|
Why Howard chooses his words carefully
By Guo Shuhan (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-09-07 07:54 "I'm just like a shark, you know, a shark must keep swimming to be alive," said renowned translator Howard Goldblatt at the 2009 Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) last week. "As a translator, I keep translating. Otherwise, I might be 'going to visit Karl Marx' (a Chinese expression to mean people's passing away) in the near future." Goldblatt, or Ge Haowen in Chinese, is research professor of Chinese at the University of Notre Dame in the United States and renowned for his devotion to contemporary Chinese literature translation and won the 2009 Special Book Award of China. Although he jokes in Chinese that translation is a work of chili bu taohao (a thankless task), he has introduced more than 40 Chinese books of 20 contemporary authors to overseas readers in the past three decades. His translation works include the award-winning novels Red Poppies (Chen'ai Luoding) by Alai and Wolf Totem (Lang Tuteng) by Jiang Rong. During last Friday's speech, Goldblatt defined what made a good translator and what made good translations. "A cultural bridge, a worker and a creative writer" are the three roles Goldblatt says a translator must master. When he works on the first draft of a translation, he regards himself as a cultural bridge to transmit information from one language to another. During the second draft, he becomes a worker taking words from one language and putting them into the words of another. Finally in the last draft, he puts his creative writing hat on and applies his language skills to turn the translation into a readable and interesting story. When it came to criteria of a good translation, Goldblatt cites principles of Xin (faithfulness), Da (expressiveness) and Ya (elegance) by Yan Fu, a Chinese scholar and translator in the 19th century. Sometimes it seems nearly impossible to balance all three categories, especially when there is something wrong in the text itself. When he worked on Notes of a Desolate Man (Huangren Shouji) by Chu Tien-wen, an author from Taiwan, he discovered a song Dream an Impossible Dream cited from the movie Don Quixote. The words were right but the order was wrong. His first reaction was to correct the order. But "what if it's not the author's but the movie character's mistake?" If he made the change, Chinese readers would take it as a translator's mistake but if he didn't, he would be blamed by the English readers. Goldblatt also says foreign readers need to understand cultural differences and historical backgrounds as clearly as possible. He says a scene from the novel The Moon Opera (Qing Yi) by Bi Feiyu was an example of cultural confusion. In the story, a couple lies in bed and the husband says to his wife: "If we don't have a daughter, you are my daughter." Goldblatt's foreign editor requested this sentence to be taken out because some readers would consider the "daughter" reference as a deviant act of incest. So the sentence was changed to: "the husband said an absurd sentence to his wife". Goldblatt is now undertaking translating Sandalwood Punishment (Tanxiang Xing) by Mo Yan and is planning to work on Rickshaw Boy (Luotuo Xiang Zi) by Lao She and Corn (Yu Mi) by Bi Feiyu. (China Daily 09/07/2009 page8) |
