![]() ![]() By “self” I mean that reservoir of memories and experiences that cannot be separated from cultural and political conditioning.Īs a writer who has migrated from a culture far from the European tradition, what I must confront with the alphabetic language (in my case the English language) is the chasm of cultural differences mixed up with mutual ignorance of one another’s history. This was not a mere matter of linguistic translation (which is hard enough) but of a deeper matter concerning the translation of the writer’s self. But somehow, in English, I could not just depict a Chinese landscape or its living history as I had done in Chinese. These ways of constructing a story had hardly altered when I began to write in English after moving to Britain. The characters are depicted through their particular forms of language, be it their dialect or a common form of speech-in China, almost every region has its own dialect, and Mandarin is an official language that is mostly spoken in the northern part of the country. So I construct everything around these two horizontal and vertical elements. Characters are tied to their living spaces, and their development is tied to the changes in that space. Then the architectural elements come in-whether it is an apartment in a tall, modern building or a traditional courtyard. I must know if I am writing about a village or a city and whether it is an agricultural village made up of cultivated land and animals or a car-choked city full of workers and the newly rich. I know for certain that when I write in Chinese, landscape comes first. These are the dimensions that allow my imagination to enter my novel and people it with characters. When I am beginning a novel, there are two fundamental things I need to establish. I especially want to discuss the layers of self-translation migrant writers have to undertake when they write in a new language and culture. On the contrary, I want to talk about the possibilities of translation. But such an imagistic mode of conveying meaning leaves the European translator floundering.īut I am not here to talk about untranslatability. There’s a beautiful simplicity in one tree being 木, two being a wood, three a forest. All the basic structures such as subject, action, and specific time have to be projected by the translator onto the ideograms. If one reads a Tang poem and its English translation alongside, one quickly gets a sense of the difficulty of the translator’s task. ![]() It’s also nonspecific about time and action. Perhaps because of its iconographic nature, Chinese writing is more condensed-each symbol holds more meaning than a word. And if you put three trees together, it makes a forest-森 ( sun). If you put two trees together, it becomes a grove-林 ( lin). To give a concrete example, in Chinese, a tree is 木 (pronounced mu). Of the many differences between the two systems, the first and foremost is visual. But you swim on.įor a writer coming from an idiographic and pictorial writing system, this transition to an alphabetic system is complicated. And the other bank is not always in view. To get across, you have to deal with treacherous weeds and hidden rocks and whirlpools of culture and concept. The process of self-translation and linguistic translation is like crossing a wild river from one bank to the other. It’s more difficult and involves the writer’s whole, lived experience. Self-translation is not like translation as we might ordinarily know it. But when I write in English, I don’t quite think in English. Then, at the age of 30, I switched to writing in English. I used to write and think in Chinese ideograms. A few years later, when the novel was published, the Chinese text remained exactly as it was, though the rest of the book had been revised hundreds of times. ![]()
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