化 境 神 似

There's new English translation of several Wang Xiaobo novellas out. Li Yinhe expressed her satisfaction over the reception in American media, particularly Publishers Weekly. A certain Zhang Fang wrote that the PW review was most likely bought and paid for by the publisher. I figured this deserved a response, and wrote up the following for XYS (domestic mirror):

质疑《质疑王小波作品在美国“受到高度评价”》

作者：zhwj

前几天看到张放先生解释《出版商周刊》是怎样写书评的，越往下读越怀疑张放先生的“铁杆订户”身份。可能是张放没有仔细查看相关网站的相关内容，也可能是对美国出版界没有深入研究与了解，我不得而知。但当我看到张放用“自吹自擂”一词来形容《出版商周刊》对王小波英译作品的评论，我就有点不太相信。结果一查，果然不出我之所料：张放在“忽悠”你们呢！

张放先生质疑王小波作品在美国“受到高度评价”，这是他的权利。不过，我担心张放先生在解读美国出版界时会误导其他读者，于是我冒昧纠正一下。

1、张放先生写道：“那段文字更重要的是要告诉美国读者王小波作品与其他中国文学作品的区别在哪里。”《出版商周刊》是个行业性杂志，而不是给人民大众看的消费者杂志。《出版商周刊》、《书单杂志》（Booklist）、《图书馆月刊》（Library Journal）、《科克斯书评》（Kirkus Reviews）等刊物是出版界的《综艺》（Variety），它们的读者群主要是由图书批发商与零售店，以及图书馆组织的。光在美国，每年出版社出那么多书，每到采购的时候，那短短二百个单词会告诉书商该书会吸引什么样的读者，因而很有影响力。

2、张放先生写道：“如果是在出版前或刚刚出版就给出了高度评价，那你信其文字内容的可靠性吗？”难道张放先生没听说过什么叫“Advance Reading Copy”（ARC，预书样）？现在连普通博客也可以享受这一待遇。一般来说，离出版日还有两三个月，评论者的样书已经拿到手了，再笨的人仍有足够的时间来消解文化差异的相关问题。

3、《出版商周刊》对王小波英译作品的评论“最有可能是出版社授意或亲自执笔写出的文字”，“最有可能”这说法跟颠倒黑白并无两样。《出版商周刊》刊登的书评都是由自由撰稿人来写的，之所以不署名就是为了避免张放先生所说的代笔现象。请张放先生查看上下文，上一则书评有这么一句：“By the time Márai's moody, uneven narration gives way to the students' long-winded confessions, the novel's seams are clearly visible”，而下一则书评也有点挑剔：“the complex details of their true plan are slowly (sometimes too slowly) revealed”。哪有出版社愿意出钱买这样的“软广告”？也许张放先生的意思是，只有负面评价才是真的，而那些“赞美之词”都是自费自编的宣传文字。然而我不相信大名鼎鼎的《出版商周刊》会采取那么卑劣的手段，勒索作家与出版社。另外，虽然《出版商周刊》刊登的不是“Starred Review”（重点评论，表示热烈推荐的意思），《书单杂志》里的评论就是个“Starred Review”，不知道张放先生认为那颗星星值多少钱？

* * *I'm inordinately pleased that my very first submission resorts to an XYS cliche for its title.

[Originally posted on 2005.01.24]

TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE against the chart below. These are all common words; most of them fall in the basic set for primary school learners (no. 14 is a bit more obscure, so I've provided a compound). Answers are provided at the end of the article, although individual characters will be discussed in the text.



So, how'd you do? Not too great, huh? I put this quiz together and I still have trouble with some of them. If the winds of history had blown in a slightly different direction, however, every last one of them would be recognizable on sight.

The first round of simplification of Chinese characters is well-documented. Put into practice in 1956 and 1964, it caused the break between the mainland's writing system and that of the overseas community. Less well known is the second round of simplification, a draft of which was published in 1977, but which was repealed in 1986. There are several books in print that discuss this plan, but any reference to it on the web takes the form of the second half of the previous sentence. Wikipedia has a better article on the second scheme now than when I first posted this, and there are scans of the promulgated document here.

The characters in the quiz all come from that draft. Some of them may be familiar - the first three, in fact, are quite common on rough, hand-lettered signs despite government campaigns urging standard characters. "早歺" can be seen on the door of a shack selling breakfast buns, "禁止仃车" spray-painted on a metal garage door proclaims "No Parking", and 亍 points out roads on sketched maps. Each of these characters has an older meaning and pronunciation that is simply overlooked in this folk usage: 歺 is a variant of 歹 "evil", 仃 is used in 伶仃, "solitary", and 亍 is used in 彳亍, "walk slowly". Number ten, also a folk simplification, is more widely accepted (visited Hong Kong recently?), since its base meaning, "chew" is similar to the borrowed meaning, "mouth".

Other characters resurrect historical usage. 厶 is an ancient form of 私, "private", and 坣 is an ancient variant of 堂, "hall". 迊 is an ancient variant of 币, "coin", but here it takes its inspiration from a calligraphic form of 迎, "greet" (this usage is quite common on banners). Character 27 is based on a script form of 真, and character 28 is a regularized script form of 青.

Characters that somehow escaped simplification under applicable rules during the first round are addressed here. The script form of 這 became regularized as 这 in 1956, so here the framers understand that 言 simplifies to 文, and reduce 信 to 伩. Likewise, 套 contains 長, which was previously simplified to 长, so the secondary result is character 19.

The 1977 plan is much more ruthless in its phonetic substitutions, eliminating wholesale those components that no longer have a phonetic relationship with modern Chinese pronunciation. Compare character 32, with 干 (gān) as a phonetic, against the original, 感 (gǎn), phonetic 咸 (xián). Or number four, 辺 (dào), phonetic 刀 (dāo), against 道, phonetic 首 (shǒu).

Where the first simplification was basically a reduction of strokes, this round turns its attention to needless semantic components. The "radicals" in Chinese characters often have little relationship to the current meaning, anyway, so when the meaning of a certain sound is evident from context, why not do away with useless strokes? Thus 葫猢蝴糊 (hú) all reduce to the phonetic component 胡, and 菜蔡 (cài) reduce to a single character with a simplified phonetic [艹才] (see the second character of 14). Note that not all characters with identical pronunciation are so conflated; 湖, "lake", retains its original form, probably because the semantic component 氵 "water" is closely related to the meaning.

Some results defy explanation. Character 18 is a simplification of 部, through what tortured logic I cannot fathom. And the prize for most obscure goes to character 20, whose traditional form is 器. The glyph itself only occurs one other place, as part of 临, the simplified form of 臨. There is perhaps a chain through 吅, but it remains one ugly character.

Of course, ugly is relative. The entire Unicode Ideograph Extension is immense (check out the 方正超大字符集; it includes both A and B), and when I open up a character browser I often lose my way, sidetracked by the marvelous, strange, and incomprehensible. Some of the characters I can guess at - some are ancient seal forms recast in modern angular strokes, others are taken from handwritten variants. Finding alternative characters for my name is a great time-waster.



The goal of all this is to allow scholars of Chinese to discuss historical tetragraphs in print without resorting to the ugly graphical representations I used in the quiz. Apparently this means that the slip of the woodblock-carver's chisel gets a slot, as does the effort made by a calligrapher who had just a bit too much to drink. And there is someone somewhere who will not be satisfied until there is space enough for the entire 千寿图, 万福图, and 亿操图. In a fine slice of irony, the "Four Dragons" character, cited in a footnote in John DeFrancis as an extreme example of why the current written form of Chinese is needlessly difficult and unlikely to work well in a computerized age, has been granted a slot at the far end of extension B.

Scholars using Unicode will find themselves able to discuss the length and breadth of China's Glorious Five-Thousand Years of history, and yet there is one period about which they must remain silent: the vast majority of the characters in the 1977 simplification draft are simply not present. The first sixteen characters in the quiz are all present in a full Unicode font, although 13-16 are in the Extension space. The remaining sixteen I pieced together with eudcedit.

The sinograph section of Unicode has always been a hotbed of political controversy, mostly in the form of nationalism on the part of Japan and the traditional-simplified struggle between China and her outlying regions. I suspect our situation here is much the same, whether through active efforts to exclude the characters, or simply indifference. With electronic composition and transmission, scanning and indexing integral parts of current-day research, this decade-long orthographic experiment is as if it had never even existed.

Or perhaps not entirely. A friend of mine who was in school during the proposed second simplification still uses many of these forms in her casual writing, and I'm sure she's not the only one.

Quiz Answers

1 餐、2 停、3 街、4 道、5 迎、6 私、7 算、8 建、9 酒、10 嘴、11 信、12 堂、13 宣、14 韭菜、15 影、16 款、17 量、18 部、19 套、20 器、21 儒、22 煤、23 面、24 靴、25 酱、26 鼻、27 真，28 青，29 鞋、30 察、31 整、32 感

SO YOU ARE making one of your periodic pilgrimages to the local pirate bookstall to check out the latest arrivals. Not that you will purchase anything—that would not only be an ethical violation but an infringement on various domestic and international regulations as well. The thought is tempting, however, as you compare the list price on the back ("Forty-five yuan for a Mo Yan novel?") with the signs posted on the walls: Everything 5 yuan. A recorded voice repeats ad nauseum over a megaphone, "Everything 5 yuan. Choose what you want, take what you like. Just 5 yuan." And the proprietor, to erase any doubt, calls out every twenty seconds, "Choose them thick. Only 5 yuan." But you merely wish to discover what people are reading, in a setting removed from the language textbooks and glossy photobooks of the local mega-bookstore, so that when you finally decide what to purchase, you can make it in and out with no one getting hurt.

As you browse past the vernacular translations of Interpreting Dreams and The Book of Changes, the racks of nearly identical martial arts series, and the self-help fiction of Carnegie, Welch, and Hill, a familiar name catches your eye. "Wang Shuo's still writing?" you wonder, as a sense of anticipation starts to build, a feeling you thought would never return after he announced his (latest) retirement from the literary scene. The novel slides out from between Kafka on the Shore and Rousseau's Confessions (English/Chinese facing page edition volume 2). Titled Don't Want To Go To Bed, the cover image is a reclining woman in soft focus black and white. Suddenly you are struck with an unsettling dread—the promo text at the top reads "Dedicated to all single women weary of love." Has Wang Shuo lost it?

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I RECOMMENDED WILLIAM Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (福克纳,《我弥留之际》) to a classmate of mine who was looking for something other than Hardy, Hemingway, and one-off short stories as examples of modern and contemporary English language literature. He finished it and was quite satisfied with the translation, done by Li Wenjun (李文俊), who has also done translations of The Sound and the Fury 《喧哗与骚动》, Absalom, Absalom! 《押沙龙，押沙龙！》, and Go Down, Moses 《去吧，摩西》. So naturally I now have to read it to see how it compares to my memory of the original. I'm reading it slowly to savor it, but I can already sense that Li Wenjun has managed to capture a great deal of what makes Faulkner's multiple narrative voices so captivating; Cora's first chapter, for example, with its continual refrain of "这些蛋糕烤出来一看还真不错呢" punctuating nervous flightiness, is markedly different from Darl's geometrical precision.

The very end of Darl's first chapter presents an interesting problem of translation. In the original text the final sentence is

I go on to the house, followed by the

Chuck. Chuck. Chuck.

of the adze.

This is translated as

我继续朝屋子走去，背后是锛子的操作声：

哧克 哧克 哧克

A question could be raised about the inversion of the adze and the sound in Li's translation, but I am more interested in his choice of sound words. Mandarin initials finals aren't up to the task of expressing the whole range of onomatopoetic English words - perhaps Cantonese has a [t∫۸k] equivalent. The choice then is between finding a Mandarin sound that has the same sense (cutting wood), or finding a sound-alike for the English word. The sound-alike Li chooses, 哧克 (chīkè), doesn't seem to exist in Chinese except for a few instances of chewing, and 哧 by itself is the sound made by tearing paper or striking a match.

Besides, there is a perfectly good word for the sound of cutting wood in the classical literature: "伐木丁丁，鸟鸣嘤嘤" from 《诗经·小雅·伐木》. The sound here represented by 丁 is read "zhēng"; glossed as "丁丁，伐木声". An acceptably close resemblance to "chuck", I think. Of course, I can understand why Li chose not to use this; using the common reading of the character, "the ding ding ding of the adze" doesn't have quite the same effect. 《诗经·魏风·伐檀》 has "坎坎伐檀兮", with 坎 (kǎn) also a wood-cutting sound, but this I feel is even less appropriate for the Faulkner sentence. What Chinese sound should the adze make here?

A similar sound occurs in a bootleg Calvin and Hobbes translation I picked up several years ago (click the image for a larger version). In the third panel (please excuse the bad web-cam scan job), Calvin's snow pants or boots make a 咔嚓！咔嚓！(kāchā) sound. 嚓 by itself is a swishing sound, which seems fine, but 咔嚓 together is supposed to be a cracking or breaking sound, or the cocking of a pistol.

Of course, the ultimate questions is whether the cartoon is still funny. I'm sure the original was, but here I find myself staring at it, trying, and failing, to appreciate the joke. I've forgotten what the original text reads; it's probably something along the lines of his galoshes making a "galosh" sound, a joke that is nearly impossible to translate (any takers?).

(originally posted on 2004.12.11)

A travelogue by Shen Youqian 沈有乾 (previous|first)

11. Arriving at School

TICKETS FOR THE FOUR of us specified the lower berth, most likely because we were afraid the upper berth would be inconvenient. But in American sleeper cars, every two bunks were facing seats during the day, and only at night did they divide into an upper and a lower berth. Those sleeping on top sat facing the front, and those sleeping on the bottom sat facing the rear. If two people were traveling together, it was typical that they would naturally choose a top-bottom set. The four of us were assigned four separate bottom berths, and this did feel a bit strange. Later, three American women came aboard, talking loudly about how they were unable to buy even a single lower berth ticket, how inconvenient it was for them to have upper berths, and how they hoped someone would switch with them. Because we were seated across from them, there was no one more appropriate to switch with them than us. If we could have granted their wish, they would definitely have thanked us, and certainly wouldn't have let us swap for nothing (because upper bunks were less expensive than lower bunks). But this was after all our first trip on an American train, and we could not avoid thinking that it was better not to make more trouble for ourselves - in the end we did not open our mouths. From then on I always reserved an upper berth on sleeping cars, since (1) lower berths are hard to come by, (2) upper berths are cheaper, (3) they are at least as comfortable for sleeping as lower berths, and (4) climbing up and down is no problem. But the most important reason was not to be envied by others.

We passed Portland, Oregon in the middle of the night. The railroad to the north belonged to the Union Pacific Company, and to the south to the Southern Pacific Company. American railroads are all commercially operated, and commercial competition is fierce. But linkages are done well; things are convenient, especially for newly-arrived Chinese travelers.

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