Striking Root

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I’m delighted to post an article written specially for Fusion View by translator Nicky Harman about the current Chinese to English translation she is working on and the process of translating literature of one culture into another.

I invited Nicky to write this piece because I wanted to learn more about the process of translation. In particular - and rather embarrassingly - I do not read Chinese at all and can only manage a smattering of broken Cantonese. My French is miles better! I suppose it’s to do with having grown up speaking and reading English and then being over in the UK where I only ever use English - and a bit of French. So it’s especially interesting for me to meet an English person who is fluent in Chinese, which should be my mother tongue but isn’t!

With a couple of well-received transations to her name and a prestigous award from PEN, Nicky is looking for a literary agent to represent her new work “Striking Root”, a translation of Nanjing-born poet Han Dong’s first novel - so if you know anyone who might be right for her project, please contact me (by clicking on “Email Me” in the sidebar) and I will forward your email to Nicky.

Nicky writes:

I teach translation on a multi-lingual MSc (Masters) course at Imperial College London, and have special responsibility for teaching the Chinese to English and Spanish to English groups, and teaching translation technology tools. My chief love, however, is Chinese to English literary translation, and this I do in my spare time.

Striking Root

I have just completed a beautiful first novel by Nanjing-born poet HAN Dong. It’s called Striking Root, and is an account of a family sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Many Chinese writers have taken the Cultural Revolution as their theme, and much of their work makes painful reading. Han Dong’s book is different: it is written with great delicacy and wit, and somehow manages to convey the complexity of life during this momentous decade – the tragedy, the cruelty and the humour – in its description of the struggles of very ordinary people to make a decent life for themselves in extreme circumstances. I won an American PEN award for part of the translation, and have had chapters published in literary journals, but like all good books, this one works as a whole, and now I need a literary agent or a publisher who will take it on. Why this book? This was one suggested by a Chinese friend: it won a national literary prize in China. I believe it has a universal appeal.

Country Life in China

The book I translated before that was also set in the Chinese countryside, but China Along the Yellow River is non-fiction. The author, CAO Jinqing, is a sociologist and writes about the lives of country people in the 1990s. Dull? Not at all. Professor Cao is marvellous writer, with an insatiable curiosity about the lives of his interviewees. The book was first published as an academic hardbook (very pricy), but has now appeared as a rather more affordable Routledge paperback.

Racy Love Affair

The first full-length novel I translated was K – The Art of Love by Hong Ying, a marvellously racy and vivid fictionalised account of a love affair between a real-life Englishman teaching in Wuhan in the 1930s, and the wife of his head of department.

Chinese for Fun…?

I always loved languages, and when I was in my teens, I thought it would be fun to learn Chinese. I’m sometimes not sure that ‘fun’ is quite the right word! (Peering at characters is ruinous to the eyesight!). However, I was lucky enough to be able to do a university degree in Chinese, and I have never regretted it. In fact, every time I pick up a book in Chinese, I feel enormously privileged to be able to read it, to have a window into that world.

Chinese novels

Since the mid-1980s there has been an explosion of fictional writing in Chinese (I’m talking about mainland China, simply because that’s what I know most about). So much is being written in Chinese, covering such a vast range of topics and styles that it is hard to have a comprehensive understanding of what is going on. I know what I like, I suppose you could say – and I rely on Chinese friends suggesting books that they have enjoyed. I love some of the modern detective novels, for instance …. If only English readers and publishers knew how good they are!

The process of translation

Translation is a sort of partnership with the author, quite a different process from creative writing, and yet wonderfully creative in its own way - the process of conveying a work from one language that you love into another language that you love is a most satisfying one. So as a translator, you have to really want to make your book available to English readers. That’s the emotional bit. But you have to use your head too, or perhaps I should say, your ears. Your readership is important too. How does what you have written sound to them? Does it read as you imagine your author would want it to read, if he or she had written in English? Being a good translator means imagining yourself as the author, and as the reader too.

Chinese is a very different language from English, and describes a very different culture. That makes the translator’s work especially difficult. For example, people in China are often referred to by their job title and surname, where in English they would be called by their surname or first name. So shall we call ‘Teacher Wang’, Ms/Mr Wang in English? Or Teacher Wang (which will take a bit of getting used to as it sounds ‘foreign’ but is what the original Chinese says)? Do we translate Chinese characters meaning ‘father’s sister’ (as opposed to mother’s sister) simply as ‘aunt’? or should we be more specific? There are stylistic differences as well as cultural differences: Chinese writers sometimes add emphasis to their text by means of repetition. In English, we tend to prefer understatement, to add emphasis by choice of words or phrases, and to avoid repetition. These are just a few short examples – I could write much, much more about what is a fascinating process!

Ideally, I like to discuss my translations with a Chinese person who has good English and an interest in translation. That person may be the author, or may be someone else who agrees to check my work for me. I actually enjoy that form of collaboration, and find it very rewarding.

I have never translated into Chinese, as my written Chinese is not good enough. One of the rewards of translating into ones native language is having at ones command all that deep knowledge and life-long experience of ones native language.

Written by Guestblogger: Nicky Harman

Photo: of Nicky, thanks to Imperial College; of Han Dong & Striking Root Chinese book cover thanks to books.sina.com