馬悅然論：翻譯的藝術
（應葛浩文教授之邀到美國Notre Dame大學演講講稿）
There are four kinds of
translators:
Firstly, there are the
scholar/translators, to whom the translation of a text serves as
the final argument in a piece of philological research. The
structure of such translations normally strictly follows that of
the original text, with the addition of square brackets, indicating
words which the target language forces the translator to include.
My venerated master professor Bernhard Karlgren’s translation of
the ancient Chinese anthology Shijing (The Book of Odes) which goes
back to the first half of the first millennium before our era, is
literal, and is meant to be literal, rather than literary. Had
Karlgren chosen to produce a literary translation, he would most
certainly have been able to do so. Already in lower middle school,
Bernhard Karlgren proved himself a master of translating Latin and
Greek poetry into an exquisite Swedish, which closely mirrored the
metrical structure of the original poems. His renderings of
Classical poetry are far superior to those produced, at about the
same time, by venerated professors of Latin and Greek. In his
verse-drama The Golden Fleece, produced when Karlgren was still in
high-school, he used a variety of classical metres. The drama
contains a long passage in faultless hexameter, with many highly
effective enjambments. (Bernhard Karlgren’s father was a
high-school master in Classical languages and insisted on sometimes
speaking Latin to his sons at home. He gave up that idea after
having heard a seven-year old son produce the following sentence:
“Här kommer (Here come) puellae vicinitatis!”)
The Shijing
has in its entirety been translated into English also by the
eminent British translator Arthur Waley and by Ezra Pound. Waley
had a good knowledge of both Chinese and Japanese. Ezra Pound did
not know Chinese. In his translation of the Shijing he based
himself on others’ translations and on his poetic intuition.
Sometimes he trusted in the strange notions of Ernest Fenollosa
(1853-1908), an American orientalist and poet who spent many years
in Japan. Much thanks to Ezra Pound, Fenollosa’s essay “The Chinese
Characters as a Poetic Medium” was posthumously published in 1920.
The essay had a great impact on translators of Chinese poetry in
the Western world, especially on Florence Ayschough. Fenollosa and
Pound both asserted that the graphic form of the Chinese characters
contains rich semantic information. Fenollosa based his theory on
the mistaken notion that Chinese characters are pictograms and
ideograms, depicting things and ideas. True, the Chinese script
does contain pictograms and ideograms, but they amount to far less
than one percent of all characters. The Chinese characters are best
described as logograms, each denoting a monosyllabic unit, a
morpheme.
The 113th
poem in the Shijing, in which poor farmers bitterly complain about
cruel tax-collectors, has the title Shishu. Shu means “rat”. What
shi means in this context nobody knows. Waley, following an early
gloss, translates shishu as “big rats”. Karlgren suggests that shi
was a kind of rodent and refrains from translating it. The
character for shi 碩 is made up of two graphs: the graph for “stone”
石 on the left and the graph for “head”頁 on the right. Now, listen
to Ezra Pound’s magnificent translation (if that is what it
is):
Rats,
Stone-head
rats lay off our grain,
Three
years pain,
Enough,
enough, plus enough again.
More than
enough from you, deaf you,
We´re
about thru and ready to go
Where
something will grow
Untaxed,
Good
earth, good sown,
And come
into our own.
There are many truths in this
world. The poetic truth which Ezra Pound arrived at in his
translation of this poem is no less true than that which Bernhard
Karlgren arrived at through his meticulous philological
methods.
Secondly,
there are the professional translators who earn their living, and
often a rather meagre living at that, from their craft. Whether
they are employed or free-lancing, they cannot always themselves
choose works to translate.
Thirdly,
there are the amateur translators, to whom translation is a work of
love. (The term “amateur” is here used in the sense of “One who
cultivates anything as a pastime, as distinguished from one who
prosecutes it professionally”). I consider myself lucky to belong
to this category. I have never yet translated a single piece of
literature that I did not appreciate and consider worthy of
translation.
There is a
fourth kind of translator, a writer/poet cum translator, a rather
dangerous species, to whom I shall return later on.
Now a few words about the
requirements of a translator: he or she must have an excellent
command of his mother-tongue (into which he or she normally
translates) and a very good command of the source language from
which he/she translates. He/she must have a keen ear for the
euphonic subtleties of the two languages, and especially for the
paramount role that rhythm plays in both poetry and
prose.
The
translator must also be keenly aware of his/her double
responsibility, to the author of the original text, and to his own
readers. He must not manipulate the text which he translates, nor
must he add anything to or distract anything from the original
text. The translator should aim at imitating the author of the
original text, and his translation should be a likeness of the
original work. Even though the literary qualities of a translation
at times, and for various reasons, may appear superior to those of
the original work, the translator must never consciously strive to
excel the author。
Literary
appreciation is of course highly subjective. What one reader
considers excellent, another reader may consider as trash. In the
first quarter of the 20th century, Lin Shu (1852-1924), who himself
did not master any foreign language, translated some 130 works of
Western literature into classical Chinese, with the aid of a
competent assistant. His translation of Lamb’s Tales from
Shakespeare was instrumental in creating a great interest for the
study of English literature. Dr. Hu Shi (1891-1962), the initiator
of the Literary Revolution in China, has the following to say about
Lin Shu’s translations: “It was a tremendous task and exceedingly
amusing to read the comic figures in the novels of Charles Dickens
talking in the dead language of two thousand years ago.” Arthur
Waley voices a diametrically opposed view in his assessment of Lin
Shu’s translations of works by Dickens: “Dickens inevitably becomes
a rather different and to my mind a better writer. All the
overelaborations, the overstatements and uncurbed garrulity
disappear.” The famous scholar-writer Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998),
who achieved a complete mastery of the major European languages,
has somewhere stated that in his youth he preferred to read Rider
Haggard’s (1856-1925) novels in Lin Shu’s
translations.
American
friends of mine, who engage in translation, have told me that their
publishers not seldom interfere with their work, demanding that
certain passages be deleted, lest they offend the taste of the
reading public. The American translation of the Chinese writer Lao
She’s novel Luotuo Xiangzi (1936) is a case in point. The novel
describes the total degeneration of a once healthy and happy
country lad, who settles in Peking in the hope of one day being
able to buy a rickshaw of his own. In spite of all his attempts at
securing a better life, he loses everything and ends up as a
miserable wreck. The American translator substitutes a happy end à
la Hollywood for the utterly tragic final chapter of the book. Lao
She, whom I knew well in the mid 1950s, was very much upset by this
manipulation of his work.
The Foreign Languages Press in
Peking has produced a great many translations of Chinese works of
literature into European languages, undertaken by Chinese
translators. The results are as a whole far inferior to works
translated from European languages into Chinese, also by Chinese
translators. I do not suggest that translators should abstain from
translating literature into what is not his or her mother tongue.
Lin Yutang (1895-1976), whose command of English was superior to
that of even the most highly educated Englishman, proved that it
can be done.
The gaps in the translations of
Chinese literature into Swedish are so many and so wide that they
can hardly be detected! Very little of Chinese literature prior to
the May Fourth Movement of 1919 has been translated into Swedish.
Bernhard Karlgren was throughout his life too heavily engaged in
research to find the time to indulge in translation of works of
Chinese literature into Swedish. Karlgren’s translations are
limited to one essay by Tao Yuanming (365-427), one essay by Ouyang
Xiu (1007-72), a collection of stories from the Ming period (1921)
and extracts from the works of ancient philosophers (Confucius, Lao
Zi, Zhuang Zi, Lie Zi and Mo Zi, presented in a monograph on
Ancient Chinese thought (1929).
Only two
Swedish sinologists are rather heavily engaged in the translation
of Chinese literature, myself and Anna Gustafsson Chen, married to
Chen Maiping, scholar and writer. In the relatively short period of
nineteen years she has translated nearly twenty works of
contemporary Chinese literature, including three long novels by Mo
Yan (The Red Fields and The Garlic Ballades, Life and Death are
Wearing me out), one novel by Su Tong (The Red Lantern), two novels
by Yu Hua (To Live and Xu Sanguan sells his blood) and three novels
by the women writer Hong Ying (The Generation of Naked Dancers,
Starving Daughter and K, a Love Story), two novels by Ma Jian, one
novel by Han Shaogong and one work by Chen Ren. She has also
translated important documentary literature, such as Wei Jingshen’s
The Courage to Stand Alone). Her achievements are all the more
impressive as she works full-time as librarian in the Stockholm
City Library.
My own
translations cover fairly wide fields, such as Ancient poetry
(selections from the anthologies Shijing (The Book of Odes) and the
Chuci (Songs of the South), from the third century B.C., popular
poetry from the Han periods (206 BC-220 A.D.), lyrical poetry of
the Tang period (618-906) and polymetric poetry of the Song period
(960-1279). I have translated two of the traditional Chinese
novels, the Shuihuzhuan , the earliest parts of which go back to
the Yuan period (1280-1367). (The novel has been paraphrased into
English by Pearl Buck, under the title All Men are Brothers, and
translated by J. H. Jackson, under the title Water Margin ) and the
16th century Xiyouji (The Journey to the West), excellently
translated into English by Anthony Yu. A few years ago I violated a
pledge made in my youth never to translate the Daoist Classic Dao
De Jing into Swedish.
As far as
modern and contemporary literature is concerned, I have chosen to
translate authorships rather than separate works. Of modern writers
of fiction I have concentrated on Shen Congwen (1902-1988), to my
mind the greatest novelist of his time. My translations of his
works include the novel Biancheng (Border Town), his autobiography
(Congwen zizhuan) and a great many short stories.
I have
translated a great deal of the works by two modern poets, Wen Yiduo
(1899-1946) , who started writing in the 1920s, and Ai Qing
(1910-1996), to my mind the greatest poet of the 1930s. An
anthology of mine, published in 1971, includes works by 42 poets of
the 20th Century.
In the last
two decennia I have concentrated on translating works by
contemporary writers. I have translated about 95 % of the works by
the Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian (his two novels Lingshan (The
spiritual Mountain), Yige ren de shengjing (One Man’s Bible), all
his short stories and fourteen of his 18 dramas. I have also
translated four major works by the Shanxi writer Li Rui (Houtu
(Sovereign Earth); Wu feng zhi shu (Windless Trees); Wanli wuyun
(Clear Skies), and Jiuzhi (The Old Place). In recent years I have
translated the Shanxi writer Cao Naiqian’s magnificent novel Dao
heiye xiang ni mei banfa (When night falls I can’t help longing for
you), a gruesome tale of the life of destitute farmers in a poor
mountain village in northern Shanxi during the cultural revolution,
and his collection of stories Zuihoude cunzhuang (The last
homestead).
As to
contemporary poetry I have translated almost the entire oeuvre by
Bei Dao and much of the poetry written by the so-called “misty
poets” (menglong shiren), who started to publish their works
towards the end of the 1970s. In recent years I have taken a great
interest in the works by Taiwanese poets. My Swedish anthology of
translations include works by nine Taiwanese poets (Chi Hsien, Lo
Fu, Yü Kuang-chung, Shang Ch’in, Ya Hsien, Lo Men, Yang Mu, Lo
Ch’ing and Hsia Yü). I have also collaborated with my friend
Michelle Yeh of the University of California at Davis in the
editing of a large anthology of Taiwanese poetry, translated into
English (Frontier Taiwan. An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, 490 pages). In 2011, I
published my translation into Swedish of works by the Taiwanese
poet Yang Mu, to my mind the greatest poet of our time, writing in
Chinese (Den gröne riddaren, Dikter av Yang Mu/The Green Knight.
Poems by Yang Mu. Stockholm: Bokförlaget Tranan, 500
pages.).
Each translator approaches work
in his or her own way. To me, translation is a work of love. (I
should add that my amateur status affords me the privilege of
myself choosing what I want to translate.) Before starting to
translate, be it a long novel or a poem, I read the work several
times in succession, in order to get a feeling for the structure
and the flow of the text. While reading and re-reading the text I
make mental notes of passages which I know will present a
challenge, and ponder over how they might be best translated. I
always articulate the text silently when I read, which gives me a
sore throat at the end of a long day’s work. The repeated readings
make me feel the presence of the author, and the author’s voice.
When I eventually arrive at the point when I feel that my own
voice, and breathing, are in harmony with the voice and breathing
of the author, then the work is almost done. I am aware of the fact
that my notions of the author’s voice and breathing may sound like
hocus-pocus to you. I am at a loss to explain how it works, but I
do know that it does. Once I feel that I have reached this stage, I
am ready to devise a language and a style to match those of the
original text.
I once
discussed this method of translation with a Swedish colleague, who
happens to be an excellent translator. He objected that this method
would deprive him of the pleasure of surprise and unexpected
encounters: to him, turning pages in the book he translated was
like following a meandering mountain path, not knowing what view
might unfold itself beyond the next bend.
When I read a book, or
translate a book, I acquaint myself thoroughly with the milieu and
with the people who inhabit it: some may become my bosom friends
and others my enemies. I would dearly like to share a few pints of
wine with Lu Zhishen, one of the heroes of the Shuihuzhuan, but I
would hate to spend the night at a Shandong inn together with Song
Jiang, the leader of the robbers’ gang. I refuse to see a movie
based on a book that I have enjoyed reading, fearing lest the
milieu, and the people portrayed in the film, would differ too
greatly from those in my own imagination.
The eminent
British scholar and translator Arthur Waley, who translated a great
many works of Chinese and Japanese literature into his
mother-tongue, refused to visit China and Japan. I guess that he
wanted to avoid a collision between his imagined world and that of
reality.
I have
already referred to my translations of works by the Shanxi writer
Li Rui, depicting life in a poor mountain village in the Lüliang
Range. In the Spring of 2004, Li Rui wrote me a letter, saying that
deposits of coal had been found in the close vicinity of the
village, which meant that it was doomed to be annihilated. I
immediately made up my mind to visit the village, which I did,
together with my wife and my friend Li Rui in August of the same
year. The village comprised 22 households and altogether about one
hundred people. Among them were several of the men and women which
Li Rui had portrayed in his books. The landscape and the village
were more or less what I had expected. I was told that the
villagers had been persuaded by their local Party secretaries to
sell their land to a mining enterprise. According to the contracts,
the farmers were to receive the annual sum of 500 RMB for each mu
of land, equal to one sixth of an acre, for the period of ten
years. In addition, they were offered jobs in the mines and on the
construction of roads which had to be built to transport the coal.
The villagers did not receive a single cent for their land, and
none of them were offered jobs in the mines or on the roads. I
learnt more on the trip to that village than hundred volumes
dealing with rural economy and the plight of Chinese peasants could
have taught me.
I would now like to discuss
some of the problems which I have encountered during my fairly long
career as translator. In the mid 1970s I translated the medieval
picaresque novel Shuihuzhuan (All Men are Brothers). The novel has
grown out of the repertoires of traditional story-tellers and it is
written in a plain colloquial language which must have been very
close to the spoken idiom of northern China in the 16th century. In
a review of my translation a critic takes up the following question
for discussion: should a translator allow the idiom of the original
text to re-emerge in his translation or should he do whatever he
can to create the impression that his translation is an original
work in his own language? In other words, should the Swedish
translation of a medieval Chinese novel sound as if it were written
in Sweden in the mid 1970s? In order to answer that question I
shall have to make an excursion into the literary history of China.
In the development of Chinese literature we can clearly distinguish
two parallel currents: polite literature, which was written in the
classical language and which carried an enormous prestige, and
popular literature, which developed from oral traditions and which
was written down in an idiom close to the spoken language. Polite
literature and popular literature as a rule utilized different
genres.
The grammar
and diction of Buddhist legends and sermons of the 9th century do
not differ considerably from the grammar and diction of present-day
Chinese. Towards the mid 13th century, the phonological structure
of Northern Chinese was more or less identical with that of
Putonghua, or Common Language of today. I feel rather embarrassed
to admit that I recently found out that I have greater difficulty
in reading a Swedish verse chronicle from the early 14th century
than I have in reading a 14th century Chinese text.
When a
listener or a reader enjoys a literary text, a relationship, or a
dialogue, is established between him and the author of the text. In
my opinion, the task of the translator is to facilitate the
establishment of a similar dialogue between his translation and the
readers. A translator of works of Chinese literature who allows the
distance in time and space to characterize the style of his
translation is guilty of sacrificing literary values on the altar
of chinoiserie. Naturally, a translator should be free to use
archaisms in both diction and grammar, but only to the extent that
they are used in the original text.
I am
sometimes asked whether it is not terribly difficult to translate
Chinese literature into Swedish. My answer is that the difficulties
vary from text to text. Translating the Shuihuzhuan, I had great
difficulties in making out the shapes of head-gear and shoes. In
that regard, I was greatly assisted by wood-cuts from the 16th
century, accompanying a Ming edition of the novel. Translating the
novel Lingshan (The Spiritual Mountain) by Gao Xingjian, I had
great difficulties in identifying his many references to flowers.
With the aid of learned friends in the Swedish Museum of Natural
History I was able to solve most of the problems. But when five
names of flowers remained unidentified, I wrote to Gao Xingjian and
asked him to draw the plants (he is after all an excellent
painter!). His answer was: “Hah, I made up those names
myself!”
I have
already referred to the need for the translator faithfully to
mirror the rhythm of the original text. The problem is that the
difference between two languages sometimes is so great that any
attempt to transpose poetic forms from the one language into
another is doomed to fail. Some 40 years ago I experimented with a
kind of a-syntactic translation of Classical Chinese poetry into
Swedish. I simply transposed the words of the original into
Swedish, with an utter disregard for the syntactical demands of the
Swedish language. Here is an example, a short lyrical poem entitled
“River Snow”, by the Tang poet Liu Zongyuan (773-819), transposed
into a-syntactic English:
Qian shan,
niao fei jue,
Wan jing,
ren zong mie.
Gu zhou,
suo li weng,
Du diao,
han jiang xue.
Thousand
mountain, bird fly sever,
Ten
thousand path, man footprint extinguish.
Solitary
boat, rain-cape, bamboo-hat, old man
Alone
fish, cold river snow.
When you translate classical
Chinese poetry into a Western language such as Swedish or English,
the target language forces you to specify what is not specified in
the original. You have to decide for yourself whether the nouns
should have definite or indefinite reference, and whether they
should be given singular of plural form. Tense is not formally
expressed in classical Chinese. But the translator’s Western
language forces him to decide whether the action or the state
referred to pertains to the past, the present or the future. The
universality and the timelessness which characterize the original
Chinese poem are lost in translation.
These
typological differences between classical Chinese and Western
languages are not the only obstacles facing a translator of Chinese
poetry. Chinese is a tonal language. The four tones of the National
Language of today are either falling, or rising, or both falling
and rising, and neither falling nor rising, that is level. For
metrical purposes these tones are divided into two categories,
level and non-level. The rigid rules applying to certain types of
Classical Chinese poetry require a fixed alternation between level
and non-level tones within the verse and within the stanza. This
tonal variation cannot, of course, be echoed in a non-tonal
language.
Rhyming plays
a very important role in all types of pre-modern Chinese poetry.
Since Classical Chinese is a monosyllabic language, in the sense
that all morphemes consist of only one syllable, only male rhymes
are employed. All rhyme words must belong to the same tonal
category. Now, rhyming comes very easily to the Chinese poet. The
National Language of today possesses only 420 different syllables,
discounting tonal distinctions. If we take the tonal distinctions
into account, the distinctive syllables would number about 1300.
This means that homophones and potential rhymes are exceedingly
common in the Chinese language. Any attempt at rendering long
sequences of rhymes in a translation is bound to fail.
While
Classical Chinese is monosyllabic, in modern Chinese most words
comprise two or more syllables. When translating modern Chinese
poetry, it is therefore easier to achieve a closer correspondence
between the original verse and the translation. Wen Yiduo
(1899-1946) asserted that the form of the poem must satisfy both
the eye of the reader and the ear of the listener: the musical
features of the spoken language must serve as building stones in a
structure of architectonic beauty. The title poem of the collection
Sishui (Deadwater) was by Wen Yiduo himself considered to be his
most successful experiment in the field of metrical architecture.
Each verse in the poem consists of nine syllables, which are
grouped into three two-syllabic units and one three-syllabic unit.
The three-syllabic unit changes position from verse to verse,
without ever occupying a verse-final position. This feature creates
a rhythmical tension in the regular structure. The first verse in
the original reads as follows in the original:
這是一溝絕望的死水
Zheshi
yigou juewangde sishui
Here’s a
ditch of hopeless deadwater.
One English translation of this
poem amounts to nothing less than cold-blooded murder of one of the
finest poems in modern Chinese literature:
“This is a
ditch of hopelessly dead water”.
This translation of the first
line utterly destroys the rhythm of the original verse. It also
treats the compound noun sishui (deadwater) as a phrase, “dead
water”. Finally the adjective juewangde, “hopeless”, has been
converted into an adverb. This one example goes a long way to show
that a translator must have a firm grasp of the linguistic aspects
of the text which he is translating.
At the
beginning of my talk I referred to a fourth category of
translators, the writer/poet. We sometimes find that some
translators who are themselves writers or poets tend to take
liberties with the original text, which other translators would not
dare to do. I shall give you an example of this. A volume of Robert
Bly’s translations of the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer’s poems
entitled Tranströmer, 20 poems (1970) contains the poem
“Balakirev’s Dream”. The seventh stanza of this reads as follows in
the original:
Det var
ett fält där plogen låg
Och plogen
var en fågel som störtat.
(There
was a field where the plough lay
and the
plough was a bird that had crashed)
Robert Bly translates as
follows:
A field
appeared in which a plow stood,
And the
plow was a bird just leaving the ground.
I remember being quite upset
when I read that translation. It seemed to me that the translator
had perverted the exquisite imagery of the original: the deserted
plough resting on one of its shafts, with the other shaft raised at
an angle of 45 degrees, exactly like a bird with one broken wing
and the other wing ready for flight. Bly’s translation forces the
reader to accept a plough not lying, but standing in the field with
the plough-share firmly embedded in the ground and stretching its
shafts like a bird ready to rise in the air. When I discussed this
translation with my friend Tomas Tranströmer, he assured me that he
had given his assent to the change and that he thought that Robert
Bly’s translation was quite successful.
It does happen that a
translator gets stuck in his text. He simply doesn’t understand
what the text says, and no dictionary can help him to elucidate the
incomprehensible passage. If he cannot solve the problem he will
have to give up his intention to translate the text.
In some cases
the text may on the surface appear perfectly comprehensible and yet
the translator has difficulty in grasping and conveying its
meaning. In the title poem of the collection Heihe (Blackbox,
1990), the Chinese poet Bei Dao speaks of a “hujiao huangdi”, a
“pepper emperor”. The poem reads as follows in my translation into
English:
who is it
that waits
for the
preordained sunrise
I shut
the door
the
interior of the poem darkens
in the
middle of the table
the pepper
king rages
a piece
of music memorizes me
and puts
down its burden
the inner
parts of the watch are scattered
over the
royal horizon
event
linked to event
passes
through the tunnel
When I first read the poem I
was quite bewildered. What is a “hujiao huangdi”? The emperor of
all the peppers in the world? An emperor made of pepper? And why
does he stand in the middle of the table? Bei Dao wrote this poem
in Sweden. In his kitchen there was a round table, providing the
horizon of which the poet speaks. In Sweden pepper and all kinds of
ground spices are normally bought in small glass jars with
screw-lids which resemble a royal crown. To Bei Dao the pepper jar
resembled the king in chess.
The story of the translation of
Swedish works of literature into Chinese is easily told. In the
1920s, works by August Strindberg (1849-1912) and Selma Lagerlöf
(1858-1940) were translated second-hand, from translations into
English. The following story may illustrate the difficulty in
translating second-hand. In an English translation of one of
Strindberg’s works we find the following passage: “When we were
enjoying ourselves, the uncle of the baron joined the company.”
This seemingly very simple sentence presents unsolvable
difficulties for the Chinese translator. Was the uncle the brother
of the baron’s father or of his mother? Had the translator had
access to the Swedish original, the problem had been easily solved,
since the Swedish language distinguishes between “farbror”
(father’s brother) and “morbror” (mother’s brother). But having
ascertained that the baron’s uncle was the brother of his father,
the translator is faced with yet another difficulty: was the uncle
older or younger than the baron’s father? In the Chinese highly
clan-centred society it is necessary explicitly to state the
relative ages of members of the clan.
It is only in
recent years that Swedish literature has been directly translated
into Chinese. The Nestor among Chinese translators from Swedish is
Li Zhiyi, who has translated many major works by August Strindberg,
Selma Lagerlöf and Astrid Lindgren (1907-2002), a famous writer of
children’s books. He has also translated essays and short stories
by the Swedish Nobel Laureates Verner von Heidenstam (1916), Erik
Axel Karlfeldt (1931), Pär Lagerkvist (1951), Eyvind Johnson and
Harry Martinson (both 1974). Chen Maiping has in the last two years
translated Harry Martinssons Aniara, the volume Air Mail,
containing the correspondence between Tomas Tranströmer and his
American translator Robert Bly, and Kjell Espmark’s novel Glömskan
(Oblivion).
Wang Ye, a
woman translator who lives in Sweden, last year translated Hjalmar
Söderberg’s novel Doktor Glas into Chinese and is now completing
her translation of Kjell Espmark’s novel Béla
Bartók mot Tredje riket (Béla Bartók against The third Reich). My
own translations into Chinese of Tomas Tranströmer’s two latest
poetry collections, Sorgegondolen (The Sad Gondola) and Den stora
gåtan (The Great Enigma) together with his autobiographical sketch
Minnena ser mig (The Memories see me) were published in
2012.
Translators are assiduous
workers in the literary vineyards and they play an exceedingly
important role as builders of bridges between cultures. Without
translators, the world would be a much poorer place to live in.
Someone has said that World Literature is Translation. It is highly
unfortunate, and greatly unfair, that their unique contributions do
not, as a rule, receive due recognition. They are often underpaid,
and unlike writers and poets they more rarely figure as recipients
of prizes and awards. It is my sincere hope that this unfortunate
situation be remedied.
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(2013-01-04 21:12:39)