Love in Translation: Equivalence and Transposition in Sense and Sound
“Every mortal loss is an immortal gain. The ruins of time build mansions in eternity.”
- William Blake
I see the two works, Eric Schlich’s “When You Are Old and I Am Gray” and Brian Heston’s “Monty Python,” as slice-of-life dramatic monologues that resemble each other in theme and language style. The theme is concerned with love and loss. The language is casual and conversational in which the flow of the narration experiences no interruptions or deviations, and the monotonous particulars of daily life are given close observations and lively depictions. The language of love enthralls me with its healing and heartwarming aura that drives away the cloud of sorrow in “Monty Python” and builds a paradise inside a dying flower in “When You Are Old and I Am Gray.” In my translation, I endeavor to revive that magic of love by which, seemingly without a trace, the mundane becomes electric, and the ordinary morphs into the epic.
On “When You Are Old and I Am Gray” by Eric Schlich
The title of this flash fiction reminds me of W. B. Yeats’s poem “When You Are Old,” the first line of which reads “when you are old and grey and full of sleep.” Both of the two works speak about love and aging. Both include words like “book,” “look”, “love,” and “grace.” Yeats’s poem evokes a sorrowful tone of unrequited love while Schlich’s fiction emanates an enduring warmness of reciprocal love. The commonality and the contrast glaze Schlich’s work with a particular sense of retrospection, which inspires me to arrange an equivalent memory trigger of something that transcends time through love in the translated title.
I came up with the title “你我沐黄昏” in a mixed style between classical and modern Chinese. Literally, the five Chinese characters mean that you and I are bathed in twilight. Twilight in Chinese literary tradition symbolizes the most romantic time in a day for a lovers’ rendezvous or tryst, as is described in 欧阳修 Ouyang Xiu’s lines “月上柳梢头，人约黄昏后。”1 Twilight (暮色) in Chinese also embodies old age in life (暮年), which accords with the implication of “old and gray” in the original title. The third character “沐” is a verb that means to immerse something in water or sunlight to be purified mentally and physically. As 李商隐 Li Shangyin wrote, “夕阳无限好， 只是近黄昏。”2 Blessed is the loving couple in their twilight years, who seem to have been nurtured by the eternal sunshine of love that shelters them from a rising morbidity of the elderly. With the nativized twilight imagery, the Chinese title not only carries the literal meaning of the original title but also elevates the representation of love through connecting readers with a sunset-eternity symbolism in classical Chinese poems.
Lyrical elements permeate this fiction. One example comes from the assonance in the last sentence “dying over the lip of the vase: the tulips, their sloping grace.” The vowel pairs like “over” and “slope,” “lip” and “tulip,” and “vase” and “grace,” almost shape the two clauses into a rhyming couplet. I reconstruct an equivalent ending rhyme pattern in which the vowel sound in the last character of the first clause “沿(yán)” rhymes with the vowel sound in last character of the second clause “线(xiàn).” The translated couplet goes “慢慢凋谢于花瓶的边沿：郁金香，它们优雅的曲线。”
Repetition enriches the cadence of some sentences with a musical quality. The phrase “long ago” and the phrase “a time” are repeated twice in the following sentence. “Long ago, a tulip was just a tulip. This is so long ago, it is a time I can barely remember, a time before you.” My translation is that “很久以前，郁金香只是郁金香而已。那是很久以前，游离记忆之外，你还未曾出现。” I rebuild a repetition in Chinese for “long ago” (很久以前), and it fits well into the translated rhythm. The repetition of “a time” (一段时间) in Chinese, however, feels redundant when read out loud. Instead, I employ a structural repetition, which has six characters in each clause, producing a bouncy groove in spoken Chinese, to replace and reflect the semantic and sonic repetition of the phrase “a time” in the source sentence. And I apply a similar treatment to the following sentence. “This is how something simple, something in this world, something that just is, takes on meaning.” It repeats the word “something” three times, and each clause is followed by a comma that indicates a pause in rhythm. I use three four-character Chinese phrases, which is a common form for traditional Chinese idioms, substituting the three “something” phrases, in a way to echo the repetition and the pauses in the original sentence. My translation is that “这便是简单之事，世上之物，原本之貌，变得意义非凡的方式。”
On “Monty Python” by Brian Heston
The title of this poem refers to the 1960s British sketch comedy group “Monty Python.” Two translated names have been prevalent in Chinese. One is “巨蟒” (“giant snake”), which is a literal translation; The other is “蒙提·派森,” which is a phonetic transcription of the original words. I adopt the latter approach because the name “Monty Python” is created by the group members, who think that it is funny and “sounded like a really bad theatrical agent…who might have got us together.”3 The original name has, in fact, nothing to do with the animal snake or the size of it; the name is intended apparently as a person’s name. To translate an English (alphabetic) name into a Chinese (logographic) name, phonetic transcription is usually the preferred method. “Monty Python” is thus translated into Chinese in the same way as “John Cleese” is.
From the communication with the author, I realized that the addressee in this poem is the speaker’s grandmother, who is grieving the loss of her husband. The “cloud” (line 11) that is gathering in her face refers to her feelings of sorrow in remembrance of the speaker’s grandfather. It is interesting to note that in Chinese the weather word cloud (“云”) is likewise used figuratively to describe the facial expression that is related to the feelings of gloom and sadness, as is shown in the common expression “愁云满面” (cloud of sorrow all over the face). The expletive interjection “the Christ” (line 18) implies that the father is getting annoyed by the speaker’s silly walks and urging him to sit down as soon as possible. I applied a semantic transposition in Chinese, in which a verb “愠怒” (be inwardly angry) and an adverb “赶紧” (quickly) replace the exclamation “the Christ,” to convey the emotion of slight anger and impatience in the father’s demand—“sit the Christ down.”
The division of time is delicately designed via enjambment in both poems. “Monty Python” includes a night scene and a morning scene, both of which last for equally nine and a half lines. The present and the past in “When You Are Old and I Am Gray” are interwoven yet likewise evenly placed with nine lines (line 1-5; 14-19 ) relating the here and now and another nine lines (line 5-14) sinking into the memories. It’s interesting to recognize that the temporal development, in the two poems, is so carefully measured at the syntactic level; meanwhile, it gets far more elusive at the emotional level as if any transient moment depicted is opening a portal to eternity. My translation retains the textual layout to reflect the manifold perceptions of time, in relation to love in all its gradations, in the original lines.
In his essay “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” Roman Jakobson stated that “creative transposition” provides a possible solution to the untranslatable nature of poetry. As a widely applied translation technique, transposition aims to preserve the polysemy and ambiguities of the original text through producing shifts of expression at morphological and syntactic levels in the target text. In the process of transposition, translators are constantly brainstorming for semantic and sonic counterparts and syntactic rearrangements in consideration of the aesthetic, cultural, and linguistic convergences and divergences between two languages while the changes they make tend to easily fall victim to rebukes of distorting and destroying the structure, the cadence, the tone, the flavor, the integrity, or the network of signifiers of the source text. It is nevertheless a translator’s responsibility to brave the storm of untranslatability and stay alert to the fine line between using and abusing the freedom of transposition.
Notes:
1 “Over willows’ end rises the moon; after twilight lovers will meet soon.” English translation is mine. Ouyang Xiu is a poet and calligrapher of Song Dynasty. The two lines are selected from his poem 《生查子·元夕》(“Shengzhazi - Lantern Night”), written in c. 1036.
2 “Boundless beauty in sunset I see; it is because the twilight comes near.” English translation is mine. Li Shangyin is a poet of Tang Dynasty. The two lines are selected from his poem 《登乐游原》(“Ascending the Leyou Height”), written in c. 844-45.
3 Jim Yoakum, Monty Python VS The World, 2014, p.46
About the Translator
Zhongxing Zeng is a Ph.D. (Literature) student in the English Department at Arizona State University. His research interests include William Blake, English Romanticism, and English-Chinese Literary Translation. He is also a singer-songwriter with publications of original music on NetEase Music, Apple Music, and Spotify under the artist name 曾寅. (updated 2022)
Translations
"Monty Python" by Brian Heston (Chinese)
"When You Are Old and I Am Gray" by Eric Schlich (Chinese)
With grateful acknowledgment to Chinese language reviewers: Xiaoqiao Ling, Huaiyu Chen & Yenan Lyu
"French Postales" by Alberto Ríos (Chinese)
"Oriental" by Jenny Yang Cropp (Chinese)
"Self-Portrait as Minotaur" by Jacqueline Balderrama (Chinese)
With grateful acknowledgment to Chinese language reviewers: Xiaoqiao Ling & Huaiyu Chen