Isn't He Adorable? : Thoughts on the Value of Translation

(photo by Makoto Kaku)

This afternoon I watched an NHK documentary on Donald Keene, a famous Japanologist who translated and analyzed a corpus of Japanese literature from ancient times to modern times.

He talked about how as a European literature major from Columbia university, he stumbled on Arthur Wiley's translation of "The Tale of Genji" at a  Times Square bookstore.

In his interview he described  "The Tale of Genji" as an escape to the uncertainties of reality.  The book was written simply for the sake of beauty and a beautiful society.  The moment defined the beginning of his career in Japanese literature.

I realized that his success stems from illuminating a part of the human experience that was unknown to the West. He had no competition because no one wanted to go to the wreckage of post-war Japan.

I'm REALLY jealous that he was able to live the life of a mind.   In many ways the life of a literary translator requires the mentality of an artist.  A computer could never translate literary text because translation isn't an algorithm that automatically converts one symbol to another. The first and foremost must communicate the feelings of the human condition.

I'm confused about how to express the relevance of the humanities.  Unlike Keene's career where communication and publication was heavily scrutinized, contemporary society has the opposite problem in that we are barraged with too much unfiltered information that it drowns out authoritative voices like Donald Keene.   The most popular person on the internet has the most credentials, not the person with the most comprehensive line of thought.

Personally I'm conflicted between getting a PhD versus finding an alternative path to study China.  I would have access to resources and connections to professional expertise on the humanities, but this resource is locked behind an ivory tower or digital subscription paywalls.  The alternative  is exploring the humanities without authoritative resources shaped by the internet.  How should this look like?

At least Donald Keene doesn't have to keep justifying the value of his work to the rest of society.  After the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, Keene renounced his US citizenship and moved to Japan.  I've never met Keene, but it's safe to say that he's one of the few rare people in the world that lived a passionate life.

 

The View of Failure in Conventional History

The narrative framework taught in American history classes must fit the American Dream narrative.  Work hard and you can live the dream, regardless of your background.

But what if the individual is unable to accomplish one's goals?  Or goes against American culture?  Focusing on the individual level, the American history narrative is a stark dichotomy.  You are either a success or failure in the American Dream.  No individual historical figure is admirable after failure.

Americans associate the inability to accomplish a feat or reach a state as a "failure."  Failure is a subject we admonish, but rarely sympathize with.  When we "fail" in this sense, we blame out own ability or lack of resources.  We rarely accept it, regardless of who or what is responsible.

Su Shi was a failure in this context.  The emperor sends Su Shi away as political exile for going against the Wang Anshi reforms.  Su shi is unable to prevent suffering of his people and the eventual fall of the Northern Song.

Yet within a decade after Su Shi's death, his legacy was still a threat to Emperor Huizong.

 

(Also my favorite emperor in Chinese history.)

Lin Yutang points out heaven could not forgive the Northern Song's treatment of Su Shi.  A thunderbolt shattered a stone steele containing Su Shi's name and opposition party members to the emperor in Wende Hall, the place where Huizong's  government convenes. Emperor Huizong commented, "His stone steele is destroyed, but these people are hard to forget!"

Su Shi was unique in that he was both poet and politician in comparison to American history.  He was able to express his worldview through political maneuvering and artistic human expression.

I hope as I continue to read Lin Yutong's work, he can show me why I should admire the failings of Su Shi.

 

Su of the Eastern Slope 蘇東坡

I've been on hiatus studying for a test that could not test me.  I'm back on my blog!

I have to put "The Dream of the Red Chamber" on hold for this man, Su Shi:

(Yuan Dynasty, Painted by Zhao Mengfu)

I recently bought the Chinese copy of Lin Yutang's "The Gay Genius:  The Biography of Su Dong Po" delivered from Taiwan.

I have many reasons for reading Su Shi, but before I make any sweeping statements about his life, please read this poem first:

(Emperor Huizong "draft cursive" 12th century)

No, please don't read the draft cursive.  Heck, I can barely read it.  Su Shi's poem is a reaction to a friend who could write this script.

Su Shi, Shi Cang-shu's "Hall of Drunken Ink" (1068)

All worry and woe in life begins

from learning to read and write---

be able to roughly mark your name

and then you should call it quits.

What point is there in cursive draft

that flaunts the spirit's speed?---

the blur in my eyes when I open a scroll

makes me ill at ease.

Yes, i too have been fond of it,

but always I laugh at myself;

how can we cure this affliction

as it shows itself in you?

You tell me that in doing this

you find a perfect joy,

mind's satisfaction, not distinct

from spirit's roaming free.

Just recently you built a hall

and named it "Drunken Ink,"

comparing this art to drinking wine

that melts anxieties.

I see now that Liu Zong-yuan

wrote something not untrue;

such affliction may crave dirt and ask

as if it were haute cuisine.

Still we may say that in this art

you have achieved the heights:

worn-out brushes pile by your walls

like little hills and knolls.

When the whim strikes, one swish of the hand

and a hundred sheets are gone:

in a fleeting moment a splendid steed

bestrides an entire land.

My own script takes shape to my mood,

I have no special technique:

the dots and lines just follow my hand,

it's a bother to try too hard.

Then tell me why in your critiques

I am singled out for praise,

isolated words an scraps of paper

all find themselves collected.

Your script may be properly judged

no lower than Zhong or Zhang;

on a lower level my own is still better

than that of Luo or Zhao.

You should no longer sit by the pool

and practice so ardently,

in the end just take all that writing silk

and use it to stuff a quilt.

Owen, Stephen. "The Ornaments of "Literati" Culture." An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. 640-41. Print.

During my darker, colder days of college, Su Shi knew the right words to speak to my soul.  His life by some standards may be seen as a "failure" because of his fall from political power.  Yet after a thousand years we remember him like an good old friend.

Lin Yutang puts it this way:  knowing a thousand year old dead guy isn't hard, you just need to write.  The living haven't finished telling their stories.  As the old saying goes, we can decide when the coffin shuts.

Time to Enjoy the Moon

(Portrait of Su Shi by Zhao Mengfu.  Yuan.  Source)

水調歌頭

Shui Diao Ge Tou

蘇軾

Su Shi

明月幾時有？把酒問青天。

When will the moon be bright?  I raise my wine to the blue sky.

不知天上宮闕，今夕是何年。

Not sure if the lunar palace, knows what year it is.

我欲乘風歸去，又恐瓊樓玉宇，高處不勝寒。

I wish to ascend with the wind to the top,  I also fear at the marble jade palace, its high and can't withstand the cold.

起舞弄清影，何似在人間。

I dance making a shadow, like you were in the mortal world.

轉朱閣，低綺戶，照無眠。

Orbiting through the red chambers, hanging low by the window, with brightness I cannot sleep.

不應有恨，何事長向別時圓？

You shouldn't respond with such hatred, why must you be full when people separate.

人有悲歡離合，月有陰晴圓缺，此事古難全。

Humans are sad, happy, seperated and together, the moon waxes and wanes. From old times it's hard to be complete.

但願人長久，千里共嬋娟。

But I long for people to live long, so from far away we can bask in your beauty.

Poor Su Shi, after living for years in exile you still pain to see you little brother. After 900 years, your longing for warmth and love still resonate today.

Regardless of whether you are enjoying mooncakes with tea and family, or contemplating your blessings in loneliness, just remember that with the vicissitudes of life, everyone has the yearning for love and belonging.  Feel the present, and count the people who love you.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

It Pays to Read: Reading is worth $960 an hour!

There's a story about a miser during the Victorian era who either kept a bond certificate or cash sitting in the bank for his entire life. When he withdrew his money, the buying power of his asset shrunk due to inflation. He ended up being poor at the end of his life.

What if you never read this story and lived this scenario? 43% of workers have less than $10000 for retire. Imagine how many more have no investment plan and are just shoving money into a savings account?

Reading allows you to relive the thought process of another human being. A good chapter book (no pictures) represents roughly a year to a thousands of years of human experience. If you read at a modest pace of 20 pages an hour, you could finish a 300 page book in 15 hours. Let's be modest and some author wrote a book in a year. Assuming that this writer was working 40 hours a week, for every one hour you read, you exchange 133 hours of the author's work!  If you assume that author is working at federal minimum wage, reading is worth $960/hr!

Let's say instead you read about ancient Rome. Let's exclude the author and count the total living hours of each Roman. On average there was roughly 50 million people living every year, and the Roman Empire was roughly 2000 years old. Let's say a book on the Roman Empire was 3000 pages. Assuming your 20 page reading rate, for every one hour of reading about Rome, you exchange roughly 76,000 man-YEARS of human experience! Instead of living and dying 1000 times, you can read for an hour!  If we assume the federal minimum wage again, that's $4.8 billion dollars an hour!  Take that quantitative easing!

I hope this is one reason to motivate you to read.

[caption id="attachment_389" align="aligncenter" width="300"] (My favorite book.  $15 USD) 

[/caption]

The New Academic

(Drool.  Source.)

People would invest more in academia if people saw its value.

For the most of human history, historical artifacts and archives belonged to the rich and powerful. Today it's slightly better. I can walk into a natural history museum and look at prehistorical fossils, or extinct birds stuffed by taxidermists. But fossil are still sold like jackets on Rodeo Drive.

There were two valuable lessons that I learned from my classical Chinese class:

1) It's always tempting to impose your narrative about a subject, but be objective as possible or you lose truth.

2) Always know your source, or else anyone can impose their own narrative.

Science can recreate an experiment to examine if claims are true. If a word is smudged off a primary historical document, the word is lost to history, never to be seen again. Imagine if the word "people" was ripped out of the preamble of the US Constitution?

Data in the humanities is literally ink fading from old pieces of paper. It's inevitable that knowledge will be lost over time.

The internet is powerful enough store data through the ravages of time, but so far we've been poor at storing and disseminating academic work.

I don't want a PhD in the humanities because the process of getting one is prehistoric. For Chinese, I would have to study know English, Chinese and French/German. After 6 years of rigorous research, I would be in debt, unemployed knowing something that barely anyone can understand.

I don't want to belittle the work of graduate students. We need experts to be the gatekeepers of cultural knowledge, but this knowledge must be relevant to the public. The PhD in the humanities currently stores its knowledge in university libraries and locks academic work within paywalls. A person from the public can only access general factoids through Wikipedia and sift through disparate internet sources. There's no academic critique or analysis of cultural data that the public can ponder, and the general public has no medium to respond beyond the comment boards full of extremists and trolls.

I hope that the new generation of humanities PhD's finds a way to effectively distribute cultural data to everyone. I fear that if this doesn't happen, digital noise may drown the value of the humanities.

Until then I will keep blogging. Or as Haruki Murakami puts it:

“If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . . We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it's too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us -- create who we are. It is we who created the system. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)”

Fancy words

Chinese is unique in that every character has it's own unique meaning and sound.  English uses the same 26 characters to phonetically sound out a word.

Whenever I see characters that I don't understand, one of the following things happens:

1.  I have no clue.

2.  I know what it sounds like, but I have no idea what it means.

3.  I have no idea what is sounds like, but I know what it means.

The Dream of the Red Chamber is describing Qing dynasty aristocrats.  Here's an example of my thought process when I encounter fresh text:

頭上戴著金絲八寶攢珠髻，

On her head she carries gold thread and carries 8 precious jewels something

綰著朝陽五鳳挂珠釵；

Some verb dealing with thread  when five brilliant phoenixes hangs a pearl pin

項上戴著赤金盤螭瓔珞圈；

On top there is a red-gold disk of something insect something something hoop.

裙邊繫著豆綠宮條、雙衡比目玫瑰佩；

On her dress a myriad of bean red palace? strips, a pair of horizontal rose amulet

身上穿著縷金 百蝶穿花大紅洋緞窄褙襖，

On her clothes gold threaded hundreds of butterflies with bright red flowers fine? something something some type of clothing.

外罩五彩刻絲石青銀鼠褂;

Her outside something rainbow stone cut green fox scarf?

下著翡翠撒花洋縐裙。

Underneath something jade-colored flower something something dress?

Here's David Hawkes translation:

Her chignon was enclosed in a circlet of gold filigree and clustered pearls.  it was fastened with a pin embellished with flying phoenixes, from whose beaks pearls were suspended on tiny chains.  Her necklet was of red gold int he form of a coiling dragon.  Her dress had a fitted bodice and was made of dark red silk damask with a pattern of flowers and butterflies in raise gold thread.  her jacked was lined with ermine.  It was a slate-blue stuff with woven insects in coloured silks.  her under-skirt was of a turquoise-coloured imported silk crepe embroidered with flowers  (Cao 91).


Geez, I have to be Tim Gunn to understand this high level of fashion vocabulary!

(He'd tell me "make it work!"    Source)

If you want a visual of who this person is, it's Wang Xifeng (王熙鳳)：

(Source)

I have 117 chapters to go...

Works Cited

Cao, Xueqin, David Hawkes, E, Gao, and John Minford. The Story of the Stone: A Chinese Novel in Five Volumes. London: Penguin, 1973. Print.