Postface: On the Translation of The Talisman Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry
The translations in this anthology are without exception the result of a two-step process: the literal translation from the Chinese original to an English “raw” or “draft” translation, and then the transformation of these drafts into poetry. This process was accomplished by two groups of individuals whose talent and knowledge complimented each other, each having an intimacy with either the Chinese original text or poetics in English. We made the choice of this two-step strategy before we started the editorial work of selecting poetry for the anthology in the winter of 2003. This choice was made by necessity. In an ideal situation, American poets as equally accomplished as their counterparts in China would be equipped with sufficient knowledge of the Chinese language to render the translation single-handedly. In the absence of such an ideal, the project brought about the necessary collaboration through a two-year process involving much deliberations and effort. I completely agree with Willis Barnstone, one of the pioneers in translating modern Chinese poetry into English, when he writes “we should not read inferior translations, since they traduce the work of the author”. Therefore we should not produce inferior translations.
This process is nothing new in the world of translation, especially in translating Chinese poetry into English. The well-known and influential translation of classical Chinese poetry from Japanese trots by Ezra Pound pointed to the possibility of an intellectually productive collaboration of the informative and the creative in translation. A few years back, New Generation, the anthology of Chinese poetry in translation edited by Wang Ping, also carried out a similar strategy. Yet the process in itself doesn’t guarantee successful translation and is as difficult and risky as it is opaque. It would be interesting to publish the final polished poems together with the back and forth revisions from the first draft, negotiating word by word, line by line between the literal/fidelity vs. liberal/creativity. On the average, it took the translators 4 to 5 revisions to reach a mutually agreed final. Between the versions, translators discussed or “talked through” the poems line by line via telephone, in face to face conversation if they happened to live near each other, and most likely for this book, via emails. As translators worked in different styles, it is hard for me here to capture and display a full picture of working process for all of them. Having said that, let’s examine the translation process of a short poem by Chen Dongdong, “Light the Lamp.” It is one of the smoother and less problematic translations in the anthology. However, it went through transformations like other poems in the book. The four versions here show the roles of each party and the care given by all involved. Particularly the important role of the poet translator, Joseph Donahue in this case, who “massaged” or “fiddled” as he put it, every word, and every line to make the draft a poem, and further to make a poem sing in the translated tongue.
Draft 1 by Chen Dongbiao (CDB):
Light the lamp into the stone, let them see
the stance of the sea, let them see
fish of the ancient times
And let them see the bright light too,
a lamp raised high on a mountain
The lamp should also be lit into the river water, let them see
living fish, let them see
the sea without a sound
you ought to let them see the sunset too
a firebird bucks up from the forest
Light the lamp. When I block the north wind with my hands
when I stand between the canyons
I think they will crowd around me
they will come to see my words
like the lamp
Draft 2 by Joseph Donahue (JD):
Shine the lamp on the stone. Let them see
the swirling of the sea. Let them see
the primordial fish.
Let them see the light itself,
a lamp raised high on a mountain.
Shine the lamp into the river. Let them see
living fish. Let them see
deep into the silence of the water.
Also, show them what a sunset is like—
a firebird bursting from the forest.
Light the lamp. When I fend off the north wind with my hands
when I stand between the canyons
let everyone crowd around me
let them see my words are
also a lamp
Draft 3 with my modification and notes (ZE):
Shine the lamp into the stone. Let them see *1
the swirling/posture of the sea. Let them see *2
the primordial fish.
Let them see the light itself,
a lamp raised high on a mountain.
Shine the lamp into the river. Let them see
living fish. Let them see
deep into the silence of the water.
Also, show them what a sunset is like—
a firebird bursting from the forest.
Light the lamp. When I fend off the north wind with my hands
when I stand between the canyons
let everyone crowd around me
let them see my words are
also a lamp
*1 the original word is “li”, inside, which is bit odd, most likely he is talking about fossils/rock with primordial fish in it. I like your choice of “primordial”.
*2 swirling is fine, the original word is “zishi”, means posture/position/stand. Swirling adds the action to it. Your choice.
Final version: Light The Lamp
Shine the lamp into the stone.
Let them see the swirling print of the sea.
Let them see the primordial fish.
Let them see the light itself,
a lamp raised high on a mountain.
Shine the lamp into the river.
Let them see living fish. Let them see
More deeply into the silence of the water.
Also, show them what a sunset is like—
a firebird bursting from the forest.
When I fend off the north wind
with my hands, light the lamp.
When I stand between the canyons
let them crowd around me, let them see
my words are a lamp
Here is another example of a little more involved process for the last stanza of Chen Dongdong’s Waibaidu Bridge:
Draft version of CDB:
The old pinions of the iron bridge flap with all strength
The volitation lands heavily onto the other bank
The city tentacle stretching out of the space
Joins and stitches centuries with birds' defeat
To penetrate through every road of rebirth
But the numerous and jumbled structure makes it abound ambiguity
The power of delirium, even lifts it up
JD’s version 1:
The hinges of the bridge rise and fall
What flight there is tumbles onto the other bank
The city is like a tentacle stretching out into space
centuries are held together by the failure of escape
if only to travel down every road of rebirth
the bridge is a prison of ambiguity
delirium passes here for freedom
Email from JD to ZE:
A question: my trouble here is with the word tentacle. Is the bridge compared here to a tentacle, as in the arm of an octopus? I find it hard to fit that image, given that DD is not a full-blown surrealist, with the scheme of bird imagery associated with the bridge. Am I correct that the bridge and not the city is being compared to a tentacle in line 3, and is there any other words beside tentacle that I could play with here, or does he actually mean for us to insert the mental picture of an octopus, or a squid, into our meditation on the bridge?
Email from ZE to JD:
literally he said, “touching hand” of the city. yes, the bridge is the touching hand which belongs to the city. touching hand in Chinese is clearly associated with either insect or octopus or machine. not of birds though. maybe we should go with the “mechanical arm” to fit the bridge’s structure, rather than to animate it.
he is kind of surreal here, half blown.
JD’s version 2:
The hinges of the bridge rise and fall
What flight there is tumbles onto the other bank
The bridge is a limb of the city stretching out into space
the centuries are linked by our failure to escape
if only down the road of every rebirth . . .
Ambiguous prison: the bridge is held in air
by the sheer force of our delirium.
ZE to JD:
here are my two cents:
The hinges of the bridge rise and fall
What flight there is tumbles onto the other bank
The bridge is a limb of the city stretching out into space
the centuries are linked by its failure to soar *
if only over the route of every rebirth . . . *
Ambiguous cumbersome/colossal structure: the bridge is held in air *
by the sheer force of our delirium.
* back to the bird image here, the bridge is the bird, its failure to be airborne long enough/flight. Please tweak. Near nearer the peak of perfection.
JD to ZE:
I take it that the “prison” concept is out, which is fine with me. Was it even in the original? Of the three adjectives that now modify "structure" which ones are in the text? Is it “ambiguous” and then something like “cumbersome” or “colossal”? Are there other possibilities for ambiguous, since it is hard for me to hold together ambiguous and say colossal, since what can really be ambiguous about something so big and obvious? Clearly, what the bridge represents, in terms of aspiration and escape etc. is ambiguous, its just hard, to my ear to apply the term ambiguous to a large metal structure. Could ambivalent work? I’ll figure something out. My main concern is I don’t want to have too many syllables running around in the penultimate line, it blunts the effect of the last line.
ZE to JD:
you are such a fine poet, Joe, can one get even closer to the words?
No. the prison is not in the original. the 2nd to the last line is literally: but the huge and confused (or numerous and jumbled, or cumbersome) structure make it so ambiguous.
It is an odd sequence in the Chinese too. cumbersome structure is ambiguous. I think he means that its presence/intention is hard to explain. or its cumbersome structure is unexplainable...
I will accept your solution.
JD to ZE:
Here it is, another attempt to climb the mountain of perfection! I have my ice pick, my water bottle, a chocolate bar and of course the holy bible! I fiddled with the third line a bit, substituting reach for limb. My thinking here is merely that the limb image, while it saves us from the intrusive picture of a squid or octopus, still raises questions in the readers mind. If the bridge is essentially like a bird, then it can't quite be called a limb. Even if its a limb of a bird, that is a wing. Then it would sound like the city is the body of the bird, and the bridge is its wing. So I've put reach instead, a bit more abstract, but then maybe closer in a way to the Chinese sense of "touch" that you said was in the original. As for the last two lines, I think "so much" gets enough of the sense of colossal, and that iron in air gets the uncanniness of the bridge, and prepares us for the idea that it is "upheld" by collective desire. I realize the word eerie is different from ambiguous, but they are related, and it sets the last two lines more within the perceiving consciousness. I think the sense of eerieness is latent within ambiguous here, and that its a more emotionally effective adjective. Twice the word for half the syllables! Also, while span is different from structure, I believe it conveys the sense of the architectural design, while communicating some of the energy and daring of building any kind of bridge. And at one syllable, its a bargain!
Anyway, let me know what you think.
JD’s final version:
The hinges of the bridge rise and fall
What flight there is tumbles onto the other bank
The bridge is the reach of the city into space
The centuries are linked by its failure to soar
if only over the route of every rebirth . . .
Eerie span: so much iron held in the air
by the sheer force of our delirium.
I can also offer a few examples of email correspondence between the translators and from translators to this editor on the process to illustrate the essence of the task at hand:
Between a poet translator (P) and a literal translator (L):
P: For me, the first duty of a translator is to make a version in English that works as English...this often requires transpositions not only of language but of fact, culture, etc. What may be coherent, visually, to a speaker of Chinese may be incoherent to an English reader...i.e. language is also in the eye. Lord knows, it makes for difficulties....but there are also opportunities for invention, as Pound showed in his Cathay....
L: I totally agree that the final poems should be English poems not clunky translations from the Chinese. Still since we are two people who each knows one language intimately, we have an advantage over Pound... i completely trust you on the English version's poetic quality. the revision is not a question of that. it is its distance from the Chinese original. After all we are not here to rewrite the poem for [the Chinese poet]. Especially these are not my own work, i do not have the liberty to disregard/reduce certain layers of the poems (or to add new elements to them).
P: But let's be bold about translation.....some things, and sometimes important ones, I have found, will always be discarded and some things added....a boat must be re-fitted to sail in different waters, sometimes radically refitted....our translation will succeed if it advocates the original for which, of course, it cannot substitute....I remember once seeing a kangaroo lost in a snowstorm in Missouri.....it had clearly escaped from some local petting zoo...we don't want to make a kangaroo in the snow.
L: Yet, we don’t want to dress the kangaroo up in wolves’ skin in order to match the snow either…Please re-read my last version and see if there are any thing that you can incorporate back into the current version. The translation in my mind should expand rather than deduct the poem, because additional energy/efforts from the collective intelligence pool have poured in it. On the other hand, "leave it all out is another way, perhaps a truer way", quoting Ashbery...
Between a potential translator (T) and the editor (E) on the two step strategy:
T: I confess I have my doubts about anthologies where a bunch of poets who know nothing about the original language or culture are given "trots" to turn into poems. I don't think you have to be an expert in the original language, but you should know something, otherwise it turns into a kind of airport art.
E: I am touched by your concern/doubts. yet, as Mao stated once, “one can only learn the taste of the pear by tasting it”. i view the process of collaborating translation as a way of crossing the culture/language barrier on the micro-level, as a way of touching the other. In most cases, the "trots" here are much closer to the real thing than what Pound had when he tasted his pear. His poetic invention and his linguistic mistakes are more interesting than most of sinologists' correctness. to me, a bunch of poets who are willing to risk their reputations by venturing into a unfamiliar arena are more attractive than a bunch of sinologists/academics who have no interest in poetry per se …
A literal translator’s retrospective comment on the collaboration with a poet translator:
Hard to explain [the process]. Sometimes through [the poet translator]’s misreading my English, I became aware of meanings I didn’t realize my words would generate. Also as we went back and forth about individual poems, even lines and words, I could feel [the poet translator] coming closer to what I saw [the original] words meaning. I sensed that the process of gradually discerning the structure of meaning through my sometimes misleading or disorganized English was exciting for [the poet translator]. Finally, [the poet translator]’s questions or word choices often required me to consult [the Chinese poet], which I had done little during the translation phase (when I tried a few times early, I had trouble getting answers I could use). But when I returned with very specific questions I sometimes discovered that I had made silly mistakes in my translation (thank God I caught them!), and I also got much clearer answers from [the Chinese poet].
The translations in the anthology are the result of collaboration of many talented people. This is manifested in the long list of translators at the back of the book. More than 20 Chinese scholars, linguists, graduate students and sometimes the poets themselves contributed in the literal translation. Most of them have an intimate knowledge of the Chinese language, either as a mother tongue or as a main focus of study for many years. They painstakingly translated as accurately as they could the Chinese original poems into English drafts. Many a time, the drafts were accompanied by comments and notes, multiple choices of wordings, to clarify or to point out hidden layers of original work without glossing over it. Many literal translators also participated in the second step of the translation, the transformation of the drafts into poetry. They offered background information on the language and culture in general and choice words, rhythm, voices, personal characteristics of individual poet at hand, as questions often raised by the poet-translators working from the drafts. Most importantly their feedback provided the needed check on the accuracy of the final poems. Their efforts are largely responsible for the fundamental accuracy of the translation in the anthology. For poets whose literal translators were not available for the second step consultation, I would play the role of the “reality” check of the literal translators.
An equal number of poets writing in English (mostly American, one Canadian, one British and one Egyptian) participated in the second step of the translation. These poets are poets whose poetics attracted my attention before or during the project. Many are established poets with multiple volumes of published poetry and are winners of prizes and fellowships in poetry. In most cases, their seriousness in their poetic undertaking was demonstrated by their previous experience in translation either directly or in collaboration from another language. They shared the common belief, as I deduced from reading their poetry even though I never took a formal survey of their opinion, that language means and therefore translation is possible. Their poetic style varies greatly, yet they tend to be versatile in handling language, employing various strategies, and commanding large vocabularies in their own creative work.
Whenever possible, I attempted to “match” the voice of a poet translator with that of a Chinese poet. One of the thoughts behind this “matching” was to see if it is possible to translate the individualized resonance in poetry besides the meaning (the idea or the imagery). The poet translators come with their individualized strategies in treatment of line breaks, rhythm, schemes of extension and contraction of space and pace. It would serve the poetry better if they would be able to utilize their talent “naturally”. Other considerations such as similar social identities, beliefs and poetics sometimes also play into the matching schemes. However, my role as an editor/match maker figured small in the success of the poem/marriage. The creativity and skills of the poet-translators and their devotion to their charge are entirely responsible for the poetic success of the translations.
The large team of translators who contributed to the anthology offered many diverse voices, many strategies in translation and poetics, to say nothing of more abundant energy and intelligence than a smaller pool of translators. No effort has been made on my part to standardize the translations, as I saw the diversity as an advantage. The reader will find translators with a minimalist approach who intentionally left traces of “raw” material uncovered, translators working with scholarly diligence, documenting their translations with notations and comments, translators who tweaked every word to search the perfection solution in translation as in their own poetry, and some even tried hard to make their Chinese counterparts adopt an American accent. “There are many roads to China”, says Tony Barnstone, Willis Barnstone’s son, in his insightful essay “The Poem behind the Poem: Literary Translation as American Poetry”. I hope this book offers a few useful tips and a road map for those who intend to travel far. Readers would benefit most through such translation by examining the bilingual text in detail and accepting the challenge of comparing translators’ styles in order to reach the “Chinese” poetics.
In spite of the efforts and deliberations by the translators and this editor, the outcry by Wai-lim Yip remains relevant. In his introduction to Chinese Poetry, an anthology of classical Chinese poetry edited and translated by himself, Yip protests against “gross distortions of Chinese poetry by translators who allowed the target language to mask and master the indigenous Chinese aesthetic, creating treacherous modes of representation”. Although this anthology is of contemporary work, Yip’s description of the Chinese language and its difference from Indo-European languages remains true: “the Chinese language has articles and personal pronouns, they are often dispensed with in poetry. This opens up an indeterminate space for readers to enter and reenter for multiple perceptions rather than locking them into some definite perspectival position or guiding them in a certain direction.” However, difficulties arise in translation from Chinese to English, as I observed during composition of this anthology, not so much from “tyrannical framing functions of the English language” as Yip put it, but from the fact that each language resides in distinct domain of metaphysics, at least in part, in different epistemology. In other words, each language offers a different conception of knowledge, therefore the world. The so-called Chinese poetics and the answer to the question of what Chinese poetry can offer to the world literature are precisely derived from the fundamental stand of Eastern ideology …
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