This conflict between the author and the translator is present in every act of translation, but it’s especially acute in contemporary passages between English and Chinese. The political divide between China and the West, exacerbated by the Scylla of Chinese censorship on the one hand and the Charybdis of the Western gaze on China as the Other on the other hand, turns every attempt to navigate across the gulf between the two languages into a dangerous journey with no easy answers.
A few examples will illustrate the range of issues. My story, “The Paper Menagerie,” has a mother who was once a Chinese mail-order bride as a main character. In my original, she was born in China right before the Great Famines of 1958-61 and lost her family to persecutions during the Cultural Revolution. When the story was commissioned for translation by a Chinese speculative fiction magazine, the translator excised these biographical details because the famines and the Cultural Revolution remain sensitive topics in China and subject to censorship. I had to accept the alterations as a condition to publication.
My initial reaction was one of outrage, but further consideration of the matter revealed complexities that were not apparent at first. I understood, of course, that the magazine’s staff would be subject to political repercussions if they defied the censorship rules (and these rules are complex, opaque, and constantly shifting). But the translator was also dealing with deeper, more nuanced issues related to the representation of China in fiction. As an American author, I wrote my story for an American audience and adopted a certain simplified, Western view of recent Chinese history. The Great Famines resulted from a combination of natural disasters and Communist agricultural policy mismanagement, and to this day the relative contribution of the various factors and the precise death figure are subject to debate. The Cultural Revolution, similarly, was far more complex than the relatively straightforward narrative of “planned brutality” most in the West are familiar with. I understood these complexities but chose to simplify them to suit the mother’s character and to serve the narrative about her I wished to construct, but in the eyes of Chinese readers these choices can appear as evidence of an American-centric view about China that overwhelmed the individual, human story that I wished to tell.
Putting aside the odious official practice of censorship, another way to look at the issue is that I chose to frame history a certain way for my American readers; why couldn’t the translator choose to frame history another way for his Chinese readers? Both of us were using historical details to serve the needs of fiction, to tell a story about specific characters designed to achieve a certain emotional effect. If a translator’s job is to preserve that overall emotional arc of the story, then faithfully translating those details in the way I used them may actually get in the way.4 If the translator’s choice hadn’t been (at least in part) motivated by the official policy of censorship, would it have been justified? And, more important, would I have been as outraged?5
Ideally, I would have preferred these details in the story to be translated faithfully, but with an open conversation with Chinese readers about the way I used Chinese history to serve my narrative. But this was the real world, and I concluded that it was best to allow publication of the altered translation while explaining the changes myself through other avenues. Luckily, a fan translation of the story soon appeared that did preserve these details, giving Chinese readers an opportunity to compare the two and decide for themselves which was more “faithful” in the broader sense.
Once you’re sensitized to these issues, they show up in all kinds of unexpected ways in translation. For example, I chose to render the title of a short story by Liu Cixin (China’s most famous scifi novelist), , as “Taking Care of God.” I did so in part because is the standard Chinese term for “God.” In addition, I read Liu’s story, concerning a race of aliens who manifest themselves to humans as old men in white robes with long white beards, as clearly intending to reference the Judeo-Christian concept.6
But the fact that the dictionary defines as “God” does not end the debate.7 There’s much more to fidelity than literal accuracy. A word does not exist alone, but as one term in a web of references embedded in culture and language. Each word brings with it countless semantic ghosts. And the ghosts in Chinese are very different from the ghosts in English.
The word is of ancient origin, not a neologism imported by Christianity. It has existed since the oracle bone script of the Shang Dynasty of the second millennium B.C., and represented the formless Supreme Being of ancient Chinese religious worship. With the advent of Confucianism, it became incorporated into the system of rites and justifications for Chinese imperial rule. It was Matteo Ricci, the great Jesuit missionary to Ming China in the 16th and 17th centuries, who first translated God (Deus) as (causing great controversy in both China and Rome). And in modern times, this Western, imported sense has become dominant. For the Chinese reader, the word will thus forever evoke a complex, layered history involving China’s classical past as well as its more recent experiences of colonialism and foreign domination, of ideological challenges from Christian missionaries and Chinese revolutionaries (Hong Xiuquan, Sun Yat-sen, etc.) who embraced Christianity as a force for positive change.
A Western reader faced with the word “God” will have a completely separate set of emotional reactions and historical references. Indeed, it’s hardly accurate to say that and God are the same word at all. On the one hand, as Liu Cixin’s story is about humanity’s responses to alien beings who claim to have created us and were “God,” translating the title the way I did was “faithful.” But it is also undeniable that an English reader faced with the phrase “Taking Care of God” would have a completely different set of semantic associations from a Chinese reader faced with . Would it have been more accurate for me to translate the title as “Caring for the Creators”? The latter is far less evocative and elegant, but perhaps in a sense more accurate. By making the choice I did, I inevitably rewrote Liu Cixin’s story.8
The other word in the title, , poses even more challenges. It is a specific Chinese concept for the duty of children to care for their parents in old age that has no exact equivalent in English. The word, shaped by thousands of years of cultural emphasis on filial piety, has an emotional resonance for Chinese readers that cannot be translated.9 One alternative, “The Dotage of the Deities,” suggested by my friend Anatoly Belilovsky, probably comes closest, and it would strike the English reader in ways distinct both from my choice and the original.
Finally, I want to note that a good translation can enhance the original in ways both big and small. For example, Tao Ruohua, who translated my “Algorithms for Love,” decided to use Classical Chinese to translate an embedded fictional account supposedly written by Western missionaries to China during the Qing Dynasty. This choice evoked for the Chinese reader the mood and historical context far more effectively than my original. As another example, Xia Jia, who translated “The Man Who Ended History” into Chinese, effectively used numerous colloquialisms and slang to give my Chinese characters a sense of authenticity that is lacking in my English original.
By far the most impressive example in this vein I’ve experienced involves the fan translation of “The Paper Menagerie.” The English original rendered some of the mother’s dialog in Chinese (pinyin) to give the English reader a sense of her foreignness. When translated into Chinese, it was not obvious how this sense could be preserved as the Chinese sentences would obviously be perfectly comprehensible to Chinese readers.
The translator, Zhang Xinyuan, came up with the novel solution of rendering those sections with the “wrong” Chinese characters whose phonetic values approximated the intended phrases. In other words, she employed a technique often used to transliterate foreign words into Chinese: using characters chosen for their phonetic value without regard to their meaning (recall /“Asura, Yaksha, Rakshasa” from earlier).10 This way of “writing Chinese in Chinese as though it were a foreign language” perfectly captured the effect of the origi
nal for Chinese readers, and defamiliarized the Chinese writing system by highlighting its phonetic nature, a fact often forgotten by those fluent with it.
Translation can never perfectly capture the original. The translator must make choices that re-create the story in a new language for a new set of readers. But it isn’t a simple matter of “lost in translation”; often, the result offers something new as instructive to the target readers as it is to the original author.
Note: Thanks to Anatoly Belilovsky, Helena Bell, Aliette de Bodard, and Alex Shvartsman for their comments on drafts of this essay.
Footnotes:
1 The choice of the right tense to use in translating Chinese fiction into English—a side effect of the differences between the two languages—is another complex topic that I do not delve into here.
2 The key is to use such literal translation techniques only judiciously. The translated names of the dates in this case may also cause an English reader to latch onto the poetic phrasings and exoticize the Chinese calendar. Readers of fantasy and science fiction may be somewhat more sensitized to these issues as the genres are full of attempts to rephrase the quotidian to appear strange and unfamiliar, a potentially problematic dynamic when applied to translations from another culture. Ultimately, I felt that the use of literal translations here was justified, but it isn’t without problems.
3 Again, this technique must be used selectively. When the metaphrase (a word-for-word-translation) is relatively transparent in meaning, this approach can delight and enlighten, but for more obscure idioms, paraphrasing would be appropriate.
4 For comparison, consider whether an American reader’s reaction to a story translated from Chinese that contained a simplified, Chinese-centric view of the Kent State shootings may detract from and overwhelm the rest of the story.
5 American authors who find that their stories have been altered in translation often react with outrage and anger, but I invite them to re-consider the reaction in the context of my own experience.
6 This understanding was confirmed with Liu Cixin.
7 Neither does authorial intent, for that matter.
8 When my translation was re-printed, the new publisher altered the title to “Taking Care of Gods” (note the plural). The new publisher, whose staff are mostly Chinese, explained to me that they thought the change was necessary because they did not wish to offend Western readers by making too explicit a reference to the Christian God. Instead, they wanted to make the aliens seem like generic “gods.” I was reminded of the controversies surrounding Matteo Ricci’s original translation of God to .
9 The tradition of children caring for aged parents at home is increasingly coming into conflict with an urbanizing, mobile society without a developed welfare state. A hot-button issue in China, this social background also forms part of the story’s meaning to Chinese readers.
10 Sometimes the characters used in transliteration are chosen to give a semantic hint of the meaning of the foreign word (e.g., —pronounced lili, literally “Beautiful Jasmine”—for “Lily” to approximate the sound as well as suggesting the name’s floral, feminine origin). The nuances in the practice of transliterating foreign words into Chinese deserve a whole book.
About the Author
Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He has won a Nebula, a Hugo, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
The Military, Magic, and the Misery Ethic:
A Conversation with Myke Cole
Jeremy L. C. Jones
In Shadow Ops: Control Point by Myke Cole, Oscar Britton is an officer attached to the Supernatural Operations Corps. He might doubt the system now and then, but he puts his life and the life of his men on the line to uphold it.
And then he begins to manifest magical abilities. According to the post-Great Reawakening law, Britton should turn himself in. Instead he runs.
In Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier, Alan Bookbinder works in the Pentagon. He’s a family man. An administrator. A paper-pushing patriot. He believes in the system. In fact, he makes the system work. When Bookbinder wakes from a nightmare, the strange current that runs through him is certainly not doubt in the system. Bookbinder thinks the “drowning” feeling might be a heart condition, but the doctor diagnosis it as a panic attack.
When Bookbinder discovers that the “current” is magic and that he is, indeed, Latent, he follows the rules. He turns himself in, even though it may mean losing everything and everyone he loves.
The Shadow Ops universe crackles with wind, fire, and stone magic (to name but a few types). There are villains like the aeromancer, Harlequin. There are monsters and elementals. Cole dips generously from the genre well to produce novels that could be labeled grimdark, urban fantasy, military fantasy, or simply speculative fiction.
Readers easily sense Cole’s love of comic books, adventure fiction, and late night games of Dungeons and Dragons.
Equally obvious, is Cole’s experience in the military and as a civilian and government security contractor.
And there are a lot of pretty cool places—the magic, the military jargon, the many forms of magic—in Coles novels where he could’ve lost sight of his mission or gotten bogged down. But he doesn’t. He stays focused on the characters—what’s going on inside them and what happens when they have to make hard decisions.
“The only interesting thing in life, really, is people interacting with other people,” said Cole, “and that’s really what all stories are. If you boil down any story, no matter what it is . . . it’s always people interacting with people at its heart.”
The most interesting thing about Cole’s Shadow Ops novels is, indeed, “people interacting with people,” and that’s saying a whole lot.
Below, Cole and I talk about writing, PTSD, and the military. We talk about his characters, his books, and his Misery Ethic. And we have a whole lot of fun doing it.
When I read a book I love, my first instinct is to not apply any critical thinking, but at the same time I’m trying to figure out, “Why do I love this so much?” You’re recent post about post-traumatic stress disorder answered some of that question for me.
I think books work on a couple of levels. There’s a visceral, gut-punch reaction to how characters resonate with you. Sort of your own lens. I did another blog post on China Miéville and why I wanted to meet him, and one of the things I said in it is that every time I read a book I feel like it’s a book written just for me, that my experience with it is so unique that it’s almost like I’m reading a different version of the book than everyone else.
But I also think critical thinking can be applied, and there is a rational lens that can be looked at, and people can make arguments for why a story works or why it doesn’t and that those arguments are common, I think, to most readers.
The Shadow Ops books definitely aim for the gut. I nearly had a panic attack reading the early sequences of both books, when Britton and Bookbinder realize that they are magical [Latent].
I’m so pleased to hear that you have that visceral reaction. That is the goal. I get different reactions from people. There are plenty of people that absolutely loathe my writing and plenty of people that love it, but the reaction I fear the most is people who go, “Eh,” and are somewhere in the middle. That’s death to a writer.
Do you encounter many readers who have a “somewhere in the middle” feeling about these books?
Not the first one [Shadow Ops: Control Point]. Most people seem to either really like it or really don’t like it. The second book [Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier] . . . I don’t want to flatter myself, but it’s almost universally praised. I haven’t read a lot of bad reviews about it, but there
have been a couple of people who have said that the book just didn’t rouse them in the way they had hoped it would. Luckily, those voices have been few enough.
I think it was Charlie Stross who wrote that a polarized fan base is actually a really positive sign because it means that your writing is really affecting people, and a person that really hates you or hates your work is actually more likely to read it than someone who had a bland and banal experience with it.
The idea of forcing us—the readers—to change viewpoint characters with each novel in a series seems to be the very thing that you force your characters to go through: the world is the same, but now I’m having to see it differently.
That’s a great way to explain it. I never even thought of it that way. For me it was a much more bald approach.
Ace mass market originals, in particular, have been very successful with a long run of novels that deal with a single protagonist. [Jim Butcher’s] Harry Dresden is a great example of that. [Charlaine Harris’] Sookie Stackhouse is another great example. People love them, and it’s a really great way to run a series.
The thing for me is that all of the stories that have been most dear to me have had ensemble casts. I think that’s one of the reasons that Game of Thrones is so unspeakably resonant, so incredibly successful.
My intention was always to do an ensemble cast, and part of it was because those are the kinds of stories I like, but part of it was also that the world is interesting and the people in it are interesting, and maybe I’m ADD or easily distracted, but I want to see it through different lenses.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 79 Page 14