Professor Schultz of Columbia University offered the "Western Literary Creative Writing" course for Fudan University's "Literary Writing" major
From 2008 to 2010, I studied with Wang Anyi for two years, the predecessor of the "Creative Writing" (MFA) major at Fudan University, which is still a master's degree, and later worked as a teaching assistant in the "Fiction Writing Practice" class she taught MFA students. After graduating with my PhD in 2015, I myself stood on the MFA podium. In the past ten years, I have had the privilege of planning, starting up and growing with this profession, and I also feel obliged to leave a little record for the exploration along the way.
In 2017, Fudan MFA added a "Literary Translation Practice" course on the basis of the two compulsory courses of "Novel Writing Practice" and "Prose Writing Practice", which I taught. This course originated when Wang Anyi visited Columbia University's School of The Arts, when the other party proposed to open a literary translation course based on English to Chinese. Unfortunately, because of the Chinese proficiency, there are very few applicants for Columbia University. But Fudan's new course has passed the approval of the Graduate School, so I can only "go it alone".
Mu dan
At the beginning, the students did not understand: why should they take translation classes when they come to learn to create? Some students are not confident in their English ability and are even afraid to choose. Of course, I have an obligation to "justify" this course. It has been said that translation itself is a creation, because the language of writing has changed, and no matter how faithful the translation is, it cannot be completely equivalent to the original text, and different languages even if they express the same concept are more or less different. There is also a theory that creation is also a kind of translation, a translation of the writer's inner thoughts. From both perspectives, translation and creation do have a lot in common. At first, I also understood the "practice of literary translation" from this perspective. However, when I happened to read Wang Xiaobo's essay "My Teacher's Inheritance", I suddenly realized that practicing translation has more important significance for beginner writers. The article begins with a comparison of two translations of Pushkin's Bronze Knight:
(Translation 1)
I love you, the great city that Peter built,
I love your serious and neat face,
How majestic the flow of the Neva River is,
Marble spread on both sides of it...
(Translation 2)
I love you Peter's creation
I love your solemn appearance...
The Bronze Knight
Wang Xiaobo said that Zha Liangzheng's translation (the first type) "is a graceful and luxurious heroic poem, the best text", and the latter translator "is quasi-Northeasterner" because "his translated poems have the tone of two-person rotation, compared with Mr. Zha's translated poems, they are high and low.". When she was fifteen years old, she "knew what kind of words can be called good." The opening paragraph of Wang Daoqian's translation of "Lover" was praised by him as "pure fire of literary kung fu". Wang Xiaobo said:
Mr. Zha and Mr. Wang have helped me more than all the writers in modern China combined. Other knowledge of modern literature can be easily learned. But without people like Mr. Cha and Mr. Wang, the best Chinese literary languages would have nowhere to learn. ...... It was they who discovered the rhythm of modern Chinese. Without this rhythm, there would be no literature. The most important thing is that in China, there is already a pure and perfect modern literary language, and the rest is just learning, which is already very easy.
Wang Daogan and "Lover"
Wang Xiaobo pointed out the great role played by literary translation in promoting the maturity of modern Chinese. In that particular era, the best words were not in the novel, but in the translation. The most proficient and beautiful modern Chinese was born in translation. The political environment at the time limited the freedom to create, and writers had to turn to a more "safe" translation; the difference between translation and creation was that the former had already given the content of the work, and all they had to do was to rewrite it in Chinese according to the meaning of the original work. So they naturally poured all their talents and enthusiasm into the words, leaving us with the "best words".
Therefore, I decided to position the teaching purpose of the course "Literary Translation Practice" at the tempering of words. When the text is transferred from the paper to the screen, the legacy of "respecting the word paper" seems out of step with the times. Especially since the popularity of online writing, the "tomes" of millions of words, the author pursues how many words to "feed" their readers, and has no time to care about the value content of the text. The use of words has become unbridled, and many online literary works are like floods and weeds. I often tell my MFA classmates: "Cang Jie writes books, and the rain is raining, and the ghosts cry at night." "The invention of writing represents a leap in civilization and a qualitative change in the relationship between mankind and the world, which is enough to change the color of heaven and earth and move ghosts and gods. Chinese characters are by far the longest-lived script in the world, and the only one of the major writing systems of the ancient period that has been passed down to this day. When we write down a Chinese character, we are actually using a huge and complex network of meanings that has been formed after thousands of years of growth, and each word is a point in this network, connected by dots, interdependent, and moving the whole body. Hyphenation into words, conjunctions into sentences, not only follow the formation of this network of meanings, but also subtly change it, or become more mellow or more scattered. Thinking like this, how can you not be more cautious, more cautious?!
Cangjie character diagram
Translation, thus providing a perfect opportunity to "refine words". In the ready-made content framework, don't think about the storyline, just give full play to your language ability and focus all your attention on the words. Dispatch words, consider words, and convey the original meaning as faithfully and fluently as possible.
After several years of teaching, I found that the performance of students often presents two extremes: one is that the translation is too "hard", paying only attention to the literal faithfulness, and not considering the fluency of Chinese expression. The entire translation is full of various "Europeanized Chinese", the most typical is to translate the clauses in the original text into lengthy modifiers unchanged, separated by a number of "of" in the middle, which reads a bit of Lu Xun's translation (but Lu Xun's written vernacular at that time was immature, and he deliberately used "hard translation" to transform Chinese grammar). This shows that the translator's Chinese organizational ability is not enough, and he cannot express the prescribed meaning in natural and fluent Chinese.
Others, on the other hand, translate the original plain text with unbridled paraphrasing. This kind of trainee is often particularly passionate about creation, and also has some creative experience, and translation is like dancing in chains for them, which is really difficult. As if they could not resist the impulse to create, they wandered between the two identities of translator and author, consciously or unconsciously crossing the boundary between translation and creation. In my opinion, such translators do not have good enough Chinese skills, because they are also unable to properly express the meaning of the original text in Chinese, but simply abandon the former between faithfulness and fluency and choose the latter. The German sinologist Wolfgang Kubin has been criticized for criticizing contemporary Chinese literature as garbage, but he has a point that I agree with very much, saying that the biggest problem for Chinese translators is not that the foreign language is not good, but that the mother tongue is not good enough. Whether it is a translator or a writer, the most important thing to pay attention to is Chinese literacy, which is often overlooked by us.
There is a condition for practicing Chinese with translation, that is, to reduce the difficulty of the original text as much as possible, that is, to reduce the requirements for the translator's foreign language ability. Otherwise, the translator does not even understand the meaning of the original text, of course, it is impossible to express it clearly in Chinese, and the translation practice for the purpose of improving Chinese proficiency will become English learning. This is also the lesson I have learned from the experience of failure.
Author: Tao Lei (The author is a lecturer in creative writing at the Department of Chinese of Fudan University) Editor: Xuanjing Responsible Editor: Xing Xiaofang