Lost and/or Gained When Translated

When an individual migrates from one language and culture into another, he experiences loss, particularly when his language and culture happen to be those of Chinese. This is pre-determined in the language.

Examples abound in the linguistic loss in this process of transmigration—comprising translation and migration. For example, a Chinese idiom that consists of four characters with two images, perfectly balanced, when turned into English is cut in half, losing an image or two.

Take ren shan ren hai (a mountain of people and a sea of people), a description of big crowds, which in English is a mere “sea of people”, without the mountain. In Chinese, to describe something solid and sturdy, one says tong qiang tie bie (a wall of copper and a bastion of iron), which in English is just a “wall of iron”. In Chinese, one says shui shen huo re (in deep waters and hot fire), which in English is “in deep waters” only, without the “hot fire” image.

In all these examples, what comes natural and complete in Chinese can only remain so in English if cut in half. Imagine what transformations could take place when a natural and complete person migrates from Chinese to English and what pain, psychological and psychiatric, might result. What is linguistically lost in English can never be retrieved unless the retrieval is done in another language, Chinese.

There are other examples of loss, too, ones that add to the sense of cultural and linguistic loss if one translates from Chinese into English. A rule of thumb I tell clients who come to me to get a quote for translation is that if you translate a document numbering 1000 Chinese characters into English the number of English words is likely to be around 850, an innate loss for which there is no logical explanation. Many Chinese expressions, when turned into English, become lesser, lessened and belittled, minus an image at least, such as the Chinese yi xin yi yi (single-minded and single-hearted) for the English “single-minded”; the Chinese chi shou kong quan (single-handed and empty-fisted) for the English “single-handed”; the Chinese tong zhou gong ji (in the same boat and rowing together) for the English “in the same boat”; and the Chinese xin xiong xia zhai (narrow-minded and narrow-hearted) for the English “narrow-minded”.

The biggest loss is incurred when the Chinese expression, cang sang (sea mulberry), is turned into a nominal “sea change”. By “sea mulberry”, it is actually meant that what used to be mulberry fields are now sea. Hence a mulberry change, a change that defies change because the Chinese language, it seems, fights a losing battle in English unless the English language is willing to adopt the change.

For this reason, I constantly warn my students from China against potential dangers that they may become incomplete, even half, or halved, individuals once they start embracing the English language and decide to migrate to an English-speaking country. It is not hard to see why when all the good and completing images are inevitably lost when age-old Chinese expressions are translated into English.

A few years ago, when I taught a poetry class of second-year English majors at Wuhan University in China, one of the girls said in the presence of all the other students that she “hated” English. Asked why, she said her parents had forced her to study English, although she had originally planned to study Chinese language and literature. I gave this class an assignment that each of them hand-make a book containing their own poems written in English at the end of the term. Amazingly, the girl who had professed her hatred for English managed to produce a lovely hand-made specimen of a book with hand-written poems that I really liked, earning a mark for her creative work above 90 per cent.

A call from China last night expressed some concerns on the part of a friend, who informed me that English is now being taught from the primary school level although his daughter is not making much headway because of her strong resistance. He wondered what was to be done about it. This reminds me of a meeting I had in Denmark in 2004 with a visiting Chinese poet who, instead of directly answering the questions from the woman behind the desk in the hotel we were both in, pulled me to the desk as his in-situ interpreter even though I later understood that he could deal in basic English. He cited his reason as that of antagonism: Why do I have to speak English while you don’t make an effort to speak our language? It’s a bit silly but it does make sense, from his point of view.

It is perhaps on account of the linguistic divide, invisible but deep-cutting, that has landed so many ex-Chinese nationals in Australian psychiatric institutions that it has also landed one of them in my recent second novel, The English Class, in which Jing, the main protagonist, ends up a mental patient in a Melbourne suburb, suffering from linguistic schizophrenia.

To this day, despite my many attempts to correct it, people in Australia keep referring to me as Mr Yu. To my great chagrin they put me last in bibliographies or “Notes on Contributors”. I still haven’t given up my impulse to correct them, although I have gradually grown resigned to the truth, rarely made known, that a Chinese individual is bound to suffer a heaven–earth reversal when he migrates into the English language and an English-language-based culture. 

It almost seems that the Chinese and English languages are pre-determined to be pitted against each other. For example, books published in Taiwan, to this day, remain the quintessential Chinese prototype of how vastly different a Chinese book can be from an English book, in that the Chinese book begins at the back and ends at the front; we could also say that an English book starts at the back of a Chinese book and ends at the front. In the Taiwanese manner, the traditional Chinese manner, the first character starts at the top right hand corner and moves down, vertically, and left-wise, page after page, till it ends on the last page.

This tradition was radically changed when the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949 on the mainland, a party based on Marxist ideology (a German’s, to be exact), and simplified the Chinese language till it became like English, running the same way English runs, from left to right. Books published in mainland China in the 1990s and since the turn of the century have adopted the way English books are produced by placing the copyright pages at the front, instead of leaving them at the end in the traditional way, a sacrifice of one of the many Chinese national characteristics in the process of self-colonisation.

Time-wise and in terms of poetry, many ancient Chinese poems defy translation into English unless they are reversed in time sequence. The most outstanding example is a poem by Chen Zi’ang (661–702), a poet of the early Tang dynasty, that runs thus, five characters per line: 

Before not see ancient people
After not see coming people
Think vast heaven and earth
Alone feel sad in tears 

This sounds like rubbish but it is not. All the poet is trying to say is that he doesn’t see anyone worthy before him or after him and when he thinks how vast the heaven and earth are he feels so sad that he is in tears.

What is interesting is that in the time sequence, he regards the ancient people as “before” or “in front of” him and the people in the future as “after” him. It is this logic-defying logic that a translator has to cope with when trying to understand it and make it make sense in English. When turned into English, the time sequence is reversed so that the ancient people are after him and the future people, or people to come, are before him, as this poem, found online, shows: 

Behind me I do not see the ancient men,
Before me I do not see the ones to come.
Thinking of the endlessness of heaven and earth,
Alone in despair, my tears fall down. 

When an English poem is turned into Chinese, the same sort of reversal is at work, too. Take D.H. Lawrence’s poem “Being Alive”, with the first stanza below: 

The only reason for living is being fully alive;
and you can’t be fully alive if you are crushed by secret fear,
and bullied with the threat: Get money, or eat dirt!—
and forced to do a thousand mean things meaner than your nature,
and forced to clutch on to possessions in the hope they’ll make you feel safe,
and forced to watch everyone that comes near you, lest they’ve come to do you down. 

The only way to make this poem live and work in Chinese is to reverse it or else it wouldn’t do either, as shown in my rendition: 

Weiyi de huofa, jiushi chedi di huo
Buneng xinli qiaoqiao de rang kongju yazhe, buneng             rangren yong zheyang de hua weibi:
“Bu zuanqian, jiu qu ken nidi!”
Buneng weixin di qu gan kuixinshi
Buneng dang shoucainu, yiwei shou, jiu anquan
Buneng yi youren zoujin, jiu huaiyi renjia yao shanghai ni
Fouze, ni meifa chedi di huo 

Roughly back-translated, this means: 

The only way of living is to live thoroughly.
You can’t let fears secretly press your heart, you can’t let people threaten you with these words:
“If you don’t make money, go and eat the dirt!”
You can’t do heart-loss things against your own heart.
You can’t be a slave to money and think you’ll be safe if you keep it.
You can’t suspect people will hurt you as soon as they come near you.
Otherwise, you won’t be able to live fully. 

Before I throw myself headlong into my point about the gain in translation, I want to change Robert Frost’s adage that poetry is what is lost in translation to something like this: Poetry is what is reversed and gained in translation.

Chinese culture has a tendency to beautify the English language and all its paraphernalia, perhaps because of the century-long colonial and semi-colonial legacy. A quick run-through of a list of things would show you the picture: America as meiguo (beautiful country), instead of meiguo (mouldy country) or miguo (rice country) as they do in South Korea and Japan; Britain as yingguo (heroic country) instead of yinguo (malicious country); France as faguo (legitimate country), instead of faguo (punishing country); and Germany as deguo (moral country), instead of deguo (bottom country). In this, racial discrimination is palpable. Take feizhou (Africa), which literally translates as non-continent, a continent that does not exist. We must understand that Africa in the Qing dynasty was on the world map as wu gui guo (dark devil country) and that it was not until recently when the government of Mozambique—which was translated in Chinese as mo san bi gei, containing the two unimpressive images of “nose” and “give”, almost like blowing one’s nose—protested that the Chinese government agreed to change its transliterated name to the present mo san bi ke, with the negative images removed.

This tendency to beautify, to add, shows no sign of retreating. Nearly all foreign products acquire wonderful names in Chinese translation: Sheraton Hotel as xi lai deng (happy to ascend), Benz as benchi (galloping), and the Australian wine Penfolds Bin 28 was beautified as benfu (rushing to riches), showing how the colonial legacy is still benefiting us to this day, without us having to lift a finger.

Faced with all these issues of loss, gain and reversal, I collaborated with John Kinsella on the selection and translation of a book of Australian poems in Chinese translation in 2007. While working on the book, I kept a notebook, recording all the traces in my translations. Following are three examples.

One is in relation to the translation of mistakes. For me, mistakes, particularly creative ones, are the hardest to translate. If you correct them, you make mistakes yourself. If you keep them, you make mistakes again. In Lionel Fogarty’s poem, he had a line that goes, “Soldier cained him down at the waterhole”. This is “cain”, not “cane”, but it’s both “cane” and “Cain”, a biblical reference. How do you combine the two in one word? In Chinese you can’t. With mistakes, you have to make do, which is what I’ve learnt in my experience. So, I turned the “cain” into teng tiao (teng is both “pain” and “cane”) which contains both the thrashing image of a cane and the pain caused by the cane, thus gaining the pain and losing the Cain, an inevitable loss akin to the ones the Chinese language has to make when rendered into English.

In a poem by Dorothy Hewett, she has the phrase, “golden leaves / raining on us”. Now, in Chinese, yu (rain) can’t be used as a verb, like it or not. With that line, an opportunity arises that challenges one to use it as a verb, which I did, with this result: wang women shenshang yuzhe / jinye (raining us / with golden leaves).

In a poem by Bronwyn Lea, there is a line that goes, “But it is my first not last name that leaps from the page”, which had to be reversed to make sense. Thus “leaps from the page” became li tou zhi bei, a Chinese expression that means the word is so powerful that it penetrates the page through to the other side.

Translation from one language into another is not a mere process of turning something into another. It involves much more than meets the eye or the mind.

This article is based on a piece Ouyang Yu presented at the 2010 Sydney Poetry Festival.