reflections 2/24

 

Guest speaker: 

Jeremy Tiang came to speak to us last Friday, and I was lucky enough to have chatted with him before the lecture as well. From both occasions, he was very eloquent in the ideas he expresses and his love for translation shines through his words. During the tea chat in STH, another student mentioned that many of the translation students are afraid of not being fluent enough in the language they translate from. To that, Jeremy said something close to the following, “well, I am lucky enough to have grown up bilingual and be fluent in both languages I work with, but if direct transcription word by word is what people want, they can get the dictionary to do that. But interpreting the interpersonal relationship and use of honorifics in one language and rendering it in another language, that’s art.” Then he chuckled and said that he just gave away the thesis of his talk. Indeed, from Jeremy’s talk and “fable of now” that he translated, it is clear that he walks on the silver lining between translation accuracy and artistic creation in the target language. His talk was very focused and inspiring, and once again confirmed my disagreement with the “translators are like ninjas” meme, that translators are artists who recreate the wonders of the original work in another language through their words. 

Tracy K. Smith: 

When reading Tracy Smith’s work, I was constantly reminded of Jeremy’s talk–translators are remaking the art in another language, they are not a passive conduit of words from one language to another. Tracy Smith embodied this idea very thoroughly, and in fact, I wonder if she did it a little too much. In the introduction of her translation of Yi Lei’s poetry selection, she mentions that she lets the elements and aura of the poem “guide” her translation multiple times. On the one hand, I appreciate her creative spirit in her translation and the encouragement many translators who aren’t fluent in the languages they work with might get from seeing how she translates. On the other hand, I do have this orthodox belief in me that translators should still try their best to be loyal to the original work. Admittedly, she did have Yi Lei’s approval to make such drastic changes, but Yi Lei doesn’t speak English too well and their communication necessitates a third party–David–to translate back and forth. I really enjoyed Yi Lei’s poems in the original, and I have to admit that, by making some domesticating modifications of word choices and such, some of Yi Lei’s spirit got lost in translation. At the end, it seemed to me like Tracy Smith didn’t translate Yi Lei’s Chinese poems into English, but created almost novel poems in English being inspired by a Chinese poet. In short, I think some translations were a little far-fetched. 

 

Jiayi