My OperaSounds in Translation
Sunday, December 31, 2006 1:00:00 PM
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
This is translated as
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)
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)
