Nicky Harman writes about translating Chinese authors' reflections on Covid19, post-lockdown.
At the risk of blowing my (or at least, our Paper Republic's) trumpet a little, I’m going to start with the back-story: Brigitte Duzan, of Chinese-shortstories.com pointed out to me that a very well-known Chinese writer, Yan Geling, had written a piece blasting the authorities for mishandling the Covid19 crisis, which Duzan herself had translated into French. Why didn’t I do the same and post it on Paper-Republic? I did both, and a single post grew into the Read Paper Republic: Epidemic mini-series of essays and poems, exploring how some impressive Chinese writers (Yan Geling, Han Dong, A Yi, Lin Bai, and Wu Ang) have been personally affected by the COVID-19 outbreak.
Then the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing, with whom Paper Republic has partnered on many projects, had a new idea. I quote, ‘What better way to spend lockdown than having a shot at literary translation? You know you always wanted to try it, so why not have a go now?’ The deal was that anyone, anywhere in the world, could have a go at translating a blog post by Deng Anqing (邓安庆) on how he got shut in with his parents as the surrounding cities locked down, and how it affected his relationship with them. We were offering this opportunity to first-time or emerging translators, so after they had all submitted their work, there would be online feedback sessions by members of the Paper Republic team, including myself and Eric Abrahamsen. The final revised and agreed-on translation was to be published as the grand finale to the Read Paper Republic: Epidemic series. We called the project Give-it-a-Go Translation. We put out the call, and we waited.
Showing posts with label Translators. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Translators. Show all posts
Wednesday 27 May 2020
Monday 4 May 2020
First Three Way Translation Interview: Elaine Chiew Chats With Kulleh Grasi and Pauline Fan about Tell Me, Kenyalang
Courtesy of Circumference Books |
Synopsis:
TELL ME, KENYALANG is a collection of poems by Kulleh Grasi, a writer and musician from Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo. This groundbreaking book is one of a handful of contemporary works of poetry written in Malay to be translated into English and the first in decades to include Malaysian indigenous languages. Translator Pauline Fan brings the work into a thrilling, living English. Kulleh Grasi's poems are entirely new and yet intimate. They are entwined with myth and nature and yet are fully post-modern. They are outside the context of American poetry and also deeply inside the questions and experiences American poets are grappling with today: questions of identity in relation to nation and language and sexuality.
Grasi, both a known poet and rock star in Malaysia, writes new rivers and islands into the landscape of identity. Grasi says: "I was reading all kinds of Malay literature. None of it spoke from the experience of Borneo's indigenous people, so I started keeping journals, writing about the lives of indigenous communities that I observed with my own eyes. This was the true beginning of my poetry."
TELL ME, KENYALANG will change the way people think of contemporary poetry throughout the world and about the role of indigenous languages in global literature and in translation. The book is a powerhouse.
Wednesday 29 April 2020
Translating literary works from the Malay world, Nazry Bahrawi in conversation with Nicky Harman
Dr Nazry Bahrawi, Singapore University of Technology & Design |
What aroused your
interest in translation, and what was the first piece you ever translated?
My journey to
literary translation began as an academic interest. As a doctoral student
reading comparative literature at the University of Warwick, I was supervised
by Susan Bassnett, a household name in translation theory. So, while my thesis
wasn’t directly about translation, I began to explore this field of study first
through conversations with her. Today, I continue to research into translation
to unveil its multifaceted role at shaping what scholars call ‘world
literature’. As an indication of just how complicated translation can get, I’ve
published a comparative analysis of the Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia
versions of Syed Hussein Alatas’ seminal book The Myth of the Lazy Native and
found that the former sharpens the ethnic divide between Malays and Chinese in
line with the Malaysian ruling party’s (UMNO) ideology of ketuanan Melayu
(Malay supremacy). This affirms the proposal that translation is mired in
practices of patronage and power as the translation theorist André Lefevere had
pointed out in his book Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary
Fame. This was one of my earliest academic essays. It’d convinced me to dive
deeper into translation research.
After my studies
in 2013, I returned to Singapore. This was when my first foray into literary
translation as practice began. Then, literary translation was starting to gain
traction in my multilingual city-island, though there'd been attempts in the
past. I was invited to deliver a public lecture about translation, and I was
excited to share what I’ve learnt with others. After the lecture, I was
approached by the playwright Nadiputra, a Cultural Medallion winner in
Singapore, to translate a musical that he was writing from Bahasa to English. I
said yes, and the result was a bilingual publication titled Muzika Lorong Buang
Kok (Lorong Buang Kok: The Musical), a play about the last kampong (village) in
urban Singapore. I’ve found the process to be nothing short of cathartic.
Embodying first-hand some of the challenges I’ve read about made the practice
of translation even more complex than I've imagined, and this made it alluring
– an enigma that’s inviting me to explore its depths. Today, I’ve translated
short stories and poems, surtitles for a theatrical adaptation of Anthony
Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, subtitles for a 1960 black-and-white Malay movie
as well as judged a translation contest. Most recently, I partook in a
performance-lecture about my process as a literary translator.
Wednesday 25 March 2020
Reading (and writing) about someplace else: Mishi Saran
Nicky Harman interviews Mishi Saran, writer of fiction and non-fiction, and long-time resident of Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Q: Serendipitously, I wrote about Xuanzang (Tripitaka) as a translator of Buddhist sutras in my last blog post here, and you have written a wonderful book, Chasing the Monk’s Shadow, in which you follow in the footsteps of Xuanzang from China to India. Did you feel like you got an insight into his character when you were writing the book?
A: I was drawn to Xuanzang as a traveller who braved the miles from China to India and back. A Chinese monk with an India obsession, an Indian woman with a China craze; he and I were destined to meet. To follow his route to India, I mostly consulted two Tang dynasty accounts translated into English by Samuel Beal (1825-1889). One was Si-Yu-Ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World, by Hiuen Tsiang in two volumes, and the other The Life of
Hiuen-Tsiang, translated from the Chinese of Shaman Hwui Li.
Poring daily over those pages for month after month on the road, seeking clues to Xuanzang’s passage 1400 years before me, I became attuned to the cadences of Xuanzang-via-Beal; how little he gave away of his inner state of mind, how stringently he observed and recorded. Xuanzang’s biographer was rather more colourful, and inevitably, hagiographic. Still, Xuanzang was my travel companion, my Chinese guide who unfolded India for me. Not infrequently, I talked to the monk in my head. It became a game for me, to extrapolate human feelings from scant clues embedded in the text. I found fear, homesickness, wonder, a certain amount of gullibility, a good deal of luck. It is an astonishing record.
Mishi Saran, photo by Tripti Lahiri |
Q: Serendipitously, I wrote about Xuanzang (Tripitaka) as a translator of Buddhist sutras in my last blog post here, and you have written a wonderful book, Chasing the Monk’s Shadow, in which you follow in the footsteps of Xuanzang from China to India. Did you feel like you got an insight into his character when you were writing the book?
A: I was drawn to Xuanzang as a traveller who braved the miles from China to India and back. A Chinese monk with an India obsession, an Indian woman with a China craze; he and I were destined to meet. To follow his route to India, I mostly consulted two Tang dynasty accounts translated into English by Samuel Beal (1825-1889). One was Si-Yu-Ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World, by Hiuen Tsiang in two volumes, and the other The Life of
Hiuen-Tsiang, translated from the Chinese of Shaman Hwui Li.
Poring daily over those pages for month after month on the road, seeking clues to Xuanzang’s passage 1400 years before me, I became attuned to the cadences of Xuanzang-via-Beal; how little he gave away of his inner state of mind, how stringently he observed and recorded. Xuanzang’s biographer was rather more colourful, and inevitably, hagiographic. Still, Xuanzang was my travel companion, my Chinese guide who unfolded India for me. Not infrequently, I talked to the monk in my head. It became a game for me, to extrapolate human feelings from scant clues embedded in the text. I found fear, homesickness, wonder, a certain amount of gullibility, a good deal of luck. It is an astonishing record.
Wednesday 26 February 2020
In Homage to the first Buddhist translators, and Martha Cheung
Nicky Harman on “Buddhism” a
wonderful exhibition in London’s British Library displaying Buddhist art and literature from all over East
Asia.
All pictures are my own from the exhibition,
unless
otherwise captioned
|
As a translator, I have what you could call a professional interest in
Buddhist texts translated into Chinese. This may sound odd, because I can’t
understand their meaning, let alone critique them as translations. But I am
always moved when I see the crystal-clear calligraphy of the sutras, first
written down in Chinese fifteen hundred years ago or more, and yet completely
familiar today. So I visited the exhibition hoping to find out more about some
of my favourite translators.
Wednesday 25 September 2019
The History of a Place in a Single Object, with Multiple Variations
Nicky Harman looks at translating tools, and it's more fascinating than you'd think.
It’s not often that I, as a
translator, get to do research on the place where a particular author’s novels
are set. In fact my recent visit, with Dylan King, to Shaanxi province to Jia
Pingwa to look at where his novels Shaanxi Opera (AmazonCrossing, forthcoming)
and Broken Wings (ACA, 2019) were set, was a first. We arrived with a list of
questions of the ‘What does that tool do?’ and ‘What kind of a gate entrance is
that?’ variety. We were primarily motivated by wanting to get the words right
in translation. But it led Dylan and me into discussing the wonderful
BBC/British Museum radio series, the History of the World in a Hundred Objects, and what
follows is (with apologies to Neal MacGregor) a small meditation on what a
particular tool can tell us about a place and how people live there.
The tool: a stone object in
two parts that grinds up grain and spices, and produces soybean milk from the
raw beans. There are two variations: 碾盘nian3pan2,
also known as碌碡liu4zhou, consisting of a
base stone and a cylindrical roller; and 石磨shi2mo4 or 磨盘 mo4pan2, made up of磨扇mo4shan1,two circular stones, one atop the other, the bedstone
(下扇) which stays still,and the upper stone (上扇) which moves around. In both versions, the top
part is pushed around by a human or a beast. At least that’s what used to
happen.
Wednesday 24 July 2019
PEN TRANSLATES' WILL FORRESTER: IN CONVERSATION WITH NICKY HARMAN
NICKY HARMAN interviews WILL FORRESTER, International and Translation Manager at English PEN, where he runs PEN TRANSLATES, the major UK-based, grant-giving programme funding literary translations.
picture credit - Stephanie Sy-Quia
You’ve had one round of PEN Translates, how did it feel? What were the most exciting books that came out of it for you?
Wednesday 29 May 2019
Exciting writing from Korean: in this post, Nicky Harman talks to noted translator from Korean, Sora Kim-Russell (김소라)
Sora, how did you get started in literary translation?
I started out translating short stories, but my big break was with Shin Kyung-sook’s novel, I’ll Be Right There. It was a big project, too. A long, sprawling novel by a major author whose previous translation, Please Look After Mom, had made the bestseller lists. But it wasn’t actually the first novel I’d translated.
I started out translating short stories, but my big break was with Shin Kyung-sook’s novel, I’ll Be Right There. It was a big project, too. A long, sprawling novel by a major author whose previous translation, Please Look After Mom, had made the bestseller lists. But it wasn’t actually the first novel I’d translated.
The first was City of Ash and Red, by Pyun Hye-young, which finally got published this year. It was a long wait, but in a lot of ways I’m grateful for that. It was a tricky novel to translate, and the long path towards publication gave me plenty of time to go back, rethink my approach, and revise.
Can you tell me a bit about contemporary Korean literature? What's the most exciting trend that you can see?
I think the most exciting trend is the increase in self-avowed
queer writers. That is, we’ve seen queer-themed poetry and prose in Korean
literature, dating back to its very origins, but not many publicly
queer-identified writers. That has been changing.
The other thing I would add is that while Korea is typically seen as having a homogeneous, conformist culture, its modern literature—at least, the parts of it that I’ve read—has always been diverse, outward-looking, and grappling with questions of identity and selfhood. For instance, it’d be easy to assume that Korean literature from the 1950s wouldn’t have much to say about race, or that there’s no way a novel published back in 1909 would feature a queer relationship, and yet there they are.
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