The Writing Life

How's this for an occupational testimonial: "There is no such thing as a good translator. The best translators make the worst mistakes. No matter how much I love them, all translators must be closely watched."

Or this: "O ye translators, do not sodonymize us!"

Or: "Traduttore-traditore." (Translator = traitor.)

Who are these people everyone loves to hate, and, if they're so bad, how do they get away with what they're doing?

Well, I confess: I'm one of them. I'm a translator.

And our accusers? The patronizing quote at the very top comes from Isaac Bashevis Singer. Later in his career (1978), thanks to a host of translators, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature and changed his tune: "Since every language contains its own unique truths," he admitted, "translation is the very spirit of civilization."

Next comes Milan Kundera, the reigning bête noire of our fraternity, who sheds translators the way snakes shed skin, and is said to devote almost as much time to overseeing foreign editions of his work as he does to writing (in the quote above, he is inveighing against a translator's decision to use a synonym from time to time).

Finally, we must thank the Italians for reminding us that every translation is a betrayal. Is this a great job, or what?

Oh, sure, Pushkin called us "couriers of the human spirit," and Goethe referred to literary translation as "one of the most important and dignified enterprises in the general commerce of the world." But theirs was a kinder, gentler age. More recently, Jorge Luis Borges, whose relationship with his English translator, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, resembled nothing so much as a Stephen King novel, wrote in a surprisingly positive vein: "The translator's work is more subtle, more civilized than that of the writer: the translator clearly comes after the writer. Translation is a more advanced stage of writing."

It's been my experience that most writers at least tolerate the men and women given the task of rewriting -- for that is surely the nature of translation -- their work into other languages. Sometimes, however rarely, a personal relationship between author and translator grows out of the project, whether as cordial as that between, say, Umberto Eco and William Weaver, or as destructive as that between Borges and Di Giovanni. In some cases, the writer has been known to marry his translator! To wit, Jose Saramago and his translator from Portuguese to Spanish, Pilar Del Rio, who live and work happily on a remote island.

I count as friends a few novelists whose work I've translated from the Chinese. In part that is a result of the trust the authors -- few of whom read English -- have placed in me, and in part it is due to their willingness to deal with inevitable queries regarding difficulties, even errors, in their texts. Mo Yan, for instance, whose Red Sorghum brought him international recognition in the early 1990s, is one of those gracious individuals who sings the praises of his translator as often as his translator sings his as a novelist. Well aware of the impossibility of a one-to-one correspondence between Chinese and English, he is always helpful in revealing obscure cultural and historical aspects of his work, and comprehends the unavoidable fact that a translation can only complement, not replicate, the original. And yet the relationship cannot help but be fragile, given an author's desire to have his work reach the broadest possible audience with the exact effect it had on its original readers. Too often, that desire is accompanied by absolute ignorance about the nature of translation, or a disdain for it, or a combination of the two.

One writer whose novel I translated to a satisfying measure of acclaim is said to have assumed that the name that appears under his on the title page actually assigned the translation to his Chinese students and then simply polished the English for publication. Since he and I have never met, I can only guess that for him, and for other Chinese writers, the idea that there might be someone out here who not only knows both languages well, but who actually considers the enterprise as something more than a student's exercise, and takes pride in doing it well, is truly alien.

Of course, that writer may have reasons for believing what he does. I remember, back in 1981 while I was teaching at UCLA, hearing a similar story from a young graduate student who was in the first post-Cultural Revolution contingent to come to the United States. He recounted being part of a project to translate Joseph Heller's Catch-22 into Chinese. Since the administrator had only one copy of the book, he tore it apart and handed it out to the members of a class, one chapter per student. Why not? It's only a translation!

On another occasion, Mobil Oil commissioned me to translate a prize-winning book on economic reforms (translators can't always be choosy). The author had little knowledge of the outside world and knew me only by my Chinese name. We spoke several times on the phone and corresponded in Chinese frequently over the many months it took me to slog through 600-plus pages of industrial and bureaucratic prose. Finally, after compiling a list of localisms and concepts with which I was unfamiliar, I wrote for his help. That's when it hit him: I was a foreigner and therefore didn't really know Chinese! The return letter could not have been more condescending if it had been written to a 10-year-old.

Translators may well agree with George Steiner's observation that "Ninety percent of all translation is inadequate," but only as an acknowledgment that, once threshed into a different language, a piece of writing is transformed, changed, not as a measure of the quality of our work. Translation is inadequate, but it's all we have if good writing is to have its life extended, spatially and temporally.

Translation is, of course, an unfinished project, while an original work is frozen in time at the moment of publication. Unlike musical compositions or dramas, however, novels and poems are not written to be re-performed or re-created; they are, in a sense, irreplaceable. That we must nonetheless replace them, if the works are to have wider readership, is a given. How translators go about the task, how we deal with the intricacies of cross-cultural communication -- these are the things at issue.

A case in point is the word ketou (literally, to knock one's head loudly on the floor). While "kowtow" is one of those rare Chinese words that has made it into the English lexicon, Western readers cannot know the range of contexts, nuances and tones that give it its evocative power in Chinese. One kowtows out of reverence, fear, remorse, gratitude and more, and the translator is obliged to somehow capture the particular sense in each instance in ways that are subtle and apt.

Some languages can resist adequate translation -- the words are simply unavailable or inefficient -- while other languages may provide richer choices. In a novel I recently co-translated with Sylvia Li-chun Lin -- Red Poppies, by the ethnic Tibetan Alai -- a mild oath used by all characters is "Tian na!" The closest literal (and obviously inadequate) English rendering is "Heavens!" After wrestling with several possibilities, we decided to have each character say something different, in languages that -- for each context -- worked better than English. We used "Ai caramba!" "Ach du lieber!" "Mama mia!" "Oy gevalt!" and, even, "Merde!" Alas, we couldn't get them past the editor. Damn!

Sometimes, of course, a translation can enhance a work in ways the author never imagined. Gabriel García Mar{acute}quez has said he prefers Gregory Rabassa's English translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude to the Spanish original, to which Rabassa replied, "That is probably less of a compliment to my translation than it is to the English language." James Thurber tipped his hat another way: When told by a French reader that his stories read even better in French, he replied, "Yes, I tend to lose something in the original."

I am sometimes asked why I translate, since to many it seems a thankless vocation. Why, they ask, don't I write my own novels, since I have lived (they assume) an interesting life and must by now have an idea of what a novel should be? I can only say that not all translators are closet novelists, and that I do not consider translation to be a lesser art -- one that ought to lead to something better. The short, and very personal, answer to the question is: Because I love it. I love to read Chinese; I love to write in English. I love the challenge, the ambiguity, the uncertainty of the enterprise. I love the tension between creativity and fidelity, even the inevitable compromises. And, every once in a while, I find a work so exciting that I'm possessed by the urge to put it into English. In other words, I translate to stay alive. The satisfaction of knowing I've faithfully served two constituencies keeps me happily turning good, bad, and indifferent Chinese prose into readable, accessible, and -- yes -- even marketable English books. Tian na! •