If I were to mention St Matthew’s Passion to some Europeans, they would understand me as referring to the famous religious musical oratorio. But if I were to mention the same work to some East Asians, it would be a very different story. Once, my Chinese parents visited me in England. It was their first trip abroad and their last. Neither of them learnt any foreign language. I took them to central London and they saw a large poster advertising a performance of St Matthew’s Passion.
‘What is that?’ my father asked, pointing to the poster.
I was not sure how to explain. ‘It is… a concert.’
‘What’s it about?’
I thought for a while, and said: ‘It’s a musical piece written by a German with many people playing western instruments. Some actors sing about the master Ye-Su’s death, and his disciple Ma-Xiu wrote the words.’
My parents looked at me blankly. I was speaking my southern Chinese dialect to them, which made the explanation somewhat weird as there was no pre-existing context in which to couch my answer. Neither of my parents knew the slightest thing about Christianity; they were communists, though they had formerly been Confucian-Buddhists.
‘Oh, that’s strange! Why would this Ma-Xiu go on about his master’s death? After all, when you’re dead you’re dead. No one complains about Buddha’s being dead!’ My mother remarked.
Shaking his head, my father had more practical concerns. He now looked about for an Asian restaurant in order to cure his despair with English food.
My little anecdote illustrates that the hardest part about translation is not the linguistic technicalities. The real difficulty lies in the layers of narrative, ideology and history, both in the translator’s world and the receiver’s world. The issue is devising some way to span two worlds, each one spinning on its own axis.
The issue is devising some way to span two worlds, each one spinning on its own axis.
A huge chasm separates ideograms from alphabets. The difference between Chinese Hanzi and the English language demands that a writer writing in an adopted language be not only an interpreter, but also an anthropologist. I have come to understand that in order to render a Chinese concept (expressed in pictograms and ideograms) into English I must draw upon my comparative knowledge of the English and Chinese traditions. That’s more complicated than St Mathew becoming Ma-Xiu, Jesus becoming Ye-Su. For example - junzi（君子）in Chinese means an upright man with an unbending principle like a bamboo plant, but in English it might be translated as a nobleman or a gentleman. However the terms nobleman and gentleman in the West suggest class and social rank, while in Chinese junzi doesn’t have such connotations. A junzi cannot lie and will not lie, whereas a noble or a gentleman might. Another example: in Chinese the word dew (露) is composed by placing ‘rain’ on top and ‘path’ underneath. So ‘dew’ signifies a wet path after rains. But in English it comes with three letters: d, e and w, a phonetic sign without direct pictorial manifestation.
When I was writing my essay book Radical, I spent some time mapping out the difference between two languages and how to build a semiotic bridge for western readers to cross. Here are a few of my notes: What does it say about the Chinese that their language does not have verb conjugations? Does it suggest that they have a different sense of time? What does it mean that Chinese verbs do not bother with pronouns, such as ‘I’ and ‘me’? And more generally, what does it imply when one culture uses picture-based ideograms and not twenty six letters? Does it mean the Chinese think more visually than westerners? Are their thoughts as a result more laconic, less linear, more spatial? All these questions prompt me to self-translate layer by layer, while working with the English language rather than Hanzi, since I no longer live in China.
Freud, in his Introduction to Psychoanalysis, saw a similarity between the image-and-thought-based Chinese language and dream language. He believed that the Chinese language was an excellent medium for the expression of thought. He was fascinated by its quality of vagueness, its utter simplicity of grammar, its non-explicitness, its dependence on context. The Chinese language is one of the oldest languages still used daily by a large population. Freud thought for a language to endure over such a vast expanse of time, there must be some deep underlying structure. He also noted that the Chinese language has no grammar and is based on images, suggesting a closeness to the structure of the unconscious.
Jacques Lacan tried to understand the Chinese language in order to understand the hidden work of the unconscious. So Lacan studied Chinese with the Chinese-French writer François Cheng in the sixties. He explored this supposed connection between oriental language and the unconscious. And he found the inner connection between the two, which led him to state humorously that if he was a Lacanian it was because he had once studied Chinese.
it is the cultural and ideological cloak, and it is powerful because it is invisible.
These days western Lacanian psychoanalysts don’t study Chinese. They stare inwardly with the same linguistic glasses. Perhaps the prescription changes from German to English, or French. The hard work of distant cultural translation seems to be done by others. And I wonder, are the psychoanalysts missing something?
Let’s come back to my poor Chinese parents. Yes, they did not understand who Ma-Xiu (St Matthew) is and his preoccupation with his master’s death, or why the concept of passion has to do with God but not with basic abilities like learning to cook well. They understood that translation actually has not much to do with linguistic differences. It has to do with the tight invisible cloak we all learn to wear from childhood onwards; it is the cultural and ideological cloak, and it is powerful because it is invisible.
‘You can rub your skin white and dye your hair blond, but you’ll only end up looking like a mangy brown bear from the bamboo forest,’ my mother remarked in her dialect, finally spotting the red lanterns of Chinatown in Soho.
There was no way of denting my mother’s tribalist philosophy. She had been spinning it all my life. My mother was too embedded in her own world to be a translator. While my parents headed towards where the smell of fried pork wafted, I followed them, my mind struck by this simple fact: the key to the translator’s art is dislocation. It was because I had transplanted myself so many times that I understood this.