Showing posts sorted by relevance for query mishi saran. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query mishi saran. Sort by date Show all posts

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.
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 4 June 2014

Tiananmen 25 Years On


Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. 

As reported last week Louisa Lim has just brought out The People's Republic of Amnesia, published by OUP.

Meanwhile Rowena Xiaoqing He has published Tiananmen Exiles, through Macmillan.

Both books include eye witness accounts of the events of 1989. Both have been extensively reviewed outside Asia - and seemingly not at all within Asia.  Follow the links below for a sample of international reviews.

The UK Daily Telegraph

The New York Review of Books

The Economist

Click here for journalist and author Mishi Saran's account of Tiananmen in the LA Review of Books.

For a full round-up of books on the Tiananmen Square massacre click here.

Wednesday 5 March 2014

Shanghai International Literary Festival

The Shanghai International Literary Festival starts today, Wednesday 5 March, and runs through until Friday 21 March, with events taking place at the restaurant, M on the Bund

After a quick glance down the programme, I picked a few probable highlights:

On Saturday March 8, David Pilling, the Financial Times’ Asia Editor will discuss his new book Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival. This presents a fresh vision of Japan, revealing its vulnerabilities and resistance in cycles of crisis and reconstruction from the 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown through the so-called lost decades, after 1990.

On Thursday 13 March, in Of Kings & Moghuls, Xanadu & Djinns, William Dalrymple, the award-winner writer, will discuss the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839, and share his tales of walking in the footsteps of Marco Polo in the 1990s.

On Sunday 16 Catherine Chung, author of Forgotten Country, a novel about a Korean family in America, North and South Korea, sibling rivalry and bonds, secrets and questions, will take part in Non-Native Speaker-Writing from Another Tongue. Chung’s first language is Korean, and she will discuss what it means to be a native speaker, and the strangeness and complicated power of writing an immigrant's story from a language that is not your first.

Since the Festival venue is a restaurant, there will be several food and wine writers participating, and lashings of fine wining and dining, including a series of mouthwatering literary lunches. To mark International Women's Day, which is this Saturday, March 8, there will be a lunch, on 7th, to discuss women's writing. What is it?  And does this question matter? Singaporean author Shamini Flint  will be one of the guests. 

Of the other literary lunches, Writing China: Journalism, Fiction & History, on Monday 17, looks interesting - it will explore how writers engage with China via three different approaches.  Indian author Mishi Saran is to be one of the panelists.

There are a variety of workshops on offer, including Getting Started, Getting Finished, in which S.J. Rozan, the award-winning author of 13 novels and the leader of a popular summer writing workshop, will take authors through the essentials of beginning and ending their books – and presumably writing the middle bit too.

There are children’s days, poetry sessions, art workshops, and debates. There’s even an event around an erotic fiction competition, at which, according to the Festival’s website, finalists will read their “saucy” stories, and the bar will serve “sexy” drinks – all in a good cause as there will be a raffle for charity.  

If you happen to be attending the Shanghai Literary Festival do please post with your comments – or even write a full post, if you feel so moved.  You can e-mail it to me at asianbooksblog.com, and I’ll put it up on the site.


Tuesday 16 February 2021

Julia Lovell's new translation of Monkey King: Journey to the West is a tour de force

 

STOP PRESS: FOR PAPER REPUBLIC'S EXCLUSIVE PODCAST WITH JULIA LOVELL TALKING ABOUT HER TRANSLATION, CLICK HERE

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Monkey King: Nicky Harman on a new translation of an old favourite.

Of all the posts I’ve written for Asian Books Blog, this one has to have been the most fun to write. Working out why a translation that’s really funny is funny… what’s not to like? To be truthful, I would have found it hard to write a more conventional review of Journey to the West. I have never read the original and although I acquired the three-volume translation by WJF Jenner many years ago, my second volume is suspiciously clean and I clearly never opened the third at all. But in any case, translator Julia Lovell, in her introduction, has done a much better job than I could ever do, in explaining where this epic novel came from, and how, over the centuries, it has been many things to many people.

Journey to the West was written (allegedly) by Wu Cheng’en in the sixteenth century and its hero, the sometimes eponymous Monkey, has enjoyed enduring popularity ever since. In addition to the stories in the Journey to the West, Monkey and his friends have featured in spin-off stories, cartoons, cartoon films, ballets, shadow plays, video games and much more, as you can see in the illustration above. 

Tripitaka, a pious Chinese monk, sets off to India in search of precious Buddhist sutras, in the company of bodyguards Monkey, Sandy and Pigsy. A brief extract from Lovell’s introduction gives a flavour of what is in store:

In the course of their travels, they encounter murderous Buddhists, perfidious Taoists, expanses of rotten persimmons, and monsters of all shapes and sizes (femmes fatales, rhinoceroses, iguanas, scorpions). They are serially captured, tied up, lacquered, sautéed, steamed, and impregnated, and come very close to being diced, boiled, liquidized, pickled, cured, and seduced by various fiends. Eventually, after eighty-one such calamities, the pilgrims reach Thunderclap Monastery, the stronghold of the Buddha in India, and are rewarded with armfuls of sutras and posts in the Buddha’s government of immortals.

Phew! It doesn't seem much of a reward for all their travails.

Julia Lovell’s new translation is about a quarter of the length of the original, including all the chapters that bookend it, and selected chapters in between. ‘The novel zings with physical and verbal humor,’ she writes, and the translation certainly does. Reading it made me wonder which of the comedic effects can be matched to the original text, and which arise from the translator’s creative use of English. Here is what Lovell says about the translation process:

Literary translators have two responsibilities: to the original text and to readers of the target language. Whichever languages translators work between, satisfying both constituencies can be difficult, but when working between two literary cultures as remote chronologically and geographically as sixteenth-century China and the twenty-first-century Anglophone world, the challenges are redoubtable. Sometimes, a translator has to sacrifice technical, linguistic fidelity to be true to the overall tone of a text.

 There is an abundance of humour in the original. Journey to the West is a fantasy novel, but the monsters and demons live in a recognisably bureaucratic society: Buddha has a government, sinecures are offered to Monkey, the demon king has ministers and flunkeys. In this exchange from the beginning of the novel, Monkey’s future is being decided (or so his divine superiors fondly imagine):

‘Majesty,’ the Spirit of Longevity from Venus ventured, ‘given that this monkey is a child of heaven and earth, of the sun and the moon, that he walks on two feet and has attained immortality, I propose that we treat him as we would a human. I humbly suggest you offer him an amnesty, summon him to Heaven and give him a government job. Once he’s inside the system he’ll have to behave. If he accepts, we can bamboozle him with sinecures; if he refuses, we can apprehend him. In any case, such a strategy will save us a military campaign and bring an unruly immortal to heel.’

 (It has to be said that Lovell has reduced this paragraph with an unapologetic panache that Monkey would have applauded. 105 words, as against Jenner’s 160 words for the same paragraph. But, hey, ‘bamboozle him with sinecures’ says it all! Here is the Chinese, for anyone who wants to have a go at it.

太白长庚星俯伏启奏道:上圣三界中,凡有九窍 者,皆可修仙。奈此猴乃天地育成之体,日月孕就之身,他也顶天履地,服露餐霞; 今既修成仙道,有降龙伏虎之能,与人何以异哉?臣启陛下,可念生化之慈恩,降 一道招安圣旨,把他宣来上界,授他一个大小官职,与他籍名在拘束此间;若 受天命,后再升赏;若违天命,就此擒拿。一则不动众劳师,二则收仙有道也。’ )

 And more divine bureaucracy: ‘Monkey told them what had happened in his dream and how he had persuaded the kings of the underworld to cross all their names off the ledger of death, at which news his subjects kowtowed with ecstatic gratitude. And from that point on, most mountain monkeys never got old, for the Underworld no longer had their names and addresses.  

Precisely what is in the Chinese (自此,山猴多有不老者,以阴司无名故也), just with ‘and addresses’ added.

 Journey to the West uses a judicious mixture of register (and bathos), both in the original and in the translation. Here is Monkey being (unusually for him) respectful and formal – and the Patriarch cutting to the chase:

Monkey was overcome with regret. ‘I have been away from home for twenty years. Though I yearn to see my former subjects again, I hate to leave you before I have repaid your kindness to me.’ ‘Forget it,’ said the Patriarch. ‘Just don’t drag me into any of your messes.’ 

Which happens to be exactly what the original says: ‘ 祖师道:’…你只是不惹祸不牵带我就罢了!

 On the other hand, quite a lot of the comedy in Lovell’s translation exploits the comic potential of English, rather than that of the Chinese. Monkey muses and fulminates. Tripitaka needles and wheedles, when he’s not blubbing in terror. The monkeys shriek and chatter. There are delicious dashes of alliteration. In chapter 15, Monkey calls the horse-eating dragon a ‘Lawless loach!’ Alliteration does not work in the same way in Chinese, so this is the translator’s voice, but entirely in the spirit of the original.

 I was particularly taken with the anachronisms[1]. They are superlatively funny. I was hard-put to choose from so many examples but here is a sample:

 ‘Lucky Monkey!’ The crowd of disciples giggled. ‘If you master this, you can get a job as an express courier. You’ll always be able to make a living.’ (This is actually only a small departure from the original, which has the job as an army or government messenger).

‘Once Monkey had explained his latest marvel, the crowd of monkeys spent the rest of the day playing with their new toys.’

‘Heaven runs a cashless economy. And so on…

Sometimes, the Dragon and Monkey sound like Jeeves and Wooster -- not entirely contemporary but instantly recognisable:

‘Now that I’ve adopted this magic staff, I feel rather under-dressed. If you could rustle up some armor to go with it, I’d be much obliged.’

‘I’m most dreadfully sorry, but I don’t have anything suitable.’

‘I don’t want to be a bother to someone else. I’ll sit it out here till you come up with the goods.’

‘I suggest you try another ocean. You might have more luck there.’

Elsewhere, the dialogue is bang up-to-date: 

‘Are you forgetting who rescued you from that stone casket beneath the Mountain of Two Frontiers? You owe me, Monkey! Get me something to eat before this pestilential mountain finishes me off.’

And here are Monkey and Pigsy as the sparring duo:

Witnessing this at a distance, Tripitaka was speechless with horror. ‘Oh, well-played, Monkey!’ chortled Pigsy. ‘Three murders and it’s not even lunchtime.’

Julia Lovell’s translation is a delight and a tour de force. I hope that in taking a translator’s tweezers to it, I have managed to convey some of my admiration for its creativity and joie de vivre.

 If you want to read around the subject, here are some more links to entertain you:

Minjie Chen in Monkey Craze! examines iterations of Monkey in the modern period.

A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi, by Sean Bye looks at the art of changing connotations and registers in translation

And on the journey by the real Xuanzang/Tripitaka, Chasing The Monk's Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang, by Mishi Saran, reviewed on Asian Books Blog here