4: Some Changes Around Here

One of the great things about this project has been the feedback we've received from people who have studied Tang poetry a great deal longer than we. Matt's attracted most of that feedback, because he's more social about his interests than I am--I'm one of those writers who regards society like a sheer cliff over deep water: if you jump off and know what you're doing, you know you'll have an experience like no other, refreshing and exhilarating and rewarding, but before you jump you always have this creeping feeling that you're about to make a horrible mistake. Despite this, I get to benefit from the conversations Matt has, because he tells me about them.

As a result of Matt's chat with his friend Lucas, I'm trying out two experiments with this poem. First, I've placed the character-by-character translation below the full translation, for reasons I outlined in my response to Matt's excellent post on the questionable value of character-by-character translations. Second, I've posted the verse in traditional Chinese characters, rather than the simplified characters we've used thus far. Look at the difference between the two "spellings" of our poet's name, Zhang: 張 is what it looks like in traditional, as opposed to the simplified 张. Note the extra lines on the right side.

Chinese characters have thousands of years of history behind them, rising out of the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty (1600 BCE) through their codification under the Qin (221 BCE) and beyond. These developments were sometimes matters of convenience, and sometimes of political import. Confucius regarded 正名 zhèngmíng , the rectification of names, as a key responsibility of good government - he was referring to the proper use of language in general, but it's good to bear this in mind when thinking about the import of language and writing in Chinese history. Anyone who's seen the movie Hero by Zhang Yimou has seen the import that character forms can have: the heroes of that film die (essentially) on behalf of a character set.

Traditional characters have roughly the same forms as those of the clerical script used in the fifth century CE. In the late nineteenth and early 20th century, Chinese scholars and statesman concerned with the country's modernization advocated a shift away from traditional characters, which they judged to be too complex to write and, more importantly, too difficult to teach. China at this point had a very low literacy rate compared to Western countries, and the thought was that public education required simpler characters. In the darkest of the "sick man of Asia" days, some scholars even advocated for abandoning the Chinese language altogether, in favor of the more "modern" language of (I kid you not) Esperanto.

To make a very long story unconscionably short and open the gates for gross overgeneralization, the Qing dynasty fell apart at the beginning of the 20th century, and early attempts at democracy devolved into the autocratic Guomindang on the one hand and the revolutionary Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the other. Then the Imperial Japanese invaded and brutalized as much of China as they could get their hands on, while the Guomindang resisted with organized and the CCP with guerrilla warfare. The Japanese lost the war, but the CCP didn't stop fighting - the Guomindang lost control of China to Mao's CCP soon after, ultimately taking refuge (as Ming Dynasty loyalists did before them) on the island of Formosa, or Taiwan. To this day, the heirs of the Communists control the mainland, and the now-representative democracy that succeeded the Guomindang controls Taiwan.

The government of the People's Republic of China (set up by the CCP) undertook a number of reforms soon after their victory in 1949, including the simplification of the character sets, along lines proposed at the beginning of the century. The simplified forms, like 张 instead of 張 or 说 (speak) instead of 說, or 爱 love instead of 愛, were not created wholesale: many were cursive abbreviations of the traditional characters, used in private correspondence and in calligraphy, while some, like the change in the character for "love," removed elements of the initial composition (to quote a writing group friend, the science fiction writer John Chu, the simplification process "took the heart (心) out of love.")

Nevertheless, as the PRC propagated its simplified characters, the Taiwanese government, eager like many governments in crisis to preserve its authority with appeals to traditional values, held firm to the traditional character set. Meanwhile, overseas Chinese communities continued to use the characters that they always knew. Entering Chinatown in New York or Boston or San Francisco, you're more likely to encounter traditional Chinese than simplified, though this is starting to change. The simplified / traditional character debate is politically fraught, concerning the obvious tensions between the PRC and Taiwan, but also the PRC's relish in the glories of China's past, and the legally-enforced use of "standard" characters and "common" dialect. Those interested in the subject can check out Wikipedia's page dedicated to the debate.

This isn't a soapbox, nor is it a political blog (though if we're to believe Aristotle, man is a political animal, so we shouldn't ever expect politics to be far from any subject of human concern). I'm a man of peace, and limited understanding, and I think that if we're trying to translate these poems accurately we should present them as their poets originally conceived them, in traditional characters.

tl;dr: You'll notice more lines in the Chinese around here in the next few weeks. Do not adjust your television set.

On the Nature of Character Translations

Recently my friend Lucas suggested that character-by-character translations of Chinese poetry, like the ones we offer, are generally misleading and confusing to lay readers. A couple nights ago at dinner I was asked about such translations and also found I had a much harder time than I would've thought explaining why we publish them. I'm not done with them necessarily, but I think it's very much worth a discussion.

Why do we do them? I generally take the following two reasons most seriously. For my part, before any consideration of the reader, I find it helpful in my process of close reading. It forces me to think actively about each character, not just rely on a higher-level understanding of the 'sense' of a line. Where character-by-character translations relate to close reading, I associate the practice with the book 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger (which I have enjoyed a lot, but find less and less useful the more translating I do; most of the translations in it just aren't very good).

The other argument is that such translations might help the lay reader better understand the 'relationship' between the original and the translation -- they highlight the process of translating and in particular the distance between these two languages. Readers can examine the translator's art-in-progress, and better understand the nature of the choices he or she makes. All elements of translation that may normally be ignored.

I think objections to this kind of 'intermediate translation' deserve to be taken seriously, though. For one, it may be completely wrong to see character-by-character translations as legitimately representative of an intermediate step in the translator's process. Translation requires not only an engagement with the meaning of each individual character, but a series of parallel engagements with phrases, and verses, and the poem as a whole. Grammar is not something one considers wholly separately from individual words. It cannot be that distinct. The meanings of words affect instantly their position vis-a-vis other words, and a word's place in a phrase or in the context of the poem as a whole affects its individual meaning. When readers examine a character-by-character translation, they may imagine, then, that it represents how the Chinese "works" at a deeper level; that simply is not the case. Character-by-character translations are more properly conceived as reducing the original Chinese, by stripping it of its grammar and context, to a form more conducive to certain kinds of analysis (though potentially less conducive to the best, most subtle and complete analysis).

Further, Lucas points out that such 'word-for-word translations as intermediate step' are not generally done when translating other languages. Honestly, I think the reason word-for-word isn't done when translating other languages into English might have more to do with the relative youth of sinology as a field. Plus it's just so easy to work character by character compared to word by word in other languages, because it happens that Chinese does not conjugate or decline. That is, of course, an explanation and not a justification.

I remember when I first read "19 Ways", I pored over the character-by-character translation. Years later I read it again and thought, "I can't believe I ever looked at it like that, what a fool I was." And as I kept looking at it I thought again, "No, no, that isn't even right" (I think they had 但 as "but" instead of "only"). So I was potentially mislead both by the format and by their execution of the format. Maybe the solution is relegating one or two example character-by-character bits to an appendix, with appropriate caveats about the particular nature of character-by-character translation, for the obsessive lay reader. Perhaps it can be safely done if the caveats are well written. What do you think?