Xiaolu Guo
On Translation
One day, in the midst of working on my first novel in English, I was overwhelmed by a wave of frustration with my adopted language. With some fury, I knocked this out on the page and decided not to translate it:
我说我爱你，你说你爱自由。
为什么自由比爱更重要。没有爱，自由是赤裸裸的一片世界。
为什么爱情不能是自由的？
A few years later, when the novel was published, the Chinese text remained exactly as it was, though the rest of the book was revised hundreds of times.
*
I used to write and think in Chinese ideograms. Then, at the age of thirty, I switched to writing in English. But when I write in English, I don’t quite think in English. I have to self-translate. Self-translation is not like translation as we might ordinarily know it. It’s more difficult and involves the writer’s whole, lived experience. The process of self-translation and linguistic translation is like crossing a wild river from one bank to another. To get across, you have to deal with treacherous weeds, hidden rocks, and whirlpools of culture and concept. And the other bank is not always in view. But the swimmer goes on.
For a writer coming from an idiographic and pictorial writing system, this transition to an alphabetic system is complicated. Of the many differences between the two systems, the first and foremost is visual. To give a concrete example, in Chinese, a tree is 木 (pronounced mu). If you put two trees together, it becomes a wood - 林 (lin). And if you put three trees together, it makes a forest - 森 (sun). Perhaps because of its iconographic nature, Chinese writing is more condensed—each symbol holds more meaning than a word. It’s also non-specific about time and action. If one reads a Tang poem and its English translation alongside, one quickly gets a sense of the difficulty of the translator’s task. All the basic structures such as subject, action and specific time have to be projected by the translator onto the ideograms. There’s a beautiful simplicity in one tree being 木, two being a wood, three a forest. But such an imagistic mode of conveying meaning leaves the European translator floundering.
But I am not here to talk about untranslatability. On the contrary, I want to talk about the possibilities of translation. I especially want to discuss the layers of self-translation migrant writers have to undertake when they write in a new language and culture.
When I am beginning a novel, there are two fundamental things I need to establish. One is horizontal, the other vertical. The horizontal is the landscape. The vertical is the social space. These are the dimensions that allow my imagination to enter my novel and people it with characters. I know for certain that when I write in Chinese, landscape comes first. I must know for sure 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. Then the architectural elements come in—whether it is an apartment in a tall, modern building or a traditional courtyard. Characters are tied to their living spaces, and their development is tied to the changes in that space. So I construct everything around these two horizontal and vertical elements. 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, which is mostly spoken in the northern part of the country.
These ways of constructing a story had hardly altered when I began to write in English after moving to Britain. But somehow, in English, I could not just depict a Chinese landscape or its living history as I had done in Chinese. 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. By ‘self’ I mean that reservoir of memories and experiences which cannot be separated from cultural and political conditioning.
As 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. I cannot just wait to be understood. It’s up to me as the writer to build a bridge spanning this abyss. Maybe one day Westerners will wake up and realise the importance of Asian culture, open the first page of Dream of the Red Chamber, or the Tale of Genji. But until that happens I must self-translate. I must convey my voice, culturally and politically, in a second tongue in order to influence my new readership. The way to do this is through the creation of a hybrid language. To self-translate, one has to hybridise language. Chinese concepts, that naturally live in the world of ideograms, must be recast in English idioms and syntax.
*
I am the complex product of Confucianism, Buddhism and Communism mixed up in a country newly opened after centuries of self-isolation. Ancient Chinese poetry as well as modern authors such as Lu Xun and Eileen Chang are my foundations. I was also attracted to foreign works in Chinese translation: the Japanese authors Kawabata and Mishima, the Indian author Tagore, and Russian authors, especially Dostoevsky and Chekhov. The poetic and epic traditions in those works were the backbone of my literary imagination. But as I grew into my twenties, I turned to the West. Contemporary authors such as Duras, Sartre, Beckett and Calvino, as well as the Beat Generation poets, began to play important roles in my literary experience.
But nothing is more significant than one’s own early physical and sensuous experiences. My hometown Wenling is a semi-tropical mountain region in Zhejiang Province. I grew up there after some years of living in a fishing village. The town and I both underwent huge changes. I turned from a skinny, snot-nosed, lonely girl into an adolescent hungry for escape, while my town grew from a small agricultural settlement—Xian—into a bustling city—Shi—of 1.4 million inhabitants. Today my hometown is full of brand-new, cheaply constructed skyscrapers that cast shadows on peasants trudging along motorways with their root vegetables stuffed in shoulder bags. Before the 1990s, the area was an agricultural valley with tea bushes and bamboo forests on the horizon. There was no tunnel going through Yandang Mountains and Wuyi Hills. The highways were only built in the 90s. We never left the town, and we walked everywhere within it.
When I was still in primary school, I would walk from our house under a hill bristling with bamboo, eventually arriving at the school, which was located at the foot of a mountain—Hushan, the Tiger Mountain. Often I was late for class because on the way I would lose myself in the brilliant bright blooms of rapeseed fields. The yellow flowers stretched beyond the reach of vision. My feet would get stuck in the mud where buffalos soaked themselves in muddy streams. Wiping my wet shoes on the grass, I’d then turn onto a dirt road and pass a factory where plastic goods were produced. The little creek in front of the factory was tinged with purple, red and blue—the chemical materials used to colour the plastic wares. Ignorant of its poisonous nature, as a child, the colourful water was a wondrous phenomenon, and I would soak my hands in it. I remember collecting bunches of plastic strings from the factory’s dumping ground to take to school. During my excruciating math class, I made plastic shrimps and bracelets with them. In the break, we girls would compare our handicraft. Our palms and fingers would be inked in red and blue. But we didn’t know those words then—cancer, pollution. Those terms only entered our minds in the 1990s.
I remember during our school lunch hours, students could either return home or eat in the canteen. Sometimes I’d grab a few pork buns from the canteen and climb up Tiger Mountain. There it was easy to sense that, indeed, a mu is a tree, two mu is a wood, and three is a forest. Everywhere I went as a young girl, there were large-leafed, semi-tropical trees. Wherever there were no trees, there were crops in fields. Sweet potatoes, rice, tea, wheat, mandarins and watermelons. Farmers and craftsmen lived next to the fields and mountains, working, sweating, swearing and struggling.
How much has that life and that landscape shaped my sense of being in the world? And how to render that life in English in a narrative form? It seems essential that I deliver that past and that sensibility in my writing if I am to communicate my view on my current life, a Western and urban one, caught between cultures and languages. That process is to me a self-translation, as a writer as well as an immigrant from a faraway place. I have decided to make a home in the West and to write in English. So I have had to search for a writing style which is not typical British English or American English, but a self-made Anglophone prose that expresses a sensibility, and narrates a history, unique to the storyteller. I am aware that the voice in my western books has always been changing, always evolving. I feel that all my writing life has been a voyage of discovery, searching for that voice, a voice that can be grasped and also appreciated by my readers. My readers now, not being Chinese, may not fully comprehend my writings. But whether or not these readers are politically engaged or apolitical, I have a minor responsibility to remind them of the multiple identities of my characters. All of us have multiple identities, but we don’t always realise or acknowledge it. This multiplicity means that one language is not enough to fully understand the world, just as knowing only one kind of climate is insufficient to understand nature. If we live only in one language, we miss something about the world.
*
When I was writing A Lover’s Discourse, my most recent novel in English, the same elements—landscape and architectural living space—were decided before the story. Perhaps ‘decided’ is not the right word. It is more that they chose me. The Regent’s Canal area in north-east London is the novel’s geographical setting, as is the ever-expanding immigrant scene. The winding, narrow English streets and the wet parks are the spaces my characters move about in. Along with those choices, I could not help but absorb the political atmosphere after the Brexit referendum. That naturally led to me putting another European country (Germany in this case) as a place of possible refuge for my two non-British Londoners. Would they move to Europe, or return to Asia? Both were transplants, where was their home? What could their relationship to Europe or Asia be? When I thought about these themes, I could only write in a comparative mode. I kept comparing the sky and the water of England to the sky and water in China. I kept comparing daily life in the uncertain political environment of Britain to daily life in China. I thought of the difference between a democratic society such as Britain and an autocratic one such as China. I thought of how the West’s ideology of the pursuit of happiness compares with the East’s pursuit of harmony. I translated my feelings into sentences and dialogue, putting them into the characters’ mouths and minds. My English sentences were tinted with a particular East Asian past: Confucian tradition and nostalgic romanticism fused with the sloganistic communist language. Although that past was not entirely present in my novel, it built the tone of the book, its voice. It’s in the voice of a female author from mainland China, who has tried to adopt Western culture by living in it and conversing with it. That’s also how I wrote my previous novels I Am China, and A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers.
But to self-translate is to study what surrounds me in my present life and how it relates to my past experiences. The past is always the sub-text and a strong ongoing memory. Since I have been living in this part of Europe, I am cut off from an agricultural life, or a collective way of living. Still, I search for them in my foreign existence. Every day, my walks take me to the paths where English nettles and wild elderflowers grow. My wanderings frequently lead me along the canal’s rust-coloured waters, either towards the west to Islington and Angel, or towards the east, to the Olympic Park and the Lee River. I can’t remember at which point I began to see urban beauty in these decaying industrial remnants. It makes me think of the former glories of Britain now forever lost. For a Chinese, this aesthetic is alien, but I have managed to grow into it. Like England’s cloudy skies, like baked beans on a breakfast plate, like pallid faces and muddied boots. These facets of life have been in my routine since I arrived. So the characters in my Western stories live with these landscape elements, along with European and American politics. But where does China fit in? For me China lies everywhere and is beneath everything. China formed the mind’s eye that I carry with me, through which I view everything, colouring the world with shades and hues. I must bring it out through my writing. This is the self to be translated.
*
I come from a tradition of artisans and craftsmen. My father was a fisherman-turned-painter, self-taught like most artisans of his generation. People from his generation were skilled with their hands. They were calligraphers, carpenters, tailors, trumpet makers, silk weavers, and porcelain producers, and they taught their children their skills by working together with them. I wanted to write about that tradition, but in a reflective way. I wanted to write about it in the context of a global environment. That’s how I came to write about the female protagonist in A Lover’s Discourse visiting an artisan village. I recalled my experiences of visiting Dafen village near Hong Kong, which specialises in copying classical paintings. The landscape there is tropical. In the narrow streets, husbands copy Renaissance paintings from Da Vinci or Botticelli; wives work on modern or postmodern works such as Monet or Chagall. Their children play in the background while grandmothers chop vegetables and meat. When I was staying in the village and interviewing the painters, I took this all in with quiet amazement. It was a flow of life without the need to define itself. The harshness of economic pressure in these people’s lives was transmuted into an almost meditative lifestyle. You could call this a kind of stoicism, or self-effacement. And for me it is the kind of life I want to portray in my ‘Western’ novels, highlighting the contrast with lives in the West. This prompts me to ask many questions. How does that kind of working life produce a global consumer culture? And why does the West hold such a prejudice against the Chinese way of thinking and working? Why don’t they realise the Chinese labour market is part of a post-colonial legacy, the monstrous product of Western power? By touching on these questions in my writing, I return to my early life, and mine it for rich details.
Still, I feel that I am swimming across the vast river, in mid-stream. My body is tangled in weeds, caught up in passing branches. My arms are heavy. I am trapped and I try not to drown. I struggle to find my way out towards the other side of the river.
*
All translation is simulation. Simulation is the attempt to reproduce the effects of something in another medium. But one cannot reproduce exactly the same expression in another culture or language. There is no such thing as a perfect translation or even a right translation. For example, Chinese speech and literary works tend to use lots of metaphors, perhaps partly because of its ancient history and poetic tradition. We say ‘flowing water does not rot’ ( 流水不腐 ), meaning a healthy life is one that keeps moving and welcomes change. We say ‘When the tree falls, the monkeys will be scattered’（树倒猴散) to speak of the fragility of fortune. We say ‘throw a brick to get a jade’ (抛砖引玉), meaning to toss an idea around in order to attract real wisdom. We say ‘move a tree it will die, move a man he will live’ (树挪死人挪活), to mean that human life is about doing things actively. But if one translates these metaphors directly into English without reinventing them, they sound false, especially to European ears. The word ‘translate’ betrays itself. The word comes from the Latin verb transferre, meaning ‘to carry across’. A good translation is never really a translation. It is a creative reproduction. A translator who undertakes the task of translating Homer’s Odyssey attempts to capture the emotional effect of people from that time. But how do you capture that? It does not happen if the translator translates word by word in a technical way. You need to capture the poetic force in a given language despite the historical gap. The English playwright George Chapman managed this feat. His translation inspired Keats to write a poem entitled ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’:
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into its ken.
Keats was amazed by Chapman’s alchemy, his transmutation of the unknown ancient world into a living English.
Another example is the ancient Chinese text I-Ching (sometimes translated as the Book of Changes), perhaps the most difficult Chinese book to translate. It is difficult not because it is written in guwen—the ancient and almost dead Chinese script—but because its cosmological and philosophical content is hard to interpret. Western translators have to make conjectures based on research and through comparison of different sources. I cannot believe that any foreign edition of I-Ching could work without a certain degree of reinvention and even free interpretation in the target language. I salute those who have undertaken such a painful task. Without them, we would still be living in the dark. But the significance of one particular type of literature is down to geopolitical influences. The Bible achieved its global influence by appearing in every major language (and through the machineries of colonialism), whereas I-Ching has not and will never have a similar effect. The geopolitical map is really the core of things, and we writers, especially the writers from the non-Western world, are engaged in an almost Sisyphean task: the rock of our work often slides back down the hill, but now and then we can get the rock to stay on the top of the hill.
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The writing of dialogue is another source of difference between non-white and mainstream western literature. In my opinion, there is more oral tradition and more folk references in the dialogue of non-European authors. For example, in V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, the dialogue seems to render effortlessly an oral history of where the author came from. Naipaul’s dialogue is rich in detail and has a fable-like quality. It often reads as unreal and symbolic, like a Buddhist text or a Hindu myth. Look at any page of A House for Mr. Biswas. When Mr. Biswas’s son is born, the midwife says: ‘Whatever you do, this boy will eat up his own mother and father.’ Then the village pundit responds: ‘The only thing I can advise is to keep him away from trees and water.’ And he continues: ‘Keep him away from rivers and ponds. And of course the sea. And another thing… he will have an unlucky sneeze… much of the evil this boy will undoubtedly bring will be mitigated if his father is forbidden to see him for twenty-one days.’
For a reader like me, this kind of speech feels familiar, like a homecoming even. I feel as though I am reading a Chinese novel set in a swampy southern village inhabited by gossiping ladies and buffeted by stormy typhoons. This vivid oral tradition is something very close to the narrative tradition in which I built myself as a writer. The same goes for The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Nigerian author Amos Tutuola. I connect instantly with its wonderful sense of folk speech, which is not neat or controlled, but improvised, ever-shifting and full of repetitions. I love its wild but simple and folksy qualities, and I never felt it was alienating or strange. The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a hybrid transcript of Pidgin English and local dialect. A typical paragraph from the novel shows its fantastical vision of brutal realities:
We met about 400 dead babies on that road who were singing the song of mourning and marching to Deads’ Town at about two o’clock in the mid-night and marching towards the town like soldiers, but these dead babies did not branch into the bush as the adult-deads were doing if they met us, all of them held sticks in their hands. But when we saw that these dead babies did not care to branch for us then we stopped at the side for them to pass peacefully, but instead of that, they started to beat us with the sticks in their hands, then we began to run away inside the bush from these babies, although we did not care about any risk of that bush which might happen to us at night, because these dead babies were the most fearful creatures for us. But as we were running inside the bush very far off that road, they were still chasing us until we met a very huge man who had hung a very large bag on his shoulder …
Despite the current debate on the self-colonisation of African writers in the discussion of postcolonialism, for me it is a perfect example of self-translation for good purpose. It successfully displays a certain culture to the Western world in a beautiful literary form. It manifests an alternative yet strongly present society, away from the mainstream narrative.
It might not have been an issue for classical authors such as Balzac or Mark Twain, or Goethe or the Bronte Sisters. They were only working with native speech in the same language. But when a novelist writes in a second language, there are many more layers of self-translation. One of the most difficult exercises is to reconstruct authentic dialogue in English, which is supposed to be spoken originally in another language. It is a huge issue for immigrant writers as well as for those who write in languages other than the mainstream European ones.
One of my novels, UFO In Her Eyes, bears the traces of that struggle. It was a novel I wrote in English in my early years of living in Britain. Linguistically, I was too weak to compose anything sophisticated in English. But I permitted myself to do so, for many reasons. It is a novel set in a backwater Chinese village with peasants speaking crudely and swearing non-stop. In my head, while I was writing in English, every character spoke my hometown dialect, or some other dialect close to mine. Of course the dirty jokes and bitter curses the peasants made in my story were vivid in my head, as well as in my ears. I was hearing them all the time in my imagination. But once my hands touched the keyboard I found I was stuck. How should I translate their speech? The English conversation given to my Chinese peasants went through countless revisions. In the beginning, the dialogue sounded strange because I tried to translate the local jokes and casual metaphors in plain English. Most of them did not work. ‘Cow’s cunt’ (niu-bi) means something great in Chinese, but not in English. The Chinese expression ‘Old Sky’ (lao-tian) means ‘what the hell’, but if I use ‘Old Sky’ in English, it does not convey the hellish feeling at all. With each revision, I took out all those direct translations for swear words and idioms, and made it ‘smooth’, in other words, no metaphors but equivalent English expressions. Still, it did not work. A farmer greeting a butcher with ‘How are you, mate?’ does not sound Chinese. On the other hand, ‘What the fuck, you have eaten and now you have nothing to do?’ is far more realistic for a Chinese story set in a village. In my earlier versions, I didn’t quite get the tone right for the village butcher character, as I did not know how to translate him. In a later version, I constructed the conversation around his cultural background, as I did with my other village characters. For example, when the local authority accuses the butcher of not having met the hygiene standards, the butcher defends himself: ‘I couldn’t give a dog’s arse what any Food Hygiene Office says!’ And then: ‘Too many flies on my pork? Well, I’ll kill them then… as I’m sure you know, I’m a Parasite Eradication Hero.’ The butcher here reminds the officials that during the 1950s he was awarded a medal for his efforts in exterminating sparrows and rats. Therefore he deserves respect. In this translational process, there is no longer a grounding for any notion of ‘authenticity’, it is all about simulation. All I can remember of writing that book is that I had to construct a unique linguistic realm in my head and on my lips, a hybrid world of speech and meaning. The characters speak neither Chinese nor English, but a hybrid language—Xiaolu Guo’s broken English. And if Xiaolu Guo’s English works in that novel, that is all that matters. It does not matter much if her language works in reality. Writers do not have much reality, having fully committed to a writing life.
But then, I am probably wrong. It is about real life too. How people translate themselves in another culture, how they make themselves understood or appreciated, is important for survival. There is an inherent creativity in our daily communication, in crossing cultures, languages and different personalities. A mysterious process is going on when we translate, or interpret, or rewrite a story. All I ask myself in this process is: have I emerged free from the troubled part of the river, and can I see the open water?
In trying to get to the other bank, we must always bear in mind where the shore is on both sides. Translation is the process of swimming from one shore to the other. As you swim, you can see the depths in the water beneath you, with its entangled weeds, hidden reefs, and dangerous eddies. The swimmer needs to be skilled and sensitive, and know how to preserve themselves. But when you have managed to cross the river, the bank you have come from has changed, and you can never quite return.
Xiaolu Guo was born in China and now lives in Britain. Her books include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and I Am China. Her memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her novel A Lover's Discourse was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020. She also directed a dozen films including She, A Chinese and UFO In Her Eyes. Her most recent book is Radical.