I had a fantastic discussion with Kang Zhengguo today that eventually developed into his offering a full-blown evisceration of my translation below. If I were always lucky enough to be so eviscerated, I would be a much wiser person:
[If you want to study literature, you must understand] intertextuality. [Do you know that word?]
[Yes Teacher Kang, yes. I was think--]
[This word is a set phrase. It doesn't mean that. It comes from a poem by Li Yuannian from the Han Dynasty. "In the north there was a beautiful woman." Do you know Qu Yuan?]
[Oh. Yes, but I've only--]
[This one is a reference to Qu Yuan's Nine Songs. "Mountain Ghosts." "Oh if through mountain depths / once wandered a traveler." And this one's not really right at all.]
Kang Laoshi (for those who might not know, laoshi is a common Chinese honorific applied to teachers) is a tall, broad-shouldered, shuffling Chinese intellectual from Xi'an. He has a a crackly Shaanxi accent, and he speaks directly, through your words if they're in his way, but not interrupting, like sand being poured steadily down over trails of smoke in the air. I won't try to encapsulate his fascinating life into a few lame bon mots, but I recommend his memoir, which has been well translated into English, entitled Confessions.
Stay tuned for explorations of the above allusions, my thoughts on enjambment, and more! Same web-site, same web-time. So, tomorrow maybe.
Your first few sentences remind me of the last line of "A Good Man is Hard to Find": "She would have been a nice woman if there were someone to shoot her every minute of her life."
ReplyDeleteFlannery O'Connor aside, that sounds like a wonderful and bracing conversation! I wish I'd been there. One of the great things about a project like this is that we have so many opportunities to be corrected.
Intertextuality, also, is really tough to deal with in translation even when you're aware of it. I don't know how one would even start translating Joyce, say, into Chinese (though apparently at least one good translation exists). Thoughts?