Masked Ballsor, All Translators are Faithless

I was living on a sampan in Hong Kong, in the Causeway Bay typhoon shelter to be exact, when I received a fax on my sampanasonic inviting me to say something about translation, or failing that, about music. I was reading Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed at the time. (Witness the undecidable etymology of the word testament, probably from testis, or balls.) The book was in French, and it was on translation and music, though I’m not sure if there was much of a crossover. Since every translation, they tell me, is a betrayal, and since music is tongueless, I accepted. The task smacked of an exquisite tension between virtue and scandal, between purity and dirty linen. Let me remind you that the word sampan comes from the Cantonese sam ban, meaning a washboard. It’s all I play these days. But while laundries hold no fear for me, I do have a particular angst about being washed overboard, or going overboard, particularly at the end of long dinners. Hong Kong harbour is not recommended for this activity. On such occasions I usually tend to speak in three or four different languages all at once, calling Help! Fire! and Shark! to attract attention, proving that the tower of Babel is not a stairway to the stars, but a good structure to keep in mind when sojourning abroad. And the sea, the sea speaks back in idle gurgle, transporting me, violator of languages, traducer and transgressor from over the short wave, translator of tongues lodged cheek by jowl in happy confusion and good taste…as I’ve always said, echoing my uncle Umberto, who stole it from someone else: traditor trattoria. Which means: Hand over your takeaway. Or perhaps: Translate before you eat. Where I was living, thirteen people have died on the floating restaurant. An unlucky number, but only for monolinguals. Polyglots would not be caught dead swallowing local oysters plucked daily from the warmish waters beside the nuclear plant.

But I’m venturing into thanatology, that favourite sea of mine, when I should be philologising, or loving language…or living language is what translation is all about. As Walter Benjamin said: No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. There must be a transformation of something living–the original must undergo a change.

Similarly, any translation must not just transmit information or escape communicating the content. Among other things, being faithful to rhythm is essential. (As Kundera has shown in Testaments Betrayed, Kafka isn’t Kafka without the rhythm of repetition.) There must be a kind of residue of something that cannot be communicated. A pleasurable osmosis and an absorption of the “music” of another culture. A miscegenation, in fact, which works both ways to establish a Pentecostal triumph of the original text evolving towards an ideal language, as well as of a meaningful enrichment of the received language. A tall order.

Because Australia has no natural borders with any other culture, we have taken little heed of the internalising enrichment of this contact. Language learning has been reserved for academic or economic pursuits, overlooking entirely the notion that to translate between languages is a border crossing not only between the purely intellectual, but, more importantly, between the artistic elements within our being. When we translate from one language to another we not only reinvent ourselves but we free up the sclerotic restrictions of our own language. We feel freer to read between the lines. Free to receive what Wilson Harris called the “quantum immediacy” of another culture which destabilises our familial tongue. George Steiner may have put it more succinctly. He speaks of the “counterfactuality” which profoundly characterises both the nature and origins of speech. It is through language that we are able to reject the empirical inevitability of the world. Through language we are able to say “No!” to reality…to avoid, in Patrick White’s terms, accepting that what is dun is dun. However, a quick glance at last year’s literary offerings convinces me Australian writing hasn’t changed much since PW’s time except that the characters have stopped doing housework and homework. Whether it be realism or grunge, the real can only be apprehended by flying free of it. Far from becoming escapist, it is only through curiosity about language, through wilful misunderstanding and obliquity, that we are able to live within a multiplicity of selves and to encounter new worlds. It is through constant translating that we are able to cross borders, to aspire, to slip between the prison-bars of the verifiable fact, to break through the “plausibility barrier”. The polyglot must be a freer person.

It is strange, therefore, that in Australia we should be forever thinking that its literature is the preserve of English. We do ourselves a disservice because no language is static. We need to translate Shakespeare to ourselves, English to English, as much as we need to translate it to others, hearing it return to delineate hitherto new and unexplored significances, delivering an ancient sense, says Edward Brathwaite…a very traditional sense…and sometimes not English at all, but language. No language exists in a national vacuum. We are immensely fortunate in our diversity, to be able to turn English into the spirit of foreignness. Only then can we expect to understand its reciprocal richness. Reciprocity is the underlying principle of every transaction and translation.

While translation is neither mechanistic nor theoretical, being as Benjamin said, midway between poetry and doctrine, it must defend to the death the wishes of the artist. Death is not out of the question. In China recently, they excised the first chapter of my novel, After China, because of its salacious parodying. They also shifted events to give the impression of political correctness. Needless to say, a much loved child returned to me a hare-lipped stranger. This must have been the ultimate in Chinese Whispers. Something in me died. The point is lost when one fails to conspire with the author…with the spirit of intention. Intentionality, in this instance, is simply good manners. Table manners. It makes the meal more delicious if you know your host’s work, respect the cooking, deal urbanely with rituals and eccentricities. This knowledge is of course essential. But there must be other sensitivities. A musical ear, a lively tongue. The translator is not trying to please the public or the state by lunching on the person of the creator. He or she is enjoying the company of the work by taking care. Or as Wittgenstein said, translating is an exact art. That’s why the interesting thing one notices immediately about good writing in translation is the notion of care, of close attention, of stillness and of shape. Translation is above all an ideational endeavour, a reaching towards hidden absolutes, and its texture is as distinct a piece of language experience as philosophy or art.

Of course not all translation deserves such special attention as that lavished upon some writers. The rough language of trade and commerce often lacks the care and spirit inherent in literature. In China, the advertisement “Coke adds life” was rendered into “Coke reincarnates your ancestors”. Not a happy experience, if my own are anything to go on. Or the Australian Wheat Board, whose caption beneath its logo proudly declared in Chinese: “The Australian Grain Plank”.

Well, never one to pass up an opportunity to use such a plank for my next dive, I shall return to my original scenario. In case you may have wondered why I was in Hong Kong, I will let you in on my little secret. As a sam-panned recluse known in local circles as a literary Australian writer (at least they seem to know the difference between jouissance and le moment cradingue), I was naturally invited to one of the territory’s premier events. The Hong Kong Toastmaster’s Club meets every Monday night on the top floor of the exclusive Hong Kong Club, an unapologetically élite establishment attracting the garrulous from all corners of the globe. I accepted the invitation on the condition that I would not speak. Speaking, I said, was detrimental to writing. So they made me a judge. Judges, as I gathered, simply have to look informed, but sometimes they are called upon to negotiate difficult cultural complexities…to translate, in other words. It didn’t take me long to realise this was little better than chairing a meeting at the United Nations.

Anyway, the address of the evening turned out to be one by a dapper little Cantonese called Timothy Lai. Lai’s truth turned on a parable of sorts. It was about a farmer who keeps chickens and fails to recognise that one of them is actually an eagle. A foreigner points this out to him, but the farmer insists the bird is a chicken. Finally, the foreigner takes the eagle to a mountain top, urges the bird to fly away and watches it soar majestically across the sky. Mr Lai explains that this should be understood as an allegory of state management, alluding, I think, to 1997. The chicken farmer is the conservative authority which fails to nurture talent and which prefers sameness to difference, and sometimes it takes an outsider to point out that certain fledglings are actually eagles and should be given the opportunity to spread their wings. “Be an eagle yourselves, if you are being treated like chickens”, Mr Lai harangues. “Go to top of mountain, spread your wings and fry, fry, fry!”

Did he mean establishing a Kentucky franchise? I was neither going to translate nor betray this ambiguity. You see, some things simply cannot be translated. The Icarus factor sees to that. But I take it that the kernel of Mr Lai’s story contains an incitement to overturn the ordinary and familiar, to cross the borders of uniformity and to recognise that language itself can either soar or sear.

I admire the initiative, but respected the form. Never turn down the opportunity of turning your back upon explication and the establishment of meaning, I say.

Chin chin.