Exotic Shift in Literary Translation

翻譯學研究集刊 2012 第十五輯

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文學翻譯中的異國轉換:

譯者自由度對翻譯策略、輸出與功能的影響

鄭永康

輔仁大學跨文化研究所/臺灣師範大學翻譯研究所/

台灣大學外文系

摘要

本文透過王禎和《玫瑰玫瑰我愛你》現代主義小說英譯本來探討譯

者自由度之相關翻譯學議題。該小說英譯版本、相關文獻、媒體採訪以

及普遍評論內容充分顯示譯者葛浩文(Howard Goldblatt)所採取之翻譯策

略定位已遠遠超出現有翻譯理論的範疇。葛浩文的翻譯策略—異國轉

換—偏好過度異國化的手段，使他的譯本已跨出韋努蒂異化翻譯的定

義。本文根據中英版本的比對結果闡述譯者自由度如何影響翻譯品質、

規範、策略、功能等議題。文中亦以多元系统理論的角度針對譯者對讀

者的責任、譯者的隱性以及譯文過度異化對比較文學之影響等概念進行

更進一步的分析與探討.

關鍵字: 譯者自由度、文學翻譯、異化翻譯、翻譯品質、翻譯規範、翻

譯策略、比較文學、玫瑰玫瑰我愛你、王禎和、葛浩文、現代主義文學


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Exotic Shift in Literary Translation:

The Implications of Translators’ Freedom for Translation Strategy,

Production and Function

Foreignization versus Domestication

Some two centuries ago in 1813, a German philosopher and

hermeneuticist, Friedrich Schleiermacher, first intimated the ideas of

foreignization and domestication without actually using these terms in his

article On the Different Methods of Translating. It was not until Lawrence

Venuti wrote about his Post-colonialist views on translation in 1995 did these

two terms appear in translation studies.

Now we define foreignization as that approach in which the translator

remains visible through retention of the foreignness of source-text

culture-specific items in the target text. In contrast, the domestication

approach favors a transparent target text through emphasis on adjusting to the

linguistic-cultural traditions of the intended readers by glossing over

culture-specific items in the source text. While contemporary discourse on

these opposing poles is often only on the level of the cultural-linguistic,

Venuti’s original work on the topic, Genealogies of Translation Theory:

Schleiermacher and Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, dwells

at length on hidden agendas, which inevitably leave a stinging acrid political

aftertaste on readers. We recall his overtones on Post-Colonialism, cultural

hegemony, imperialism of culture and the like to berate the Anglo-American

championing of the domestication method. Following the prudent practice of


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contemporary theorists and experts of translation studies, we shall in this

paper relegate the issue of political agenda in translation as pointed out by

Venuti to the backburner of our subconscious, focusing our attention and

energy instead on the range that extends between the two poles of

foreignization and domestication, or even, beyond them.

A number of translation theorists have in the last decade published their

observations of how culture-specific items in original texts may be handled

or processed in translation. Altogether, more than a dozen or so methods have

been separately mentioned, illustrated and documented in the writings of

Aixela, Munday, Lefevere (Aixela, 1995; Munday, 2001; Lefevere, 1989) and

others. The list represents the broad spectrum of possibilities that run the

length of the foreignization-domestication range.

Yet, could it be possible for translators to overstep the bounds of that

range? And if the answer should be in the affirmative, what are its

implications for translation studies and comparative literature? Another

practical question that comes to mind is “how much freedom should a

translator enjoy in fulfilling his task?”

Exotic Shift—Going Beyond Foreignization

These questions draw our attention to the English translation of Wang

Chen-ho’s novel, Rose, Rose I Love You, by the celebrated translator of recent

fame, Howard Goldblatt. While the translation is not by any means perfect,

Goldblatt’s rendition of this difficult Modernist work by Wang is, by and

large, commendable, once for its smooth readability, and twice for his

achievement of a tone that generally reflects the hilarious, often kitschy


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narrative of Wang’s original. In many respects, Goldblatt, undoubtedly an old

hand in the translation of Taiwanese fiction with many decades of

involvement in translation projects handled by the Taipei Chinese PEN, has

once again proven that indeed he is an authority when it came to rendering

difficult Chinese literary texts into readable English. It therefore suffices to

say that there is no paucity of excellent examples in his translation.

Yet, while native English readers may find reading enjoyment in the

linguistic and tonal brilliance of the translated novel, it could only be a

consequence of the practical impossibility of their textual comparison with

the original. For a casual inter-textual scrutiny of the target text vis-à-vis the

original Chinese surprisingly reveals a translation approach difficult to

position in the context of commonly adopted applied translation theories

these days.

In Schleiermacher’s, or in Venuti’s, impassioned discourse on

foreignization, source text-specific cultural components, oftentimes including

their peculiar terminology, are retained in the translated version. Here,

retention goes to say that the concepts are kept as is and not subjected to any

attempt at glossing over or manipulation for the sake of adapting to the target

reader culture. In many instances in Goldblatt’s translation, what strikes the

observer is that some foreign items are exaggerated by addition in the

translation, semantically, tonally or by other means. The gain in such an

operation eventually adds to the quaintness of the text. In short, an extra load

of foreignness is added over and above what actually is present in the original.

For the practical purpose of our discussion, let us call this translation

phenomenon exotic shift.


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Even before we probe into the motivational aspects of such creative

embellishment, and prior to a discussion of their possible implications, let us

first look into several of these instances. In the first chapter of the book, just

where Wang introduces the main protagonist of the novel, Goldblatt’s

translation of the passage ta genben bushi hualianren, ta shi zai hualian

guangfuxiang zhangda de (他根本不是花蓮人，他是在花蓮光復鄉長大的)

(Wang, 1984, p. 3) reads as follows:

He was not from Hualien originally. Rather, he grew up in

Restoration Township, near Hualien. (Wang, 1998, p. 2)

While indeed the name of the township, Kuangfu (光復), roughly means

restoration or recovery, or, more properly, if we are to adopt official and

more-precise translation of the term that refers to the return of Taiwan to

Chinese rule after a period of Japanese colonization, retrocession, the use of

such a term as a place name contributes to the strangeness of the passage. A

simple, more direct transliteration into Kuangfu Township would have been

more appropriate than the literal translation, as in common practice. In fact,

Kuangfu Township is not a fictional place name. It really exists and it is

translated that way. Imagine if the Americans were to have changed Boca

Raton into its literal English translation, Rat’s Mouth, after Spanish-speaking

Florida joined the U.S. federation in 1845! We also take note that Goldblatt

transliterated another place name, Hualien (花蓮), in that very same sentence,

instead of calling it something like Flower Lotus if consistency in translation

strategy were indeed to be observed.

Another example of exotic shift appears when Wang describes the

protagonist’s, Dong Siwen’s, adamancy in abstaining from cigarette smoking.


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Here, Wang writes:

此後他真地信守誓言，終生守身如玉絕不和香菸再發生關

係。(1984, p. 10)

Goldblatt’s rendition reads:

From that day forward he would keep his vow to treat his body

like fine jade and never rekindle his love affair with tobacco,

not even a minor flirtation. (Wang, 1998, p. 8)

“To treat his body like fine jade” is a literal translation of the idiom shoushen

ruyu (守身如玉). While the translation is, by exhausting all semantic

considerations, found to be blameless, the visual imagery it conjures up in the

reader’s mind contributes to a strong foreign touch that is at once uncanny

and mysterious. For the Chinese, jade occupies a lofty position. In the

traditional Confucian sense of values, for instance, the traits of a gentleman

were often compared to the characteristics of fine jade, and this should in fact

be the etymological provenance of the said idiom. “But why jade of all the

rich selection of fine gems and precious stones in the jeweler’s shop

window?” a reader may ask. Certainly, no way could someone uninitiated in

oriental culture and history fully comprehend, much less, fathom the depth

and significance of such a comparison. Even the famous Ezra Pound himself,

in his translation of a verse that mentions this precious gem, refrains from a

direct translation of yujie (玉階) into jade stairs. Instead, Pounds opts for the

domesticated rendition, jeweled stairs, so as to compensate for the cultural

difference and to put the expression in its proper context. The adverbial

phrase “not even a minor flirtation” is obviously an embellishment neither to

be found nor implied in Wang’s original. By employing some reverse


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engineering combined with much logical inference, we can only surmise that

the said phrase was added by the translator to embellish, or possibly, to

generate a funny, mischievous twang in the English version.

In an interview with South China Morning Post, Goldblatt says that he

“leans towards making his translations reader-friendly—‘domesticated’—

while retaining a sense of unfamiliarity or ‘the exotic’.” Take note that the

word domesticated was put inside quotation marks. What he meant here is

not identical with how domestication is defined by Venuti, but rather more of

an effort to make his translation reader-friendly. As we have noted early on,

for Venuti, domestication is the glossing over of culture-specific items in the

source text to attain transparency. From the examples we have examined

earlier, we readily realize that the claim about reader-friendliness above is

rather confusing, for Goldblatt does not just retain a sense of the unfamiliar

when it came to culture-specific items; he tends to add much more to it

through his embellishment approach. Obviously referring to Shklovsky’s

defamiliarization concept, Goldblatt (2007) says that “if I assume that it’s

idiosyncratic, that the author was trying to defamiliarize the text, to slow the

reader down, then I try very much to capture that.” Such a sensitivity to the

issue of Jakobsonian literariness as applied to literary translation is highly

commendable for a translator, but it hardly is reason enough to serve as a

license for embellishment or exaggeration of the source text.

Yet another example of exotic shift can be found in Goldblatt’s

translation of the passage ni shi zai bian shenme wen (youru guoyu:ni daodi

zai gao shenme!) (你是在變什麼蚊[猶如國語：你到底在搞什麼!]) (Wang,

1984, p. 32). The English version reads:


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“What sort of mosquito tactics are you up to?” he said in

Taiwanese slang. (Wang, 1998, p. 21)

It is evident here that although Wang deliberately included a parenthetical

explanation of the Taiwanese expression in standard Mandarin as a

comprehension aid, Goldblatt still opts for too literal a rendering that not only

reads foreign but also would register as absurd in the mind of a native

English speaker. In plain language, the said phrase roughly corresponds to the

expression “what tricks do you have up your sleeve?” The passage ni shi zai

bian shenme wen (li sile bi siami bang in Taiwanese) is a common expression

in the local dialect. In contrast, does the sentence “What sort of mosquito

tactics are you up to?” read naturally to an English reader? Whatever

Goldblatt’s adopted strategy was in processing this passage, translations such

as this seem only to create an alienation effect that is, certainly, never

intended in the source text.

The Taiwanese, and the PRC Chinese to a lesser extent, for that matter,

habitually use four-character idioms, clichés, slang, metaphor, allusions and

other such linguistic devices in daily speech and formal writing. These

expressions, described as a precious heritage by the contemporary Taiwan

poet Yu Kwang-chung (2004), even when used in high frequency, do not

hinder ease of reading but in fact, often contribute to make the written piece

sound familiar, more profound, and also, linguistically sophisticated, so long

as they are employed correctly and in proper context. In this regard, Wang

Chen-ho is no exception. Rose, Rose, I Love You is a modernist work that,

though very faintly, reminds one of the brilliant linguistic compositions and

structures of pre-Ulysses Joycean fiction. Wang’s original adopts a mixture of


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Mandarin idioms and Taiwanese expressions, while also employing clever

play of words using those expressions. This linguistic feature contrasts

strongly with the American disdain for what are often pejoratively referred to

as the old clichés. Thus, while it would be logical and proper to retain some

of these expressions by finding their closest counterparts in the English

language, it is not absolutely necessary that each and every idiom in the book

should be mirrored through their English equivalents. Otherwise the reader

will find it unnecessarily unnatural because of the over-abundance of such

devices of expression in the English narrative.

In this regard, Goldblatt does not seem to mind the rubrics of Western

poetics. In a New Yorker review of Goldblatt’s translation of Tong Su’s My

Life as Emperor (published in 2005), the seasoned novelist John Updike

observes that Goldblatt’s translation sometimes sounds too literal and that at

times, he uses too many old clichés. Although speaking without having

compared the English version with the original Chinese, Updike voices

suspicion that Goldblatt was pursuing the Chinese text “ideogram by

ideogram” and that “exceptionally much is lost in translation” (2005).

Apparently, Goldblatt’s penchant to over-foreignize continued even

beyond Rose, Rose, I Love you, which was published some seven years

earlier than My Life as Emperor. Let me cite a couple of examples of what

Updike was referring to. In Chapter 8 of My Life as Emperor, a line reads:

What they saw was a man on a white horse dressed in funeral

hemp, a bow in one hand... (Su, 2005, p. 161)

The Chinese original of the line reads:

看見一個披麻戴孝的人騎著白馬，一手持弓... (Su, 1992, p.


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141)

What on earth is funeral hemp? a reader may ask. While “dressed in

mourning clothes” may be a drab translation of pima daixiao (披麻戴孝), it

certainly is easier to understand than the confusing funeral hemp, a vague

rendition which could lead to a mistaken interpretation that the armed man

was dressed prepared to die. In fact, there is an English counterpart to 披麻,

which is “to wear sackcloth.” Goldblatt’s dressed in funeral hemp is a typical

example of what Updike said about translating the original Chinese literally,

ideogram by ideogram.

Another line in the same book reads:

He suffered the dry heaves as he crawled up and grabbed the

hem of my python robe. (Su, 2005, p. 186)

A python robe? Evidently, Goldblatt mistranslated mangpao (蟒袍),

which, in Chinese dynastic heraldry, is technically called a lesser-dragon

robe1 and was worn by princes, dukes, other imperial nobilities and high

officials. A full dragon robe, called longpao (龍袍), reserved only for a ruling

Son of Heaven, depicts a dragon with five extended claws, while the lesser

dragon has only four. Of course, in modern-day Chinese, mang (蟒) is either

a python or a boa, both of which happen to be less-menacingly clawless.

Translating mangpao (蟒袍) as python robe is not just semantically wrong;

the term also conjures up a strange exotic image in the minds of readers. In

fact, snakes, serpents and constrictors never enjoyed an exalted position in

Chinese mythology and folklore.

In another New Yorker review, Goldblatt’s translation of Please Don’t

1 See Schuyler.


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Call Me Human, a novel written by Wang Shuo, another PRC author, was

criticized for a dialogue that consists of “exuberantly subverted clichés”

(Anonymous, 2000). The tendency for Chinese metaphors and clichés to

suffer distortion and to eventually get lost in Goldblatt’s translations has also

been singled out by Amy Tan. In her foreword to Red Ivy, Green Earth

Mother, a novel by Ai Bei and also translated by Goldblatt, Tan writes:

So much can be lost in translation... In fact, I have often

wondered in reading current literature arriving from the PRC,

“How much has been left out?” (2000, p. xii)

Referring to Goldblatt’s translation, she continues:

In translating fiction, oftentimes certain colloquial expressions

and culture-specific references are changed for the sake of

clarity and fluidity of the story... But how I wish some of those

lines could have stayed! In Chinese they convey witticisms,

puns, rich images and historical allusions...there is another

rich dimension to Ai Bei’s fiction that you won’t know unless

you are able to hear and understand her stories in Chinese.

(2000, p. xii)

Wang Chen-ho’s original is replete with slapstick expressions, including

topics considered near-taboo by Western reckoning, unprintable in the right

sense of the word. One of them is the constant reference to Dong Siwen’s

indigestion and consequently, his habitual and all-too-frequent flatulence. In

one of the passages, the original author writes:

斯文又不禁想放屁了，他慢條斯理地改個坐態再安祥放了

個悶聲不響的。(Wang, 1984, p. 42)


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Goldblatt’s translation of this line reads:

Happy again, he was dying to pass wind. So he shifted his

hindquarters just enough to let the fart escape silently into the

air. (Wang, 1998, p. 27)

Again, we find the tendency to exaggerate and to render as exotic in the

words shifted his hindquarters just enough to let the fart escape. The original

wording certainly reads more sedate than Goldblatt’s much-too-vivid and

hilarious characterization of the protagonist’s well-calculated act—almost

pantomimic in the imagery it conjures up—of lifting his hindquarters just

enough to let the wind pass. Without any doubt, the lexical choice of this

train of picturesque words, with all their paradigmatic and syntagmatic

functions, creates a funny, slapstick synergy effect far exceeding that

observed in the source text. The vulgarity of the impact easily makes the

English-language reader perceive a heightened sense of foreignness, or even,

cringe at the funny yet offensive quaintness of the translation. One may

perhaps argue on Goldblatt’s behalf that the original novel is a hilarious

parody of Taiwan society in the 70s and that therefore the additions we have

cited above are only compatible, tone-for-tone, with Wang’s original. That the

tone sounds compatible may indeed be right, but the generous garnishing of

lewdness unnecessarily pushes the slapstick effect beyond that of the source

text, as we have seen in some of the examples above. In Ulysses’ “Sirens”

episode, Bloom’s flatulence was suggested through a series of sounds (Joyce,

p. 239), and it certainly pales in comparison with Goldblatt’s

near-pantomimic description of shifting hindquarters just enough to let the

fart escape silently into the air. The point here is that his descriptive language


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was an exaggeration of Wang’s original. Countless similar instances of

exaggeration as illustrated above are readily observable in Goldblatt’s

translation of Wang’s work as we shall see later.

Critics, Critiques and Discussions

Quite predictably, Goldblatt’s adopted strategy to add, to exaggerate and

to reconfigure, as we have observed, has not gone unnoticed. In Translation,

Nationhood and Cultural Manipulation: The Case of China, Red Chan

critiques Goldblatt’s view that most Chinese writers fail to write “perfect

enough” stories and for that reason, translators must edit the work for better

translation readability (163). Elsewhere, Chan comments that in Goldblatt’s

translation of Wang Shuo’s Playing for Thrills, which first came off the press

in 1997, a year earlier than Rose, Rose, I Love You, he has injected new

dynamics into Wang Shuo’s work and “given it new meanings and

interpretations” (2003, p. 165). Goldblatt is said to “take the liberties in

changing, adding and cutting bits and pieces” (p. 163) from the original. We

gather from all these that Goldblatt deliberately reconfigures his translations

so as to make them fit into his idea of readable, “perfect enough” stories.

Chan quotes Dick Adler’s review of one of Wang Shuo’s books translated by

Goldblatt as having given Wang’s dialogue “the snap of enhanced reality”

(2003, p. 165). Chan explains that what enhanced reality means is that the

work is perceived by Anglophones in a way different from the reality

perceived by readers of the Chinese original.

Not surprisingly, Chan’s observation overlaps with ours, and more

significantly, her finding seems to support our view that Goldblatt remains


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conscious and lucid, and much more, was in fact deliberate, in adopting such

an enhancement strategy of a shift towards the exotic, beyond the extreme of

Venuti’s foreignizing translation.

Goldblatt once wrote a paper criticizing Arthur Waley for allegedly

losing the Chinese touch in his translation just to appease his readers (1999, p.

35). To some extent, he may be justified in saying so, i.e., if we are to

acquiesce to the foreignizing bent of Venuti’s discourse. But the question that

immediately comes to mind is “Is it proper to over-foreignize just to make

the readers feel happy?” Goldblatt seems confident about his chosen

approach. In an interview conducted by Chan in 2001, he says “it is the

responsibility of the translator to change the text for the reader’s sake” (as

cited in Chan, 2001, p. 163; italics mine). The subjective and the

self-confident in Goldblatt apparently are fully at work here, for that

conviction is based on his belief that “Chinese writers do not write perfect

enough stories and for this reason the translator must also assume the duty of

an editor” (as cited in Chan, 2001, p. 163). And so we observe that only a

short time later, in fact, only a mere two years after critiquing Waley’s stand

on putting emphasis on readers above all other considerations in translation,

Goldblatt himself, for some reason, wakes up and smells the roses, realizing

that, after all, there is so much wisdom in such an approach.

Goldblatt (2007) believes that the “translator’s primary obligation is to

the reader, not the writer,” and that the biggest problem in English

translations of Chinese works is literalism. Yet, in some of the examples we

have examined above, Goldblatt, as Updike correctly suspects, also quite

often adopted a directly literal approach in processing more-problematic


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culture-specific items.

On equivalence with the original, Goldblatt further comments that he

loves “the tension between creativity and fidelity” (2008) and that he enjoys

“turning good, bad, and indifferent Chinese prose into readable, accessible,

and—yes—even marketable English books” (2002).

His views and practice, as we have presented above, challenge in many

respects the norms, conventions and concepts relevant to the task of the

translator in the academic study of translation today. As we reach this point of

our discussion, Goldblatt’s stand, as well as our observations, bids us to look

into their implications for many aspects of translation studies and actual

practice.

Itamar Even-Zohar (1990a) proposed his Polysystems Theory, in which

literature is viewed as a polysystem consisting of mutually related forms and

norms. If we now borrow the Polysystems Theory in considering literary

translation itself as a system of systems, we may then endeavor to look into

Goldblatt’s translation from various relevant perspectives and systemic points

of consideration.

The Implications

At this point, we are reminded of the oft-quoted Italian old cliché in

translation discourse, tradutorre traditori, i.e. implying that every translation

is a betrayal. Much has been written, theorized and debated on regarding the

issue of translation equivalence. But if we are to squarely look at Goldblatt’s

translation approach through the colored glass of equivalence, we will

immediately find ourselves arriving at the conclusion that this issue occupies


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no position of importance in his translational sense of values. The very

strategy of changing, not even just manipulating, the text, for reader effects

as adopted and proposed by Goldblatt and as we have noted above is an

eloquent act of turning his back on the concept of equivalence in translation.

For him, what matters most is to come up with a translation more enjoyable

for English-speaking readers to read cover-to-cover and that’s worth picking

up from the bookstore shelf. It is obvious that from Goldblatt’s

depth-of-field-oriented point of view, the concept of equivalence often just

fades into the hazy, inconsequential background. He didn’t even attempt to

make a try. While Goldblatt sometimes juxtaposes creativity with fidelity

(2008), the former is a province that belongs more properly to an original

writer. In reaction to his style, some die-hard proponents of the tenets of

applied translation studies may be quick to take up the argument that

translation must be a mirror image of the original, for which the translator has

no business other than to make sure not to cast too long, too short or too

oblique a shadow.

Chesterman, in his exploration of the ethics-related facets of translation

practice, mentions an “ethics of representation” in which the translator is

required to represent the “source text, or the source author’s intention, or

even the source culture, faithfully and truly, like a good mirror...” (2001, p.

140). In that same article, Chesterman describes the prime quality of a good

translator as one who is “loyal above all to the client, but also to the target

readers and the original writer” (p. 140). In these times of ethical ambiguity,

the standards presented by Chesterman may sound a bit too demanding and

for some, way too impractical. Yet, no matter how much Theo Hermans and


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his Manipulationist School colleagues hate to recognize the pragmatic and

theoretical relevance of the non-Descriptive brands of translation studies, the

implications of translation accuracy, or its ramifications, will always create

large ripples not just in comparative literature but also in real translation

practice. These implications we will discuss in more detail below.

Chesterman brings up the concept of clarity and equates it with the

“quality determining the ease with which readers can understand a text, its

meaning, the message, the author’s intention” (p. 144). To be unclear, we

may conclude together with Chesterman, is therefore a betrayal of loyalty to

the reader. In Goldblatt’s translation of Wang’s novel, the alienation effects of

his exotic-shift strategy to translate expressions in the source text work in the

opposite direction of what Chesterman has pointed out. Although Goldblatt

emphatically claims that he gives primary importance to the reader, it is

certainly not in terms of delivering the source text’s meaning or message

clearly, much less the intentio auctoris, to the reader. As we have seen above,

his approach is oriented towards the achievement of a type of readability that

he subjectively thinks his imagined Anglophone readers are well-accustomed

to in their own reading cultures. This calls to mind what Ulrich Weisstein has

warned us in quoting the expression “Omnia recipiuntur secundum

recipientem” (1973, p. 60).

In his philosophical treatment of abuse in translation in The Measure of

Translation Effects, Lewis (2004) marks out the telltale signs of problematic

translations in the following words:

...the abusive work of the translation will be oriented by

specific nubs in the original, by points or passages that are in


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some sense forced, that stand out as clusters of textual energy.

(p. 263)

This pointer reminds us of some specific passages in Goldblatt’s

translation of Rose, Rose, I Love You. Let me cite one of them.

A passage in Wang’ original reads:

他們這一輩青年人，比我們進步了，懂斯文了，才不要講

什麼幹伊娘，他媽的，他們現在流行講：他奶奶的熊...(1984,

p. 180)

Goldblatt translates this passage as:

We’re no match for kids these days, they understand

refinement. No more ‘fuck you’ and ‘damn him’ for them, now

they say things like his granny’s beaver, know what I mean?

(Wang, 1998, p. 122)

The lewd invective ta nene de xiong (他奶奶的熊) was as expression

commonly used among the Taiwanese young in the 60s and 70s, especially

those from military dependents’ compounds. It was often blurted out to

express dismay or aghast over an unexpected or unhappy event. Although the

last character literally means bear, it is a Shandong-dialect euphemism for

sperm, and the translator’s decision to substitute the expression with granny’s

beaver is an obvious flaw. All U.S. marines would know how the American

expression originated: One day, a mother took shower with his toddler son,

who looked around and, in no time at all, was so bewildered by the

anatomical difference between himself and his mother. When he asked what

it was, while pointing his forefinger at her pudendum, the mother made a

snappy answer: “It’s your granny’s beaver!”


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The hilarious association of the translation far exceeds that of the

Chinese text, which is decidedly more off-color in tone. In fact, the absence

of a contextual link suggesting why the funny euphemistic term granny’s

beaver appears out of the blue in the sentence makes the whole passage in

English read with little semblance to the original, both in sense and effect. We

also take note that Dong Siwen (董斯文), the Chinese characters for the name

of the protagonist, appear as a double-entendre (懂斯文) in the original text,

but this was lost in Goldblatt’s translation. This play of Chinese characters, a

double meaning, we may contend, belongs to the realm of the untranslatable,

and perhaps for Goldblatt, an explicatory footnote would have gone against

his self-professed readability-above-all strategy.

Let me cite yet another example. Describing a scene showing how elated

Dong Siwen was, Wang Chen-ho writes:

掛上電話，他就不知道該坐還是躺，一個身體一隻大陀螺

般地滿屋子兜轉，樂的什麼似的。(1984, p. 141)

The translation of the passage reads:

After hanging up, Siwen couldn’t choose between sitting down

and lying down, so he prowled the room like a bloated, and

very happy, serpent. (Wang, 1998, p. 94)

If one were to read the English version even without the luxury of comparing

with the Chinese, it would be difficult to miss a disturbing touch of

strangeness in the descriptive phrase like a bloated, and very happy serpent.

The comparison is absurd. “Why compare with a dancing, ebullient, and

bloated serpent?” a reader may ask. “Why not compare with a corpulent

happy beaver instead?” Here, the translator appears to have lapsed into some


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lexico-semantic laissez-faire through creative distortion of the original text.

On close examination, however, Goldblatt appears to have misread the phrase

yige shenti yizhi datuoluo ban di manwuzi douzhuan (一個身體一隻大陀

螺般地滿屋子兜轉) which simply means a body spinning around the room

like a large top. The two characters for top in Chinese (陀螺) contain the left

and right radicals that form the single character for serpent (蛇). We should,

for this reason, point out that in this example, the distortion may, in all

probability, not have been consciously committed, much less intended. But

the fact that the translation got published with the problematic items still

there, raw and gaping, tells us that Goldblatt got away, scot-free.

The conspicuous visibility of Goldblatt in his translations has not gone

unnoticed by the reading public: Interestingly, Goldblatt’s translations of

different authors are said to always share the same voice in English (Chan,

2003, p. 165). In plain words, Goldblatt’s personality, style and tone as a

translator loom large, in consistently the same ways, in his translations even

of different Chinese authors. Having observed in the above paragraphs the

translator’s tendency to overshoot the runway, we must, at this point,

examine and review the role of the institution, especially as a translation

watchdog.

Goldblatt (2002) explains that "there is no such thing as a good

translator. The best translators make the worst mistakes. No matter how much

I love them, all translators must be closely watched.” Evidently, Goldblatt

himself realizes that translators are far from infallible. His statement

underscores the need for translation editing, including that of his own works.

In fact, Goldblatt’s rendering of Wang’s Rose, Rose, I Love You did undergo


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an editing phase (Wang, 1998, p. ix), but the crux of the matter is in how

selective the perforations are in the editor’s sieve. In one interview, Goldblatt

deplores the shortage of translation copy editors who know Chinese well

enough to do the job efficiently.

Wang’s Rose, Rose, I Love you forms part of the Modern Literature from

Taiwan series published by Columbia University Press. Somewhere along the

line, quality control seemed to have failed our expectations. Columbia

University has done much to introduce Taiwanese literature to Western

readers, for which it deserves our encouragement, but this prestigious

publishing house, its impresarios, or even, the assigned editorial board,

should have known better the importance of translation editing. More so if

we are to take into account the fact that the series of works has been chosen

as quasi-canonical representatives of Taiwanese fiction. We understand, for

example, that these works are often required readings not just at Columbia

University but also in other Taiwanese literature courses and curricula in

many leading universities outside Taiwan.

In consideration of all these, the next question that one may ask is “Are

the translated works really a representation of Taiwanese literature, or are

people reading a distorted semblance of the real thing?” With such

exaggerated renderings of culture-specific components in the English

translation, is it reflective enough of Wang’s novel to allow comparison with

the Modernist works of Woolf, Joyce and many others? At this point, we

must be reminded that Wang Chen-ho was one among the group of students

at National Taiwan University who experimented with Modernist writing

styles in 1960s Taiwan. Together with a group of English majors at National


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Taiwan University, he published a periodical called Modernist Literature

(Xiandai wenxue) around that time. For the literature comparatist, therefore,

this issue is very significant, notably when it came to conducting influence

and reception studies.

These questions lead us to an analysis of the role of translation in

literature, a relevant issue that has helped determine the course of

development of literary studies, comparative literature and translation theory.

In his seminal work, Even-Zohar maintains that normally, translated literature

assumes a peripheral position (1990a, p. 48) although he confirms the role of

translated literature in interference and transfer (1990b, p. 57). In fact, the

secondary position of translations in literary studies has long been deplored

by literary comparatists, who all point to poor translation quality as the

culprit behind the sad phenomenon.

Ulrich Weisstein, for instance, cites the important role of translation in

literary reception and the negative effects of a bad translation on good

authors (1973, pp. 58-62). Michael Riffaterre expresses belief that translation

can only become an effective tool if features of interest to comparatists (i.e.,

connotations, associations, symbolisms, etc.) in translated works are clearly

rendered through commentary glosses in the translation. He laments that

conventional literary translations are not “a reliable index of cultural

difference” (1994, p. 68). Horst Frenz recommends that translators must be

sensitive to cultural, historical and social traditions (1971, p. 121), as well as

the use of the right words to convey all aspects of the original—rhythm,

expression, color, etc. Siegfried Schmidt argues that in translated literature,

“the receiver of the resulting translation text is being seriously deprived of


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the experience intended by the original text producer” (1982, p. 166). The

above statements all point to the frustration in regard to the limited role

assigned to translated versions in comparative literature studies due to “poor”

translation quality. But perhaps the most eloquent testimony to this collective

mistrust and frustration comes from Gayatri Spivak, who says: “I never teach

anything whose original I cannot read” (2000, p. 13).

In plain words, the proper role of translation in comparative literature is

to make translated literature worthy of comparison through their concurrence

with the original. For many, that may be a tall order. The ideal standards are

suspended high up there—lofty and beyond reach—but whether or not

translation equivalence can be achieved in all respects at once is really

something else. Yet isn’t it true that every job or profession, excepting that of

thievery perhaps, needs its own set of governing standards and applicable

norms for managing the ropes of the trade? While winds of change have

blown in comparative literature in recent years, especially after ACLA

President Sandra Bermann (2009) called for an And Zone between translation

and the comparative practice, virtually urging the acceptance of translation as

a partner and an equal, and acknowledging that linguistic and cultural

differences make translation equivalence a mission impossible, the practical

need to take a translated version as a reference facsimile of an original piece

of literature remains necessary.

In Translation in Systems, Theo Hermans quotes McFarlane: “If we

despise translation because it fails to live up to our expectations, this is

because our expectations are unreasonable” (1999, p. 17). In fact, as early as

in 1953, McFarlane further proposed the acceptance of translations “as they


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are” and Holmes seconded the proposal to view translated literature as

meta-literature in a way similar to Barthes’ “meta-language” (1988, pp. 10,

23). This brilliant idea, however, has failed to catch the collective fancy of

literature academics, even after the publication of Sandra Bermann’s article.

At best, the proposal remains just another topic of debate in translation

conferences today. The idea of translated literature as literature per se faces

so formidable obstacles that it is a practical impossibility. Two contentious

issues alone would take eons to iron out: One is patronage, on which Andre

Lefevere wrote quite extensively (1992, pp. 11-25). The other is copyright, a

potentially very-thorny issue discussed at length by Venuti in his The

Scandals of Translation.

It therefore suffices to say that the celebrated examples of Fitzgerald’s

English version of the Rubaiyat and Ezra Pound’s popular renditions of some

Confucian classics, which enjoy literature per se status, will continue to

remain as sudden, isolated sparks of genius (or perhaps for some, of madness)

in the world of literature. Goldblatt’s “corrected” translations of

contemporary Chinese fiction, fruits of his “changing, adding and cutting bits

and pieces” (Chan, 2003, p. 165), cannot be literature per se, at least not in

the foreseeable future.

Needless to say, the implications of translators’ freedom for translation

studies and comparative literature are myriad and far-reaching. As we

ruminate on the complex intricacies of the issues and their repercussions on

translation as practice and as theory, let us take one last look at Goldblatt’s

case. To date, there are more than 40 translation titles bearing his name,

making him the most prolific translator of modern Chinese-language fiction.


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His ever-growing list of translations includes works of important

contemporary PRC writers such as Mo Yan and Wang Shuo, among many

others. Should Mo Yan win the Nobel Prize, and that is not so distant a

possibility2, Goldblatt’s contributions would be critical and surely, decisive.

My question is: On the awarding date, who deserves to be in Stockholm to

accept the award? Mo Yan or Howard Goldblatt?

It’s a nagging question that begs a clear answer.

2 Mo Yan’s name is often mentioned whenever the topic of a potential Chinese literature

Nobel Prize winner comes up. Kenzaburo Oe, the Japanese Nobel laureate for Literature in

1994, is among many admirers who insist that Mo Yan deserves the prize (Morrison, 2005).


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Exotic Shift in Literary Translation:

The Implications of Translators’ Freedom for Translation Strategy,

Production and Function

Carlos Tee

Fu Jen Catholic University/

National Taiwan Normal University/

National Taiwan University

ABSTRACT

This paper probes into the implications of translators’ freedom by

examining Howard Goldblatt’s English translation of Wang Chen-ho’s

Modernist novel, Rose, Rose, I Love You. Analysis of Goldblatt’s text,

observation of his chosen approach in translation, a review of published

media interviews, and correlation with critics’ views on Goldblatt’s renditions

of Taiwanese and Chinese contemporary fiction, all reveal a translation

strategy difficult to situate in the context of contemporary translation theories.

In this paper, Goldblatt’s chosen approach of making his translation sound

overly exotic and foreign way beyond what the original text expresses or

implies is termed exotic shift. In many of Goldblatt’s translations of

Chinese-language fiction, what strikes the observer is that some foreign items

are exaggerated through addition in the translat ion, semantically,

linguistically, tonally or by other means. The gain derived from such an

operation eventually adds to the quaintness of the text. This phenomenon,


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analyzed from the perspective of Venuti’s foreignization through intertextual

comparison of Goldblatt’s work with Wang’s original, serves as basis in

raising some questions on the implications of translators’ freedom for

translation quality, strategy, production and function, responsibility to the

reader, the institution’s role, translator’s visibility, normativity, and

significance to comparative literature. Goldblatt’s exotic shift, and its

implications for translation studies—both the theoretical and the applied—are

examined from the Polysystemic point of view. Analysis of Goldblatt’s target

texts reveals a “reader-oriented” approach, often chosen at the expense of the

message in the source text, creating what he himself calls a “tension between

creativity and fidelity.” His declared purpose in doing so is to transform

indifferent Chinese prose into more readable and marketable English versions.

Yet an observable and necessary result of this approach is a conspicuous

translator’s presence and visibility. The ultimate question that arises then is:

“Are the translated works really adequate representations of Taiwanese or

Chinese literature, or are readers in the West getting a distorted semblance of

the real thing?” As the most prolific translator of Chinese-language fiction

today, Howard Goldblatt, as well as his chosen method, has strong

repercussions on how contemporary Chinese-language literature is perceived

by Western readers today at a time of growing interest in things Chinese in

anticipat ion of the imminent rise of the PRC as a world power.

Key words: exotic shift, literary translation, contemporary Chinese fiction,

Taiwanese fiction, equivalence, foreignization, translator’s freedom, Wang

Chen-ho, Howard Goldblatt

Exotic Shift in Literary Translation

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