Last fall while attending the annual fundraiser for the Asian American and Asian Diasporic Studies (AAADS) Program at UC Berkeley, Judy Kagiwara, a compatriot and friend from the 1969 TWLF Student Strike days, asked upon my informing her of the impending publication of my book of Angel Island poetry translations, “Do you read Chinese?” It is an inevitable if not necessary question for the translator, her or his knowledge of the source language, and for those of us second and third generation American-born Asians, an obvious one.
Not whether one speaks the language of the ancestors but whether one is literate in the fine nuances of that tongue, where more often than not one’s verbal abilities within the family context did not achieve more than an elementary school knowledge of Chinese character and syntax. My answer to my old writing group colleague was a “no-yes,” that my knowledge of characters was limited to one quarter of Mandarin at UC Berkeley, but too that online Internet resources of several different types have increased my skill level ten-thousand fold.
There are also the effects of “intersectionality” upon translation where it is not simply a matter of language proficiency in the source language but also having the cultural knowledge, historical context, and even an advantageous personal understanding from one’s own race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. A complex interweave of factors is needed for good translation, but perhaps most important of all is the translator’s facility with the target language, especially to render powerful Chinese verse into a faithful yet vibrant poem in English. As opposed to translations of business documents such as contracts and instruction manuals, literary translation requires the same level of nuanced languaging in the translation as was present in the original text. And occasionally translated text may be said to be even more compelling than the original, but this is not necessarily the goal.
Even if all the above factors were ideal to make a literary translation, the basic building block remains the source language poem. I shall describe below what it was like for me to translate a Chinese poem, the process of which has been explicated in detail in the introduction to Wild Geese Sorrow.
The first step was to obtain the original Chinese text of the Angel Island poems which I received from Judy Yung, one of the co-authors of Island, who generously gave assistance to this graduate student working on his master’s thesis.
The Chinese text I received was laid out in the contemporary horizontal fashion to be read from left to right, much like in English language texts. However for the book, I chose instead to return the Chinese text to its traditional vertical format to be read top-down, and then from right to left in columns. This was done to graphically mimic what exists on the actual Immigration Station walls so that readers can have a visual sense of the original, yet the text would still be readable to Chinese audiences.
逍 民 船 我 誰 買 挺 黃
逵 國 泊 國 知 槕 身 家
子 十 岸 圖 撥 到 投 子
鐵 三 邊 强 我 了 筆 弟
城 廿 直 無 過 金 赴 本
閒 肆 可 此 埃 山 美 香
筆 晨 登 樣 菕 地 京 珹
Next working with the received horizontal layout and using Internet resources, I made a word-for-word transliteration of the Chinese text in both Mandarin Pinyin and Cantonese romanization (Yale). The Cantonese version was helpful for me because my childhood language skills were invaluable in discerning poetic word choice and syntax, and thereby meaning.
- 黃 家 子 弟 本 香 珹
Huáng jiā zǐ dì běn Xiāng Chéng
Wòhng gà jái daih bún Hèung Sèhng
Huang family son younger brother this Fragrant City
The translation method I developed is organic but not unique. In 1905 Ezra Pound used a variation of it in translating/reinterpreting a set of poems by the Tang master Li Bai. These poems had been previously translated into Japanese, then into an English word-for-word version, before ending up in Pound’s ground-breaking anthology, Cathay. Professor Wai-lim Yip uses a similar format in his critical essays on Chinese translation.
Typically in translating poetry written in the formal Tang period style, one ends up with five or seven character lines, in four to eight line short poems. So let’s say you have a matrix of 56 characters (7 characters/line x 8 lines) which contains an equivalent number of words. It should be noted that in pre-industrial China of the early 1900s, units of meaning were sometimes composed of two or more characters while others remained just one. Consequently you might have something less than 50 phrases to understand and parse into poetry.
Because of the basic educational level of the Angel Island poets who chose to express themselves in classical forms learned from their primary and secondary school experiences, many texts are straightforward and literal without the verbal elusiveness and complexity of a literary Li Shangyin.
Yet I had to make literary choices whether the work was straightforward or “slant” in order to elicit the ideal “tone” for the translation, that elusive quality which I feel is key to rendering full this body of work, and to capture the anger, outrage, sorrow and resentment of the Chinese detainees. Tone which I assert is based upon the basic elements of diction, syntax, soundscape, and imagery.
7. 民 國 十 三 廿 肆 晨
8. 逍 逵 子 鐵 城 閒 筆
Here is a simple example of literary decision-making from Poem 4, also explained in the Wild Geese Sorrow introduction. The raw translation is from the two signature lines at the end of Poem 4, which read:
7. Nationalist China 13th year – twenty four morning
8. Leisurely thoroughfare child Iron City idle writing brush,pen
For Line 7, which is mostly informational, I retranslated it as:
Written at dawn, 24th day in the 13th Year of the Republic,
However, Line 8 is a bit more indeterminate and open because it uses the traditional Tang poetic device of juxtaposed imagery: a lazy child and a writing brush. What was the author inferring about the relationship between the two? For the Tang poet that leap between images is where the poem lies.
I chose to retranslate Line 8 thusly:
the idle pen of a lazy boy from the City of Iron.
In this rendering the lazy pen becomes the synecdoche, the equivalent for the similarly lazy author as if it were the pen that wrote the poem and not the consciousness of the author, adding a layer of artfulness and interest to the poem.
This is one small example of the myriad decision-makings made for each aspect of the 70 poems in the final manuscript. It is a process somewhat tedious and repetitive, yet can be astonishing when discovering some fine artistic skill in the original. Perhaps the greatest reward for me was to absolutely inhabit the mind and soul of another writer in the process of bringing his words into the target language, my own. It was a deep and humbling experience.
A final note…I highly recommend translation for latter generation Asian Pacific Americans as a way of not only approaching literature, but of understanding the mindset and life choices of our ancestors. The early Asian American Studies scholar Yuji Ichioka once said to me that if you want to know the Issei (Japanese) first generation, you must read their monolingual newspapers and journals, or in my case for first generation Chinese to translate the poems written upon the walls of an immigration station.
I will be presenting a paper on this very topic of “Literary Translation as Resistance: The Angel Island Wall Poems” at the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) 2018 annual conference in San Francisco on Friday, March 30. See this website’s calendar for time and location of the presentation.