MCLC: Sandalwood Death review (7,8)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Sandalwood Death review (7)
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I would suggest that one way of making the translator more visible would
be to place his/her name on the title page of published translations
side-by-side with that of the author. I just got my copy of the latest
issue of Chinese Literature Today, and it appears to be the practice of
this journal to place the name of the translator at the end of the
translation. To my mind, that practice buries the name and the role of the
translator.

My point: we are perhaps all guilty of this ideology of invisibility.

Kirk 

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From: Canaan Morse <canaan.morse at gmail.com>
Subject: Sandalwood Death review (8)

Prof. Klein¹s addition to the Sandalwood Death discussion makes a strong
case for the existence of an imperative to include translation as part of
any discussion of cross-cultural literature. His proofs of the centrality
of translation in critical discourse, the error of comparing translations
to originals, and the wasted opportunity of translation-insensitive
reviewing are immediately pertinent to our examination of Xiao Jiwei¹s
essay. I¹d like to expand briefly on the last point, the potential benefit
of reviews that feature ³translated criticism² versus the potential harm
of those that don¹t, in order to suggest what I consider an ominous
problem of perspective lurking in Prof. Xiao¹s review, as well as a few
ways it might have been made better.

 
As a literary translator, editor, and reviewer, I was deeply troubled by
Prof. Xiao¹s admission that, ³having read the originals, I only did
skimŠthe translations,² because it suggests that a very unequal structure
of privilege was at work in her review. The LARB is an English-language
periodical aimed first and foremost at English-language readers, the vast
majority of whom will find infinitely easier access to the work in its
English version. The reviewer, apparently conscious of this, quotes from
the English translation; yet she neither credits the translation
independently, nor acknowledges its status as such. Prof. Klein¹s
quotation from Eliot Weinberger allows us skip over discussion of the
false dichotomy between ³sacred² originals and ³secondary² translations,
with which most of us are already familiar; simple consideration of the
audience and its theater of language should have been enough to dissuade
the reviewer from massively empowering an inaccessible, once-removed
original for which she has allowed herself to be the only licensed
interpreter. The sensitive reader realizes that he is being introduced to
a book through a translation that the reviewer considers subordinate, but
the reviewer never tells him why. I¹m afraid I may be stating the obvious,
but I find it necessary, as both translator and spectator to this
discussion, to restate in simple language that there is a large community
of translators which considers this kind of reviewing behavior to be
careless and counterproductive.

 
I allow myself to criticize in this way because I have written bi-textual
reviews of Chinese literature in English, and while I don¹t have either
Prof. Klein¹s or Prof. Xiao¹s extensive experience reviewing, even the
process of an informal review (say, of Klein and Clayton Eshleman¹s
translation of Bei Dao bit.ly/JYyui4 <http://bit.ly/JYyui4>) has
enlightened me to the potential for more delicate expression, fuller
interpretation of content, and a more interesting argument than was
previously possible. Most readers don¹t realize that our minds create the
abstract story through comparison with paratexts, but the bilingual review
offers us a representation of that process, and can make our reading of
the translation more flexible thereby. Bilingual reviewing also allows a
reviewer to be judicious through differentiated appraisal of both
versions, by which we can avoid the trap of attributing achievements to
the original writer and faults to the translator. Lastly, it opens up to
the reader the possibility that ³translation² and ³creative writing² are
not entirely separate activities, but rather different facets of a broader
creative process, which is a worthy idea in itself.

 
Paper Republic, my institution, and our literary magazine Pathlight: New
Chinese Writing have already spent several years attempting to represent
Chinese literature in a full, honest manner to the English-speaking world.
The task is difficult because we face obstruction on both sides, usually
in the form of an unreceptive, inflexible publishing culture in the US and
Europe, and a government-influenced, usually culturally-biased (by which I
mean noticeably ethnocentric) literary production mechanism here in
Beijing. That is why I support wholeheartedly Prof. Xiao¹s initial
decision to review Sandalwood Death (and, by extension, LARB's
presentation of its China Nobel series), but also why I remain concerned
about the perspective through which that review is presented.


Canaan Morse
Pathlight: New Chinese Writing