autumn’s fire’ instead of taking off the flaming masks of autumn’s days (摘下秋日里火焰的面具, zhāi xià qiū rì lǐ huǒyàn de miànjù).

The last line, however, is the most intriguing for me. In the Chinese, ‘dried branches’ (枯枝缠绕, kūzhī chánrào) and ‘strange doubts and suspicions’ (呈现诡异的谜团, chéngxiàn guǐyì de mítuán) are ‘in the line of vision’ (视线里, shìxiàn lǐ). Zhang condensed all this into ‘dried branches—strange rebus—block my vision.’ Opting for the word ‘rebus’ is quite an interesting choice. You can almost picture the hieroglyphics formed by those branches, and how strange and doubtful they must be.

二

树根潜伏的空地，空出你莫测的妙计。
长椅空出亲热的情侣。无人交谈时，我转向
那高达的柿树，直到交颈的鸟巢嘤咛泄露
树顶仅存的果实，是寒风中你等待第一枚
雪花的诱饵。
然而，你并无出现; 天空也并没清洁:
雾霾深重像一扇漆黑的大门，将我锁在
对称于你的道听说之外。过多的真相
皆无法骗你现身 —— 树顶仅存的果树闪光: 今日里
耽迷的卡尔维诺，难道你要为我剥出那柄多变的钥匙?

roots hidden in an empty lot,
absent of your brilliant feints
and sweethearts on a bench.
no one to speak to me, I turn
to a huge persimmon tree,
whose sole remaining fruit a
crisscrossed bird cry reveals:
bait for your coming
to wait the first snow out.
but you don’t come, nor is the sky clear:
I am locked by the smog’s thick jet door
outside a rumor that mirrors you. too much truth
can’t coax you out—sole, lacquered tree-borne fruit: Calvino,
lately so dissipated, will you hand me that ever-changing key?

A safer and more conservative bet for ‘feints’ would have been the literal translation of 妙计 (miàojì, ‘excellent plan’). I choose to visualize those feints as the kind you would find in fencing – swift and clever, their tracing difficult to follow in the air. Kind of like what makes an excellent plan, if you will.

The poem’s ‘I’ turns to a persimmon tree, until its sole remaining fruit is revealed by the trill of a crisscrossed bird. I think Zhang does a very good job of translating the ensuing line: 是寒风中你等待第一枚 / 雪花的诱饵 (shì hán fēng zhōng nǐ děngdài dì yī méi xuěhuā de yòu’ěr). The English here seems to be the bones of the full Chinese sentence, but it is the right choice to preserve the lyricism granted by the conciseness of Chinese ideograms in the source text. (Bonus points – crisscrossed birds seem to be a somewhat frequent motif in ancient Chinese art.)

I equally applaud Zhang’s work with regard to the next line. Again, Chinese characters offer great value for length, which is why the source text can explain that the thick smog resembles a door (雾霾深重像一扇漆黑的大门, wù mái shēnzhòng xiàng yī shàn qīhēi de dàmén) that will lock the poem’s ‘I’ (将我锁在, jiāng wǒ suǒ zài) in a rumor that mirrors the poem’s ‘you’ (对称于你的道听说之外, duìchèn yú nǐ de dào tīng shuō zhī wài). This is trickier to attain in English and so I agree with Zhang’s translation: “I am locked by the smog’s thick jet door / outside a rumor that mirrors you.” Same goes for 树顶仅存的果树闪光 (shùdǐng jǐncún de guǒshù shǎnguāng) – what a brilliant way to seam everything together.

I told you this was not an easy poem – let’s jump to the third section!

三

短暂的游戏，从孩童头顶冒出热气。
欢呼声惊起鸟群。不远处，祖母们眼中闪烁
糖果的陷阱。
时间，却将凝成冰块: 紧捏在他们手心
释放出微妙的甜味。隐身处，你在久注视
人境岁月的缓慢，无数可见物在粘稠的漩涡中
汇入镜像。秋冬难辨？那是挽歌被多变的舌头
敲响: 警醒于你的所在，正位于虚空深处不可捉摸的叹息中。

a short game, children’s heads steaming.
jaunty cries that startle birds. close by, grandmother’s eyes
shine like a candy trap.
soon, time congeals: clutched to faintly
sweet-smelling palms. you are hidden, and look
upon the slow, accumulating years, the untold sights
sucked into the viscous whirlpool
of a mirror. can’t tell fall from winter?
those fickle tongues are clucking out an elegy: I’m alert to your presence
inside nameless, stygian sighs.

Let’s look at time congealing – in the original Chinese, it does so, subsequently turning into a piece of ice (凝成冰块, níng chéng bīng kuài) that is absent in the English translation. Why so? Because ice is nothing more than frozen (congealed) water – it’s redundant, and it would translate as a cliché into English. I would also like to note the great choice to convey the action by which those tongues utter an elegy as ‘cluck out’ in the English text. It is just as visual and as closely linked to the tongue as the Chinese is in its own way – 敲响 (qiāo xiǎng, ‘to sound a bell’, to sound a uvula, after all).

Please do not miss the beautiful choice of the adjective ‘stygian’ here – murky, dark, shadowy, unlit, related to the River Styx in Greek mythology. A rare, perfect match for the Chinese original 不可捉摸 (bù kě zhuō mō) – that which is elusive, intangible, unpredictable.

Rich in obscure imagery and heavy on the absence of someone who is clearly important to ‘I’, this is a poem that feels velvety, decadent. The English translation keeps this feeling through plenty of devices, including of course the choice of words such as ‘languor’ (慵懒, yōnglǎn).

四

垂死之鼠，词的恐怖: 干冷的街道上漫过
我最惧怕的事物。矮灌木滴着血，从伤口贴出
危险得像要引燃切近的楼房。幽暗处
流浪猫脱下慵懒，像呼啸的男爵，随时准备
梅花的一击。
不存在的对手戏。灰蒙的天色波诡云谲。
我知道你就藏身在眼前焚烧的阁楼，却无法
捕获久等的形象。窗口，花香骤然袭来
凌厉的变形记，你顺势隐身其中。而我只能期望
你我之间对峙绝然的距离: 火势最盛时，必有雪之降临。

a dying mouse, a word of fear: dry, cold streets
ooze what I fear most. squat bushes dripping blood from wounds
lethal enough to burn the nearby buildings. in the gloom
a stray cat shakes its languor off, like Puss in Boots readying
a plum-blossom strike.
nonexistent duet. gray, drizzling, mutating sky.
I know you are hiding in the burning room, but cannot
catch that biding shape. window, the assault of flowers’ smell,
a cruel metamorphosis you hide inside. yet I can only await
the absolute distance between us: when the fire rages, the snow must fall.

Brace yourselves for the translation of 呼啸的男爵 (hūxiào de nánjué, ‘roaring baron’) as ‘Puss in Boots.’ It was certainly a surprising one – I couldn’t find the way to it. When I asked Zhang, it turned out to be a result of a discussion with Li himself a while back. It is precisely at moments like this that we can identify yet another step in the translation process, as well as just how much creativity it requires. The dialogue between an author and their translator is always open to potential authorial meanings that may not be present in the source text. Oh, and as for that mysterious ‘plum-blossom strike?’ It is a kung-fu move.

This may have easily been my most challenging column. As a translator myself, I learned quite a bit from commenting on it. I hope you have loved it just as much as I did! Wanting for more? Get the third issue of Spittoon Literary Magazine and enjoy!

— Ana Padilla Fornieles

初冬物语

因为一成不变，你才丧失了目光
—— 钟鸣《鹿，雪》

一

二

三

四

Winter Monogatari

Because of all this, unchanging, you’ve lost your sight
— Zhong Ming, “Deer, Snow”

Li Haipeng 李海鹏, born in 1990 in Shenyang, Liaoning, is currently a Ph.D. student at Renmin University. Winner of the Weiming Poetry Award for new writers and 1st Prize in the Guanghua Poetry Competition, his work has appeared in Shikan, Xingxing, Shilin, Shanghai Literature, Feidi, and other magazines. Aside from writing poetry, he is a critic, translator, and theorist.

Ana Padilla Fornieles 林诗安 is a Spanish writer and translator currently based in Beijing. Her work in both fields has been featured in Womankind magazine, The Shanghai Literary Review, Spittoon Literary Magazine, 聲韻詩刊 (Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine), and the Spanish website China traducida y por traducir, and her comics have been featured in the Shanghai zine Shaving in the Dark. She is a moderator for the feminist book club Our Shared Shelf and a regular contributor to Spanish cultural magazine Le Miau Noir. You can follow her on Instagram @holdenslake.

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