Translation: Writing Across Languages, Video, Iowa City Public Library, September 25, 2009 |
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Translation: Writing Across Languages, Video, Iowa City Public Library, September 25, 2009
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| Rating | |
| Title | Translation: writing across languages, Iowa City Public Library, September 25, 2009 |
| Creator |
Dafydd, Fflur Groyon, Vicente Garcia, 1970- Najm, Soheil Zhang, Lijia |
| Creator - Nationality |
Welsh Filipino Iraqi Chinese |
| Contributor | Durovicová, Nataša |
| Date Original | 2009-09-25 |
| Description | Welsh author Fflur Dafydd discusses the difference between expression in Welsh and English, contrasting the often euphemistic nature of Welsh with the more straightforward character of English. She then gives examples of how a novel she wrote in Welsh completely changed when she translated it into English. Vicente Garcia Groyon of the Philippines speaks about growing up multi-lingual with English being his most dominant language. He goes on to discuss the number of languages spoken in the Philippines and the benefits that globalization brings to people able to communicate across languages including the shaping of identity. Soheil Najm from Iraq gives a brief history of translation in the Arab world, explaining that two methods of translation developed (literal and translation for meaning). He then proposes two new styles of translation in order to capture the meaning and form of literature and the artistic nature of poetry and then discusses the challenges/benefits of translating poetry. Chinese author Lijia Zhang discusses her choice to write in English as a means of “liberation.” She explains that writing in English allows her to be “bold” in a way she is not when writing in Chinese and explains some of the challenges and benefits of writing in English. |
| Venue | Iowa City Public Library |
| Topical Subject (LCTGM) |
Authors Writing |
| Personal Name Subject | Dafydd, Fflur; Groyon, Vicente Garcia, 1970-; Najm, Soheil; Zhang, Lijia |
| Geographic Subject | United States -- Iowa -- Iowa City |
| Chronological Subject | 2000-2009 |
| Transcription | 1 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 25, 2009: Fflur Dafydd (Wales/UK), Vicente Groyon (the Philippines), Soheil Najm (Iraq), and Lijia Zhang (China) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu Fflur Dafydd WRITING ACROSS LANGUAGES You taught me language; and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse. Caliban, The Tempest, William Shakespeare Like Caliban, stranded on the rock in The Tempest, I often feel that all my life, I have been using a language imposed upon me by others; but the use of which, has enabled me to “profit on’t” in a number of ways. And, unfortunately, I’m not talking here about financial gain, but less tangible types of profit, the kind which won’t buy you a swimming pool but will certainly help you make friends with an Englishman who does, smiling all the while a Caliban-esque demonic smile behind his back. I have lived my entire life between two languages. I was raised in a Welsh-language household, by Welsh-languageactivist parents, in a predominantly Welsh-speaking part of Wales. But of course, English was also part of my reality from day to day, as Wales has been colonised by the English for centuries. But living between languages has undoubtedly been an enriching experience for me as a writer. While there is no time now for me to give you a comprehensive etymological account of the differences between Welsh and English, I will perhaps briefly illustrate this using an example which would make Caliban proud. Caliban uses the new language given to him by Prospero disrespectfully, in order to “curse.” And when a Welsh speaker swears, they usually do so in English, because swearing in Welsh is a complicated affair. We tend to use all the words in the world just to tell somebody to “buzz off”. Even our new modern English/Welsh dictionary suggests that if we are really angry with someone we should say something like: twll dy din di Ffaro, cer getre ti di cael dy gyfle! Which loosely translates as “Up yours, Pharoah, you’ve had your chance and should maybe think about going home now.” Try shouting that in the heat of the moment. As you can see here, our language is often digressive in nature, and rhythmically driven by hard hitting consonants. (Only yesterday I received a letter from my sister-in-law remarking on how nice it was to write down a name without consonants - IOWA!) Sexual vocabulary, too, is rather limited in Welsh, and is of a euphemistic nature, with female genitalia, for example, being referred to as “y llawes goch” (the red sleeve) and The Vagina Monologues having recently been translated into Shinani’n siarad, or Little Jane Talks. So if you want to talk dirty, I would suggest doing it with someone who speaks English. That way, you won’t run the risk of bursting out laughing in the middle of an intimate act. And with this in mind, how does one then begin to translate a text from Welsh into English? How does one make the shift from this highly literary language, albeit one with many limitations and boundaries, to a vaster, broader language, where no word, no phrase, is unutterable? Certainly it is not impossible, and has been done countless times before. I have faced this challenge as a translator of Welsh poetry, and have found ways of manoeuvring the meaning across the divide. But when I began translating my own Welsh-language novel, Atyniad (Attraction) into English, the results were drastically different. Once I realised that I was working with a completely different set of linguistic tools, and that I needn’t be afraid of upsetting the original author of the text, my language began to run away with itself, adding new images, metaphors, and even characters to the story. Although I was using the same setting and location - Bardsey, a small island in North Wales - by the time I had finished the first chapter I realised that I was not writing a translation but rather a completely different novel. My motivation changed, too, and I realised with urgency that the novel needed to be about the Welsh-language experience this time, rather than merely being a Welsh-language experience. Like Caliban, I was attempting to “profit” on the language my colonisers had 2 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 25, 2009: Fflur Dafydd (Wales/UK), Vicente Groyon (the Philippines), Soheil Najm (Iraq), and Lijia Zhang (China) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu taught me, using it boldly, rebelliously, to regain my power, to shed light on the colonial experience. The novel therefore needed a new title and a new identity, and became Twenty Thousand Saints - a title that in Welsh would seem wordy and clichéd, but created intrigue and anticipation in English. And then, suddenly, my linguistic tools became scalpels, and I went about giving my characters rather ruthless lobotomies so that they could fulfil their new roles. The writer-in-residence of the island, who in the Welsh original was a short blonde fiction writer whose narrative was relayed in 1st person, became Mererid, whose narration is confined to 3rd person. Not only did I make her a poet, but I also gave her nicer hair, making her the sleek brunette I always wanted to be, and sat back to watch her gain several inches in height. For reasons beyond my comprehension, the sex she had was much less satisfying, but at least I had the vocabulary to explain why. Several other characters also underwent trans-language-surgery. The ecologists in the Welsh version, Sioned and Cadi, became compressed into a character named Elin, and she was bestowed with the body of the former and mind of the latter. Justin Bowen, my satirical take on Welsh-language presenters, lost his identity as a heterosexual male and was transformed into two lesbians in one afternoon. The characters of Dic, Anni and Telor were killed outright, pushed off the cliff-edge of the page, never to be seen again. The character of Bela, who in Welsh had been a hard-nosed, asexual gardener, became a rhubarbpilfering heretical nun with a political background. And out of the spare parts, I was also able to construct a bilingual dog to take the place of two monolingual goats. Interestingly, because of all these changes, Twenty Thousand Saints received better reviews by my Welsh-language critics than any of my Welsh-language novels. A production company (which showed no interest in the Welsh-language original) is now interested in dramatising the book for the screen - but bizarrely wants to turn it into a Welsh-language screenplay! If this were to happen, the novel will have made a full circle from Welsh into English and then back into Welsh, which means I would need to get the scalpel out again, and prepare my characters for another transformation. Already they are clinging to each other in terror. But such sacrifices would have to be made, for if this novel were to make it to the screen, then that, as Caliban says, would be profit! Vicente Garcia Groyon PORTRAIT OF A FILIPINO WRITING FROM ENGLISH I discovered very early that I had a knack for writing (which means, by default, writing in English). My parents, readers and writers both, encouraged me, and I never problematized what language to write in-I was simply most fluent in English, case closed. I think of English as “my language,” and yet, at times I suspect it never will be. As a teenager, I became aware of nationalist discourse, and its rejection of things foreign, especially the languages of our former colonizers. Spanish was successfully lobbied out of the college curriculum, but English continues to be resilient, especially in the age of globalization/Americanization. Nationalist discourse insists that one cannot think Filipino thoughts in English, and therefore the pressure mounted for this teenage writer to begin writing, and therefore reading, in Philippine languages. There are a little over 170 languages in the Philippines, some with several dialectal variations, and about 4 to 8 major language groups, depending on how one defines “major.” Some of the languages are similar to each other, but more often than not, a Filipino from one part of the Philippines will not understand a Filipino from another part. 3 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 25, 2009: Fflur Dafydd (Wales/UK), Vicente Groyon (the Philippines), Soheil Najm (Iraq), and Lijia Zhang (China) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu This is how it was for my mother and father. My mother spoke Hiligaynon, and my father spoke Tagalog. They met at the Ateneo de Manila University, and when their romance blossomed, it blossomed in English. When we moved from Manila to my mother’s hometown, Bacolod, to escape the terrors of Martial Law in 1972, my father began to speak some bad Hiligaynon, eventually becoming fluent in it. At that point I had begun talking in a smattering of English and Tagalog, although it’s said that my first coherent, original sentence was in English, signaling that at age 1, I was composing my thoughts in that language. Therefore I do not accept the notion that being a “native speaker” of a language is necessarily a geographical or racial matter. English was a gift from America to her “little brown brothers” in 1901, a way of teaching the new colony how to be American, and it helped Filipinos understand one another, finally. It wasn’t until 1936 that an indigenous national language, called Filipino, was decreed by law, which caused problems of its own, but which now meant that most Filipinos would learn three languages: (1) the language of their region, (2) Filipino, and (3) English, which, despite legislative changes, remains the medium of instruction. It is the language of the educated, the language of the elite (or the elitist), and is widely perceived, as in many other countries today, to be a ticket to a better life. English is the unofficial national language of the Philippines, and it is the unofficial regional language of Southeast Asia. Indeed, it is the official program language of the IWP, which arguably could not function as effectively without it. As I began to read more literature in the Philippine languages that I know, I became aware of nuances of expression and sensibility that perhaps cannot be translated into, or even expressed in, another language. Interesting experiments and innovations are happening today in Philippine writing, and they are happening in Philippine languages, in which, arguably, one comes closest to an idea of the “Filipino.” Ironically, there are more publishing venues for writing in English, and very little writing is done in Philippine languages apart from Filipino, as writers and publishers prefer to access a larger audience. Older works in Philippine languages are either inaccessible or unavailable. The sad reality is that the literatures of most of the 170 Philippine languages are being lost to time, because they are largely oral and mostly unretrieved, unstudied, or unpreserved. As Philippine literary scholarship toddles in the footsteps of Western academic fads, the more basic work of constituting the body of Philippine literature remains undone, much less the work of translating it into Filipino or English so that all Filipinos can read it. Translating is a particularly bleak matter, owing to the paucity of inter-language dictionaries, and the diminishing number of native speakers. My experiences writing a libretto and a screenplay in Hiligaynon led me to question my own tendency to write in English. Writing in Hiligaynon and relearning it felt like having a locked room in my memory suddenly burst open, evoking afternoons of listening to AM radio serials, househelpers gossiping, politicians speechifying, priests sermoning, and relatives catching up with each other at family reunions. There is a Tagalog phrase, “lukso ng dugo” which literally means “the leap of the blood” and describes the sudden joy at recognizing the familiar, the beloved, the self in the other. My blood leapt to the cadences and tones, the nuances of thought and expression in Hiligaynon as I wrote. It’s said that multilingual people constantly translate in their heads from a first language before uttering or writing anything outside that language. I had always felt that this did not apply to my use of English, and now I had to reconsider. 4 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 25, 2009: Fflur Dafydd (Wales/UK), Vicente Groyon (the Philippines), Soheil Najm (Iraq), and Lijia Zhang (China) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu Was I truly writing from English as a Filipino, deploying the language for my own expressive needs? Or was I merely drawing on received metaphors and turns of phrase, trafficking in clichés in the effort to write “correctly”? Did I have to choose one language or languish forever in a nowhereland? The answer is not as simple as it seeks to be. One can long for the “pure,” pre-colonial state of being several hundred divided, warring tribes on 7,100 separate islands, but one can never go back, only forward. To be Filipino is to be, necessarily, a hybrid-one free to draw from the streams of culture that feed into one’s history, including those indigenous and foreign. The elusiveness of the Filipino identity is a non-issue to Filipinos living in the Philippines, who blithely go about their hybrid lives, both aware of and disinterested in the ineffable national self that unites them. Many of the best Filipino writers are bilingual or trilingual, producing excellent work in whatever language they choose, often translating their own work into the other languages they know. In this day and age, no one can own English. Filipinos have been writing from English for almost a century, both with and without Caliban’s seething resentment. To be hybrid is to be multiple and various. One of the paradoxes of globalization is that it engenders diversity, and hybrids are adept at traversing the borders between subject positions. Nowhereland is proving to be not all that unpleasant, and quite a viable position, when one considers the matter of shaping an identity, which is ultimately not a fixed, monolithic “am” but a more fluid, provisional, and evolving “to be.” Soheil Najm TRANSLATION AS CREATIVE WRITING Translation has a very long history, particularly in Iraq, where it has been practiced for thousands of years. Archeologists have found translations in many languages of the epic of Gilgamesh and the code of Hammurabi. By the fifteenth century, Arabs knew the art of translation widely and very well. They had two primary methods of translation: the way of Ibn Naima Al-Himsy, the first translator, which we can call ‘literal translation’, has the translator interpreting the text word by word. The second way, that is translating the meaning, was pioneered by the two most important translators at that time, Al-Batreeq and his son Yehya Ibn Al-Batreeq, who in that manner translated the most important Greek books in philosophy and medicine into Arabic during the golden age of Islamic civilization. If literary logic leads us to take the second way, I guess we need a third way in order to be able to translate both the meaning and form of literature. This third way should concern itself with conveying what is beyond the surface structure of the text, which is the text in its whole expressive style and its ability to convey the vision of the author. This means that the translator stands in front of the challenge of a language against another language. Often, the translated text becomes confused because it lacks coherence. Sometimes the uncreative translator misses the underlying rhythm of a text. Of course, the translator needs to have a special sense of the text, so that the he can convey that rhythm in a professional and charming style, at once very loyal to the foreign text and at the same time creating a new text. In this sense I support here the idea that sees the translator as the second creator of the literary text. This second creator scrutinizes his message and language which should take its active and more impressive role, if we agree that the translated text is a creative work and the language here is not only a means but also a target. Concerning the translation of poetry, this may need, in my opinion a fourth way. And I see this way as more purely artistic. It may require poetic sensibility and intuition, more than an adherence to the rules. For this reason it is difficult to imagine that 5 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 25, 2009: Fflur Dafydd (Wales/UK), Vicente Groyon (the Philippines), Soheil Najm (Iraq), and Lijia Zhang (China) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu anyone can translate poetry, except the one who has the talent of creating poetry himself, because translating poetry is nearly impossible, as the linguist Jacobson said. What is possible is to rewrite the text and the most important is the effect that the text has on the reader when there is no alienation between him and the text. From that idea comes what we can call the creative voice of the translator, as well as his effective role. Some theorists, like Benjamin, see that translation goes beyond the enrichment of the target language and culture, goes beyond the borders of renewing the original text, and it even goes beyond the limits of expressing the interrelationships among languages, to become an introduction to an international language. That means translation provides an advanced cultural incubator for human understanding on the base of comprehending and never ignoring the Other. Some people argue that the poet might be affected by his translations of poetry, and begin to imitate that foreign style. However, I think of the translation process as a deep and close reading of the foreign text; furthermore, it is a good opportunity to analyze and deconstruct this text in order to discover its creative and artistic secrets and rebuild it again in another language. This process of reading and rebuilding can play a positive cultural role, and the poet who works on translations shouldn't be afraid of any negative effects on his style and theory of writing poetry. On the contrary, I think translating poetry can polish a writer’s poetic experiences through a very close acquaintance with those of the Other, especially if he is wary and employs them effectively in his writing. I think that the poet-translator is luckier than other poets because he is able to grow very close to texts, and feel their charm as he translates them. In my experience I spent a very long time reading and then translating the work of many English and American poets, and learned much about their skills in all their transformations. As a result that didn't negatively affect my poetic orientations or my own writing style. From another corner I see translation as a way to work creatively during the temporary absence, which might be long or short, of the ability to write poetry, which of course depends on the circumstances around my mood. I presume that there is a secret or a magic relationship between myself and the poetic text that I intend to translate. This relationship might not happen with the other poems of the same poet because there are texts that won’t let you catch them whatever you try, and if you force yourself to translate them, the birth will be a damaged creation. So, provoked by the essay of the brilliant critic P. R. King, I found myself drawn to Ted Hughes and not Philip Larkin, as the poetic world of Ted Hughes was closer to my mindset. I saw myself translating his work as if I were writing my own poems, though the world of Hughes is very distinct from my own, and his poetic style is unique, especially in his explorations of wildlife. Inevitably there must be a special sensitivity that attracts the poet to translate a specific other poet, and this sensitivity is embodied in the special style or use of the language and ideas in which the foreign poet deals with the subjects, words, images, metaphors and all the tools that help him to create his poetic vision. Zhang Lijia A TOOL OF STRUGGLE: THE CHALLENGE AND CHARM OF WRITING IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE “Foreign language is a tool of class struggle,” said Karl Max. For many years, the English language was my tool of struggle. I was taught the sentence in secondary school when I hardly knew all the letters in English. Yet we stretched our mouths into the alien sound. An alien and strange sound indeed. Our teacher spoke so-called English with a strong Nanjing accent. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year would sound something like this: . 6 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 25, 2009: Fflur Dafydd (Wales/UK), Vicente Groyon (the Philippines), Soheil Najm (Iraq), and Lijia Zhang (China) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu Even that didn’t last long. At 16, my education ended abruptly as my mother sent me to work at a rocket factory. As an escape route, I decided to teach myself English, in the hopes of getting a job as an interpreter outside the factory. I became fascinated by this language system that is so different from our characters. When I left China for England in 1990, I dared to pursue my childhood dream by taking a course in journalism. Now I am a writer as well as a journalist, reporting on Chinese society for international media while based in Beijing. I have to admit that I am not naturally linguistically gifted. I just sent my bio to my Italian publisher, and boasted that I am a frequent speaker on the BBC, CNN and National Public Radio. In the ‘Public’, I unfortunately missed out an ‘l’. If anything, pubic is certainly not public. People write in another language for different reasons. Samuel Beckett deliberately wrote Waiting for Godot in French so that its style would be different. Joseph Conrad wrote in English, not his native tongue, with a felicity rarely seen in native English speakers. I shall not compare myself to these masters. Why would I choose to write in English? First of all, it frees me politically. I wouldn’t otherwise be able to publish books deemed politically sensitive in mainland China. After a book I wrote in Chinese entitled The Western Image of the Chairman was banned from publication in China, having failed to meet the censor’s criteria, I’ve made it a point to write in English. Also, it frees me literally. Since it’s not my native tongue, I can be bold; I can take an adventure. Let me give you an example. On a balmy spring day, I took my children to a park where flowers suddenly burst into blossom. I wanted to use the word ‘bewitched’ to convey a sense of dramatic and sudden change. I tried at first: “Bewitched by spring, the park came to life and the glorious peonies blossomed everywhere.” Then I decided to use a more active verb: “Spring had bewitched the park where glorious peonies blossomed everywhere.” Please do tell me which sentence works better or if they work at all. The first Roman emperor famously said: “When you gain a new language, you gain a new soul.” I am not sure that I’ve gained a new soul, but I do feel that speaking a different language brings out different sides of my personality. For example, when using Chinese, I speak faster and louder and I don’t sound as sophisticated or polished as I sometimes pretend to in English. Writing in English frees me from any inhibitions I may have. If I had written my memoir in English, I think the sex scene would have been less detailed. I am not sure Chinese is the best language to describe emotions or personal relationships. For example, in Chinese the very word ‘romantic’ - ruo man ti ke - comes from the transliteration of the English word. As mentioned I am not gifted with language. But sometimes, I also worry that my English has become so fluent that it has lost is quaintness. One of the Chinese memoirs I much enjoyed for its freshness of language is a book entitled Mr. China’s Son, a Villager’s Life during the Cultural Revolution. “Her feet were seriously pierced by stings,” he wrote. Such sentences do bring readers the delight of tasting something different or fresh. Borrowing our dated and rich idioms can not only spice up the language but also evoke a sense of place. I commented on a young colleague’s appearance: “The moustache on his even-featured face looked as out of place as painted legs on a snake.” I often don’t directly translate the idiom but weave the concept into the text. For example, we have a phrase called ‘angry hair shoots a hat’. When my mother told me that I was to stop my schooling to go to work, I wrote: “If I had been wearing a hat, the force of my rage would have shot it into the air.” 7 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 25, 2009: Fflur Dafydd (Wales/UK), Vicente Groyon (the Philippines), Soheil Najm (Iraq), and Lijia Zhang (China) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu My experiments don’t always work. In my first novel, Lotus, a book about prostitution set in modern-day China, I described how Lotus, the main character, sent money home so that her family could enjoy a ‘fat New Year’. My agent in London suggested ‘splendid’. “People wouldn’t understand ‘fat New Year’!” he argued. But ‘splendid’ simply doesn’t sound right for an uneducated village girl. I’ll have to stay ‘fat’ in this case. Having written for international media for years, I feel I know when and how to explain certain terminology. Tamade, for instance - to keep it the way it is, I would have to explain that it is a national swear word, good for expressing joy or anger in equal measure. Writing for the domestic market, on the other hand, there’s always a great amount of presumed knowledge. Having been bewitched by the language - again, I am not sure if that’s the right word to use - I also find the challenge of writing in English rewarding and fun. And I know it’ll be an ongoing battle until the day I am no longer confused by ‘in the bed’ and ‘on the bed’. After all, fighting for something worthwhile keeps us alive. |
| Type (DCMIType) | Moving Image |
| Type (AAT) | Presentations (Communicative events) |
| Type (IMT) | mp4 |
| Duration | 01:23:46 |
| Language | English |
| Digital Collection | Virtual Writing University Archive |
| Contributing Institution | Iowa City Public Library |
| Subcollection | International Writing Program Collection |
| Rights Management | Educational use only, no other rights given. U.S. and international copyright laws may protect this digital object. Commercial use or distribution of the object is not permitted without prior permission of the copyright holder. |
| Contact Information | Contact the VWU Webmaster: http://www.writinguniversity.org/index.php/main/info/25/ |
| Date Digital | 2009 |
| File Name | iwp-icpl_09-25-09.mp4 |
| Original File Name | iwp_09-25-09.mpg |
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