Lee Ambrozy on The Art of Translation

2008.04.11

Jiang Rong and Howard Goldblatt in dialogue.

Photo by Tom Saunders

A few weeks back, Penguin Publishing Group and the Arts Council England hosted the first ever Sino-British Literary Translation Workshop on a hazy bamboo mountainside in the historic resort town of Moganshan, just a few hours north of Shanghai. Translators of various levels and backgrounds convened to discuss the finer points of textual and contextual understanding when moving texts across languages and cultures. The workshop was timed to coincide with the English release of Chinese bestseller and Mainland publishing anomaly Wolf Totem (Lang Tuteng), translated by the uncontested king of modern Chinese literature in translation, Howard Goldblatt. The basic premise of the workshop was that the responsibility of the translator is not simply to convert text from one language to another, but that in the act of translation, he or she becomes a cultural authority in his or her own right.

Wolf Totem, rumored to be one of the most widely circulated books in China since Mao’s “Little Red Book,” is a non-traditional, allegorical novel that examines the character of the wolf through not only narrative, but collected parables and folklore. It grew out of the experiences of the author, Jiang Rong, a pensive, conservative-looking man who sports Jiang Zemin-esque glasses. His time in Inner Mongolia inspired the book, 11 years laboring on a farm during the Cultural Revolution. He eventually finished Wolf Totem after six years of writing; it is purported to be a muffled criticism of the complacency of the Han people, ripe with nationalist undertones. According to publishing insiders, the book sold more than 4 million copies in its legal copyrighted edition since its 2004 release, which likely amounts to less than 40% of the book’s total sales on the mainland (including pirated editions).

While Wolf Totem can be read as a didactic exposition of the weaknesses of the Han character, it is often interpreted as a treatise on China’s overwhelming nationality and its place in global politics. Thus, Wolf Totem’s English translation is perceived as a weighty task of near patriotic importance, one that could only be entrusted to the most capable scholar: Professor Goldblatt.

Imagine the shock of these collected translators, then, when the cultural medium we idolized most was picked to shreds, scrutinized and questioned forthright by Goldblatt’s latest “translatee.” At an open discussion between the two, Jiang Rong expressed unequivocal unhappiness with this scholar’s interpretation of his magnum opus. Aside from nitpicky linguistic details, the omission of the classical references to wolves that headed each chapter, and other maladies related to its abridgement, the greatest offense of this English version was the interpretation of Han people as “the Chinese.”

Most of the Chinese translators in attendance nodded in agreement. They argued: it is ridiculous that Han would be translated as “Chinese,” why, with so many other ethnicities falling under the banner of one nation, how could the English reader catch the author’s true meaning, let alone the gist of the entire book? They protested loudly, citing China’s multiethnic population, all the while taking for granted that all Western readers know––as Goldblatt himself surely does––that the People’s Republic claims to enfranchise 55 national minorities, and is proud of them, each and every one.

The cultural sensitivity brimming from a room of bilingual spectators hampered argumentative words, but still the crowd began to feel polarized. Informative tones were directed at Goldblatt, and we minor translators of the Western persuasion sat in awe and amusement at the comedy of misinterpretation unfolding before us. Under the interrogation lamps, Goldblatt defended his decision to use “Chinese” as a stand-in for “Han”: were he talking about the Mongolians, the Tibetans, or any other ethnic minority, he would have used the corresponding categorization. But to the average Western reader, he explained, the prevailing Han ethnicity (which accounts for approximately 90% of China’s population) were simply the “Chinese.” The translation of Han into “Chinese,” he claimed, was thus no mistake at all. He tossed in a host of other reasons, including the fact that using “specialized” terms such as “Han” might alienate lay readers.

Jiang Rong was still distressed: a generation of young Chinese (probably mostly Han, but nevertheless) readers would use Goldblatt’s translation to practice their English, so how could he explain away this intrinsic error? Perhaps he, too, was wondering how he could articulate the very fundamental differences in how we imagine others see us, and how we are actually seen. This was, after all, a translation for a Western literary audience, not the Chinglish-speaking world.

For me, as a translator mainly of texts about contemporary art in China, this cautionary tale leads to another related question: How is it exactly that we go about viewing and interpreting art at an axiomatically global moment? While the appreciation of fine art does not require knowledge of a vocabulary or grammar (two eyes and visual references will do—perhaps one reason why Chinese art has been so much more widely circulated in the West than Chinese fiction), this candid dialogue between the most respected translator in the field and his subject demonstrated that not even professional eminence and the best of intentions can mitigate utter misunderstanding. One wonders how many similar conversations have unfolded between Chinese artists and the foreign curators and critics of their works. This emotional confrontation revealed to parties vested in Sino-Western mutual perception that the way in which our chosen “other” views us isn’t necessarily the way we like best—a warning worth heeding at a moment when so much of the relationship between China and the world beyond it plays out in the contested middle ground of translation.

— 文/ Lee Ambrozy