Perusing the opening three sentences of "Snow Country": "The bottom of the night has turned white", it is difficult to translate many translators

Yasunari Kawabata is the pinnacle of Japanese literature in the past hundred years, and in the use of language, he has expanded the boundaries of Japanese, which is undoubtedly a gospel for readers, but when there is a creative breakthrough in one language, it is often difficult to find a correspondence in other languages, so it will become a "nightmare" for translators.

Yasunari Kawabata, 1946

From the beginning of Yasunari Kawabata's most prestigious "Snow Country", you can get a glimpse of one or two. The three opening sentences of "Snow Country" can be recited by almost everyone in Japan:

It was a snow country when passing through the tunnel with a long border. The bottom of the night turned white. The train stopped at the signal station.

The Chinese and English translations of these three sentences are as follows (only the most popular translations are selected here):

Through the long tunnel of the county boundary, there is the snow country. The night sky is white. The train stopped in front of the signalhouse. (Translated by Ye Weiqu)

The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky. The train pulled up at a signal stop.（爱德华·乔治·赛登施蒂克译）

There have been countless discussions about the beauty of the first sentence, and today I would like to focus on the second sentence:

The bottom of the night turned white.

Compared with the original text, whether it is the Chinese translation of "a white expanse under the night sky" or the English translation of "The earth lay white under the night sky", in fact, a lot of things have been lost.

If translated literally as Chinese, the sentence should be "the bottom of the night has turned white." What's so good about it? What is lost in the translation?

First of all, Yasunari Kawabata used a very accurate description. Only those who have lived in the snowy land can understand such a scene in an instant.

Nowadays, when it comes to "snow night", what comes to people's minds seems to be "the night is white and the sky is clear". But this is not real, just a literary imagination. In the vast darkness of the night, darkness envelops everything, in fact, people can not see snow. Probably only on the night of the fifteenth day of the lunar calendar, when the moonlight is at its purest, can there be a strong contrast between black and white. "Snow Country" was written in the 1930s, when electricity was far less popular than it is today.

Therefore, at the beginning of "Snow Country", after the train rushed out of the tunnel mouth, people still felt the continuous darkness. Only when the light comes, the snow will appear white due to the reflection, and the night and the earth will instantly become distinct. In the novel, this light comes from the train's headlights and the signal lights in the distance (just in time to catch the next sentence, "The train stopped in front of the signalhouse"). There was a small time difference between the lights shining on the snow and the passengers in the car feeling the darkness, which Kawabata Yasunari keenly captured, so he wrote "White" in writing. Neither the Chinese nor the English translation reflects this.

Second, "the bottom of the night turns white", is a poetic language, full of modernity and expressiveness, embodied in the fact that it has a "sense of container".

The night is boundless and invisible, and if something has a "bottom", it must have a boundary. The combination of "night" and "bottom", two seemingly contradictory things, reflects Kawabata Yasunari's sensitive understanding and delicate use of language.

In Yasunari Kawabata's pen, night is both edged and tangible.

If you really walk through the snowy night, you will find that the day may be wide and wide, and at night, after people's vision is obscured by darkness, the night will cover themselves like a cover.

On the other hand, things with bottoms, such as bottles, basins, tanks, and even pools and the sea, many of them are used to hold liquids. If "night" has a bottom, then the night changes from an invisible thing to a liquid. The train that drills out of the tunnel becomes a floating boat floating on the surface of the water, which is in turn associated with the protagonist Shimamura's "wandering life of doing nothing". It can be said that Yasunari Kawabata used the simplest words to create the most infinite imagery.

The "sense of container" in this sentence is also regrettable, and the Chinese and English translations have not been reflected. Chinese "a white expanse under the night sky", which is very much in line with the aesthetic habits of Chinese, but its imagery is too open, and the image created by the original text is even contrary to it, which inevitably makes the reader have an aesthetic deviation when reading.

Finally, the phrase "the bottom of the night turns white" is actually a typical Neo-Sensory writing style.

Neo-Sensation was an important genre of Twentieth-century Japanese literature, and Yasunari Kawabata was the standard-bearer writer of Neo-Sensationalism. Neosensitist writers describe the inner world rather than the superficial reality, and therefore advocate a "new feeling" to feel everything in life and the world. In terms of writing skills, it is often to turn external scenes into subjective feelings.

The opening sentence of "Snow Country" has no subject, which is not in line with the english custom, so the English translator added the subject "The train" (train) when translating. This translation has been greatly criticized, because it is not difficult to read the text carefully, and the perspective of the opening paragraph is not floating overhead to watch the train rush out of the tunnel, it is an internalized perspective, sitting in the carriage and looking out through the window.

The same is true of "the bottom of the night has turned white", which is a subjective feeling of man. The opening paragraphs of "Snow Country" are few strokes, which seem to be simple scenery descriptions, but in fact, Yasunari Kawabata transforms them into the inner feelings of the protagonist Shimamura. In the Chinese-English translation, these few sentences are translated into ordinary objective descriptions, and thus lack the charm of the new sense school.

But it has to be said that the translators have done their best. Imagine if translated literally, what would have happened? The biggest possibility is to be scolded by the reader, saying that "the translator Chinese fail and does not speak human words." After all, in addition to introducing new forms of expression, translation must also consider the aesthetic habits of the national language.

It's a dilemma. Many times, translation is dancing on two tightropes. Because of this, translation is almost an impossible task. However, knowing that it is impossible to complete, but still trying to get close to perfection, is this not the most attractive part of the translation process?

Original title: The bottom of the night has turned white It is difficult for many translators

Text/Yu Zhuang

Source/Beijing Evening News

Editor/He Mengyu