Translation as hybridity in Sinophone Bai writing

ABSTRACT

How can minority writers within China assert their own ethnolinguistic distinctiveness whilst also writing in Chinese? Ethnic minority works fall into two groups: writing in standard Chinese, and works in native scripts. Most ethnic minority writing that can go beyond the local level to connect with a national or even global audience is published in Chinese – hence the label ‘Sinophone’ writing. The Bai people are one such minority nationality within China, who live in and around the city of Dali in ethnically-diverse Yunnan Province. Despite having their own language, they are often cited as one of the most ‘Sinicised’ of China’s ethnic groups. This means that the Bai are caught between two linguistic and cultural worlds: a situation that is reflected in their writing. As they write in Chinese, they translate their own language and culture, inserting non-Chinese words and cultural context, creating a new hybrid written form.

KEYWORDS:

• Bai people
• minority literature
• Sinophone writing
• Chinese ethnic groups
• minority translation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Cordingley, Self-Translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture, 3.

2. Yang, Yun zai Erhai shangkong, 90.

3. Zhao, Lanse Cunzhuang, 73.

4. Bai words in this paper are represented in the 1993 revision of the Latin-alphabet Bai orthography, otherwise known as Bai pinyin. It is designed to look similar to the Hanyu pinyin romanisation system for standard Chinese, and attempts to represent lexical items according to their standard pronunciation. Chinese words are written first in Hanyu pinyin, then traditional characters. All Chinese/Bai translations are my own, except where otherwise stated. It should be noted that the author is not fluent in Bai. All transcriptions and Bai language elements have been checked with informants from the Dali region, but any errors remain the author’s alone.

5. See National Bureau of Statistics. Yunnansheng 2010 nian diliouci qunguo renkou pucha zhuyao shuju gongbao 云南省2010年第六次全国人口普查主要数据公报.

6. See Wang, “On the Genetic Position of the Bai Language” for an in-depth, if as yet inconclusive, discussion of the genetic position of the Bai language. Thurgood suggests that the available data situates Bai as a ‘heavily Sinicized Tibeto-Burman language, otherwise as yet unsubgrouped’ (see Thurgood and Lapolla, The Sino-Tibetan Languages, 7).

7. Wiersma, Investigation of the Bai (Minjia) language along historical lines, 8.

8. Ibid., 2–3.

9. See, for example, Zhang, Dali Baizushi Tansuo.

10. Bryson, “Baijie and the Bai” 4.

11. see Harrell, “Introduction.” In Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan, 1–18.

12. Mckhann, “The Naxi and the Nationalities Question,” 46.

13. Bryson, “Baijie and the Bai,” 9.

14. Fitzgerald, The Tower of Five Glories, 14.

15. Ibid., 15.

16. See Hsu, Under the Ancestor’s Shadow.

17. Ma Yao 馬曜, a native Bai historian and anthropologist, has said that ‘I myself am Bai, and both within and outside of the Bai people there are odd remarks such as “the Bai have already been Sinicized”, “there’s nothing special about them”, and “regional autonomy is unnecessary”’ (Ma, Ma Yao Wenji, 335).

18. Mackerras, “Aspects of Bai Culture: Change and Continuity in a Yunnan Nationality,” 78.

19. Spitta, Between Two Waters, 2.

20. Fitzgerald, The Tower of Five Glories, 11.

21. Bryson, “Baijie and the Bai” 25.

22. Zhao and Xu, Bai-Han Cidian, 475.

23. Wiersma, “Investigation of the Bai (Minjia) language along historical lines,” 41.

24. Bender, “Ethnic Minority Literature,” 262.

25. Shih, “Introduction: What Is Sinophone Studies?” 3.

26. Yang, Yang Zhengwen Naxixue Lunji, 86.

27. See Poupard, “The translated identities of Sinophone Naxi authors,” 204.

28. As in Crossley, A Translucent Mirror.

29. See note 25.

30. Dirlik. “Literary Identity/Cultural Identity.”

31. Bender, “Ethnic Minority Literature,” 274. (emphasis added by author).

32. Tymoczko,“Post-colonial writing and literary translation,” 18.

33. See Lefevere and Bassnett, Constructing Cultures, and Venuti, “Translation and Minority.”

34. Bassnett, Translation, 145.

35. Ashcroft, “Bridging the silence: Inner translation and the metonymic gap,” 20.

36. Hassan, “Agency and Translational Literature,” 755.

37. See Ashcroft, Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Post-Colonial Literatures.

38. Tymoczko,“Post-colonial writing and literary translation,” 24.

39. Ashcroft, Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Post-Colonial Literatures, 176.

40. Ibid.

41. Na, Na Jialun Sanwenxuan, 3.

42. Yang, Yun zai Erhai shangkong, 16.

43. A good line by line reading of the stele text with a focus on Bai language elements can be found in Xu and Zhao, Baiwen Shanhuabei Shidu.

44. Gao, Dian xi cunzhuang de denghuo, 211.

45. Wiersma, Investigation of the Bai (Minjia) language along historical lines, 27.

46. Hefright, Language contact as bilingual contrast among Bái language users in Jiànchuān County, China, 326.

47. Yang, “Adanlan,” 35.

48. Ibid., 36.

49. Yang, Yun zai Erhai shangkong, 51, 77.

50. Ibid., 51.

51. Zhang, Erhai Zhi Cun, 302.

52. The title of the novel refers to the custom of Bai women painting their fingernails red using natural dyes each summer at the Torch Festival. A ritual to remember Cishan (legendary Bai figure and benzhu goddess, now known as Baijie), who is said to have clawed through the burning embers of a collapsed tower to find her husband’s remains with her bare hands until they became red with blood. As Yuqing Yang has written, Jing Yi’s novel represents a ‘resistance to representational superficiality, its refusal to produce yet another one-dimensional minority image’ (Yang, Mystifying China’s Southwest Ethnic Borderlands, 93). Bryson offers a detailed portrait of Baijie that deals with issues of gender, identity and ethnicity, see Bryson, Goddess on the Frontier.

53. Jing, Shei You Meili de Hong Zhijia, 62.

54. Yang, Mystifying China’s Southwest Ethnic Borderlands, 93.

55. Yang, Yun zai Erhai shangkong, 138.

56. Ibid., 138.

57. Ibid., 145.

58. These are generally soundbites that are easily remembered, and thus work nicely as an anecdote told on a tour bus, see Sun, Changyou Kunming, Dali, Lijiang, Xishuangbanna, 138, for an egregious example: ‘由於外形酷似人的耳朵，因此人們就稱其為“洱海”’ (because it’s shaped like a human ear, people call it ‘Erhai’).

59. Na, Na Jialun Sanwenxuan, 198.

60. Ibid.

61. Zhang, Wangfuyun Shengqi de Yewan, 22.

62. Eoyang, Borrowed Plumage, 82.

63. Yang, Mystifying China’s Southwest Ethnic Borderlands, 95.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Lee Hysan Foundation Research Grant [CA11256].

Notes on contributors

Duncan James Poupard

Duncan James Poupard is assistant professor in the Department of Translation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His work focuses on the translation of Chinese ethnic minority texts, and he has worked with museums and research groups around the world, including the British Library and the Barcelona Museum of World Cultures. His academic articles have appeared in journals such as Oral Tradition and the Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese.