Tag Archives: translation

10.12.18 [Saturday]
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food, travel, 中国

lambs to the barbecue

Last night we went to a Chinese wedding, my first. Holly says it was very atypical, which is why it was as fun as it was.

Lisa and Lee were the bride and groom. Lisa is from Nanchong, and owns a westernish bar here. Lee is Australian. They got married a few months ago, but just had the ceremony/meal now (the delay is common in China – you also do the photos weeks ahead of time so they can be blown up to 4 feet by 3 feet and displayed for people showing up to the banquet). There was a bonfire and dancing around the bonfire led by one of the pole dancers from Lisa’s bar (and was much chaster than that sentence might lead you to believe).

There were a few ceremonial rituals/games designed to symbolize different parts of married life(?). They stepped over a saddle and kneeled in front of Lisa’s parents and a few other things. Of course this was all done in 中文, which had people concerned for Lee being able to follow it, so Holly was recruited to be his interpreter, despite her unfamiliarity with the formal words for “bow from the waist” vs “bow your head.” The MC who was doing the 中文 part had a terrible squealing mic which detracted from the effect, but the bits where Lee had to repeat things in 四川话 (the local dialect) got good laughs from the crowd.

The part that I think was the best to have Holly awkwardly on stage trying to avoid being in pictures for was the exchange of vows/”say something nice” part. Then Lee could say romantic things about Lisa being special in his natural language, and Holly translated and everyone was happy. I think it was much better than him having memorized something short and simple so he could say it himself.

And then there was food. They had a dozen lambs and a dozen chickens basted in oils and spices and sesame, roasted on spits over coals. So fucking delicious. I’m normally vegetarian, but I give that up when I’m in China. (Basically I eat meat here because it would be such a pain in the ass for everyone else not to. Canada is well set up for non-meat-based foods. China is not.) And every time I come, there’s something like this that makes me so glad I’m eating the flesh of beasts.

There was some toasting at the wedding but not a huge amount because the after party was happening at Lisa’s bar. One guy came and toasted every foreigner at our table individually, meaning he had 8 drinks in 6 minutes. And that guy wasn’t me! This night.

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10.03.31 [Wednesday]
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books, travel

book review: facing the bridge

I enjoy the length of Yoko Tawada’s stories. Like the other books of hers I’ve read, Facing the Bridge is a collection of three longish short stories, like 60 pages each. It’s an oddish length, which works because they’re oddish stories. The perfect kinds of things to sit down with on an afternoon and read.

In this book the three stories are about a Japanese exchange student in Germany and the first African to get a PhD in philosophy (back in the 1700s). The two parts to the story blurred into each other at the edges. There were no breaks between talking about Amo (the Ghanian) and Tamao (the Japanese student). The second story is about a Japanese tourist who goes to Vietnam. This was my favourite in the book because of her talking about what a tourist’s role is as she buys coconuts and goes to see temples. And there are these wonderful non sequiturs about fearing becoming pregnant. The last story is about translating and living in the Canary Islands. It was the weirdest of the three (though all were plenty odd).

There’s just so much in Tawada’s odd characters and their not entirely rational decisions they make that I find very attractive, in an intriguing kind of way.

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09.12.15 [Tuesday]
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books, writing

book review: number9dream

I picked up David Mitchell’s number9dream from the library last week, solely because we didn’t have The Cloud Atlas in. “Japan?” I said upon picking this one up, “Sure I’ll give it a shot.”

The thing I’ve been telling everyone about it is how British it feels, despite being about a young Japanese man from the countryside going to Tokyo to find the father he never met. It’s mostly just the turns of phrase Eiji (the main character and narrator) uses to describe things. The occasional word from the English countryside is a little jarring. At first I thought this was going to annoy me to no end, but as it went on it became kind of a translation artifact. It almost made it feel more Japanese because of the obviousness of the filter. I wonder how it is when translated into Japanese?

The thing that really made the book for me was the shifting styles in each part. There’s the story of Eiji Miyake trying to find his father, but each section has different sort of dreams. Panopticon is filled with wish-fulfillment action movie daydreams (and are perfect for making the book grab you and knock you a little off-kilter). Lost Property is all flashbacks and remembering. Video Games is mediated escape from reality. Et cetera. So structurally/stylistically: great.

The story itself works, though the quest itself isn’t the main thing. At least not for me. There are unrealistic things that happen. There are Yakuza; I won’t deny that. There is a bit of a sense of the writer stringing the protagonist along in service of the structure of the book. But whatever. I was happy to take the ride. It took me through some of the same headspace that a Haruki Murakami novel does (there is a discarded Murakami novel as a tiny bit of set-dressing in one of the chapters and I am sure Mitchell was conscious of the comparison) which is a place I like to be.

I don’t know if it’s a really good book or not. Maybe it’s culturally imperialistic or ethnocentric or one of those other very bad things of me to think that some young white guy can write a good novel about Japan. Maybe I only like it because it’s the kind of Murakami pastiche my China book might turn into. I know I liked it though.

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09.05.08 [Friday]
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books, writing

book review: the case for literature

I like Gao Xingjian’s work. His book of essays The Case for Literature isn’t a writing book like Reading Like a Writer was; it’s a book about his experience of literature and the importance it is to him and to language. He’s a writer who is trying to create art with language and I don’t know why his point of view was so much more resonant with me than Francine Prose’s. That’s not true. His was more interesting because he takes that view that there should be no schools of thought in art. No isms. He is doing his own thing. (Which reminds me of the Murakami speech about being on the side of the egg not the wall.)

The fact that a bunch of these essays are talking about translation make it even more interesting. I hate that so many of my favourite writers are only accessible to me through translation (which may be why I’m an “ideas” person instead of a “sentences” person in what I appreciate in writing, since it’s impossible to know how exact the words actually are in so many of my favourite books). But yes, Gao Xingjian talking about how Soul Mountain is about a shift in pronoun usage gave me chills, and I’m starting to go back and re-read that one now.

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08.12.31 [Wednesday]
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books, writing

book review: what i talk about when i talk about running

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is Haruki Murakami’s latest English book. Translated from the Japanese I mean. He doesn’t write books in English. It’s a memoir about running. I don’t run, and probably won’t take up the sport just because of this book. But I do write a bit sort of, and I enjoyed the book most when he talked about the issues in long distance running as they apply to writing. Mostly though I just like the Murakami voice and would read anything written in it. I wonder what his translations of English stories read like in Japanese.

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