Reading List: In Translation
I’m introducing a new reading list feature of this Substack that is generally related to topics that I research (and which you might be interested in too). These topics include: Chinese cuisines, diaspora discourse - Asian and otherwise, language, philosophy, arts and so on. The lists are non-exhaustive - as writers of listicles are wont to caveat - so if you have something complementary or expansive to add, please do leave a comment.
Reading list: in translation
The first list is loosely based on the act of translation, though not about language itself. Maybe you’re privileged to have never had to think about how to translate yourself, your language, your culture or your work. Or maybe, like a lot of the diaspora that I encounter, translation is an act you have to grapple with everyday, to different levels of fluency. This list will be particularly appealing to multilingualists, cultural codeswitchers, food writers, anyone hopeless at reading Chinese (like me)…
Happy reading.
Writers’ takes
“The demand for a glossary betrays the entitlement of someone accustomed to a world in which they are always the implied audience. Someone unused to having to look things up themselves, to infer based on context, or to simply sit with the discomfort of not fully understanding something, as the rest of us do.”
‘Why I Don’t Translate Non-English Words in My Writing’ - Rachel Heng (Time). The author of The Great Reclamation defends her decision not to italicise or translate the many languages and dialects that intermingle in Singapore, the setting for her book.
“Even 10 years ago, it was kind of harder to find cool typefaces that had a lot of foreign-language characters… We basically have to create a little drawing of the character if it doesn’t exist within the font itself.”
‘Why’s it taken so long for foreign-language characters and words to make it into English cookbooks?’ - Rachel Baron (The Counter). Food writers have long negotiated the dilemma of when and how to translate non-English dish names and ingredients, while taking on the extra labour of working with book designers to find ways to present non-Roman scripts and diacritic markings as well as finding additional proofreaders (often themselves).
“But poetry—in both English and Korean, spoken aloud and read on the page and translated—has helped me to find new meaning within and across linguistic boundaries. There will always be much lost in the gaps, where one tongue does not transfer cleanly to another, but that loss can be valuable; it can help us work harder to understand one another. In the moments when my desire for exactitude overwhelms, I think of my lineage, of all that we want to say to each other across the distance of our lives.”
‘Translation And The Family Of Things’ - Crystal Hana Kim (Guernica). A touching piece about how the writer Kim’s translation of her grandmother’s poem revealed her own myopic understanding about the latter’s mind.
“I found myself approaching things familiar to me with a fairy tale-like mysticism. When I spoke about foods I grew up with around Delhi, I began to glorify and dissect. I racked my brain for praises of dal-chawal. To write neatly digestible text, I tried to code familiar foods into adaptable Western packages for an American readership. I translated everyday things as a “kind of crepe,” or a “sort of sauce.” I believed that I had to explain, instruct, and pander to a comfortable fantasy staged in the West about the cultures of South Asia.”
‘Bad Taste’ - Sharanya Deepak (Hazlitt). Deepak scrutinises the way non-Western food is covered in Western food media, from the stereotypes and aesthetics to the way writers water down their language.
Online Chinese translation projects
To understand Chineseness, you must be able to read Chinese and understand how the Chinese think. I’ve heard something approximating this maxim many times, though whether I agree is another matter. It is true, however, that we should study Chinese language texts and actively seek out the best translations. I’ve recently come across some Chinese translation projects that are free to read and encompass the entire brow height spectrum. First there is Reading The China Dream by David Ownby, who translates the writings of established intellectuals in contemporary China. As Ownby notes, it’s insightful for anyone who wants to gain an overview of what can be said across China’s intellectual landscape (roughly mapped as Liberals/New Left/New Confucians) - i.e. taken to, but not over the edge of censorship.
Then there is the UK-based Paper Republic 纸托邦 , dedicated to translating new writing from contemporary Chinese writers into English. For the food lovers, there is a new six-part miniseries called Food Glorious Food:
They ate everywhere. He knew he lived in a good city for food, but this felt more like wandering through the world of an ancient almanac, stumbling into restaurants operated by fantastical creatures with strange and wondrous powers. He started to let his attention wander, watching the nearby diners and neurotically toying with old aphorisms in his head. If it takes ten years of good deeds to earn a single boat ride with your true love, how long did the two of us have to toil to share this pot of soup? I know not for whom you eat, but the bell, it eats for thee. This last bit of nonsense struck him as particularly inauspicious, and he quickly took a sip of the Buddha Jumps Over the Wall shark fin soup in front of him. Where there’s Buddha, there’s safety.
Taste Test by Sabrina Huang (transl. Andrew Rule)
For those who want to know what’s going down on Chinese social media, there is What’s On Weibo, and the brilliantly-named Chinese Doom Scroll that I literally scrolled past (though not in a doom-ful way), as well as The Great Translation Movement which must be considered with care.
If you’ve ever wondered what linguist nerds get up to in their spare time, you can lose literal days on Language Log forum, where you will see the back-of-envelope workings of sinologist Victor H. Mair alongside satisfyingly dorky mistranslation memes.
Translating culture vs. cultural translation
A lecture below from Harish Trivedi, Professor of English at Delhi University and postcolonial and translation scholar on how translation studies - historically rooted in linguistics - became influenced by the emergence of postcolonial cultural studies in the 1970s. Trivedi discusses how the notion of ‘cultural translation’ is not so much a survival tactic of the migrant, but an imposition of ‘hegemonic Western demand and necessity’. Some great points about ‘untranslatability’; I guess what we might today reclaim as an act of resistance or the refusal of politics.
If you prefer to read, here’s the full paper (2007).
In Bhabha’s discussion, the literary text treated as the pre-eminent example of cultural translation is Salman Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses, a novel written originally in English and read in that language by Bhabha. A clue to the new sense in which the term translation is here being used is suggested by a remark made by Rushdie himself (which Bhabha incidentally does not cite) in which he said of himself and other diasporic postcolonial writers: “we are translated men” (Rushdie 16). Rushdie was here exploiting the etymology of the word “translation,” which means to carry or bear across, and what he meant, therefore, was that because he had been borne across, presumably by an aeroplane, from India and Pakistan to the United Kingdom, he was therefore a translated man. He neglected to tell us as to whether, before he became a translated man, he was at any stage also an original man.
But a second and overriding sense in which too Rushdie claimed to be a translated man is precisely what is expounded by Homi Bhabha in his essay, with specific reference to The Satanic Verses. Bhabha begins with an epigraph from Walter Benjamin’s classic essay on translation: “‘Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract ideas of identity and similarity’” (qted. in Bhabha 212). Later, in a key passage, Bhabha brings in Derrida’s deconstruction of Benjamin’s concept of translation as an after-life or survival, in order to deploy it in a wholly new context unintended by either Benjamin or Derrida, i.e., the context of Rushdean migrancy and hybridity.
In the above excerpt, Trivedi is referring to Rushdie’s excerpt below - which itself refers to the etymology of ‘translation’ - carried across - included at the top of this article.
Books
Finally, I have added all of Xiaolu Guo’s books to my to-read list. I kinda want to be her when I grow up. No other notes.