Representing the true colors of Bai Xian-yong in the English language: A Touch of Green recounted

ABSTRACT

Bai Xian-yong is one of the most important writers in contemporary Chinese and world literature. His masterpiece Taipei People, a collection of fourteen short stories, presents a gallery of Chinese mainland émigrés to Taiwan in 1949 in the wake of Chinese civil war. As a classic of Taiwanese modernism, Taipei People features an emotional sensitivity and a lingual novelty comparable to those of James Joyce’s Dubliners. Its English version was translated by the author and Patia Yasin, and edited by George Kao, the co-founder of Renditions. The paper attempts to compare and contrast the renowned short story, “A Touch of Green,” with its original Chinese, focusing on some sentences, phrases, proper nouns and the title itself, whose English renditions might not be considered tantamount to their original Chinese – a Chinese so crisply and creatively converging both classical beauty and colloquial flavor that only Bai Xian-yong the Chinese novelist knows how to craft. The research argues that if equivalent English rendition abiding by the principle of optimal fidelity exists as the promise land for the promotion of Taiwan literature across the world, future literary translators may need to adopt a multi-etymological strategy to represent the whole picture of Bai’s well-wrought works.

KEYWORDS:

• Literary translation
• Bai Xian-yong
• “A Touch of Green”
• Taiwan literature
• multi-etymological strategy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The “is” here seems to be a typo of “takes.” This kind of typo can be seen elsewhere in the English version of Taipei People.

1. “Si l’on traduit tant, c’est aussi parce que la traduction ne cesse d’être une des activités intellectuelles les plus attrayantes” (Dobossy 1970, 214). (The French-English translations of all the footnote are rendered by the author of the essay for the convenience of reading.).

2. “la meilleure compréhension et à l’estime mutuelle entre les peuples” (Dobossy 1970, 215).

3. The quote from Yu Kuang-chung was originally written in Chinese and the English here is translated by the author of the essay. Hereafter if the author quotes a Chinese bibliographical entry other than Taipei People in the text, he will do the Chinese-English translation in the context of discussion for the convenience of reading.

4. The term “Stream of Consciousness” refers to a narrative technique, which is employed by writers to describe unspoken thoughts and feelings of their characters without bothering themselves to resort to conventional dialogues as seen in most realistic novels. One of the earliest and best known practitioners of “Stream of Consciousness” narration skill is the modernist Irish writer, James Joyce (1882–1941). One of the most famous examples of his stream of consciousness narration occurs in the last chapter of his renowned novel, Ulysses, in which Molly Bloom delivers a sentence of 4,391 words, all of which is internal monologue and is therefore presented as one single sentence, that is, without the insertion of any traditional punctuation. Bai Xian-yong, a follower of Western modernism and particularly James Joyce, also resorts to “Stream of Consciousness” in his novel writing. For details, please refer to Min-Hua Wu’s “When the Chrystal Boys Meet the Rebellious Daughter: Investigating Bai Xian-yong’s and Du Xiu-Lan’s Homographeses and their Interpretations” (Wu 2020, 206–27). As far as translation studies is concerned, when dealing with Bai’s works written in Stream of Consciousness, a literary translation scholar has to exempt his/her analyses from traditional grammatical perspective because a stream and consciousness narration flows like a stream of human consciousness, notwithstanding conventional punctuation and grammatical rigors.

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Min-Hua Wu

Min-Hua Wu is Associate Professor at the Department of English, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan and Associate Vice President for the Office of International Cooperation, NCCU (2020 Aug. - 2022 Jul.). He completed his doctoral dissertation in English literature at Paris-Sorbonne University fully funded by a Taiwan government scholarship. Besides a Chinese-French translation prize awarded by the Council for Cultural Affairs, Taiwan, he is a three-time awardee for the National Taiwan University Chinese-English Literary Translation Awards and three-time awardee in English-Chinese translation contest for the Liang Shih-ch’iu Literary Awards. As the Co-author of Chang Pao Chun Chiu: Li Ao’s Landscape of Lettres (Ink Publishing, Taipei), he has published in The Wenshan Review, Concentric, Brontë Studies, The Emily Dickinson Journal, Review of English and American Literature, Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, East Journal of Translation, Chengchi University Press, and Modern Chinese Literature, amongst others. He has co-edited a special issue on “Lyrical Translation and the Translator’s Subjectivity” with Paula VARSANO, Chair and Professor of Chinese literature at UC Berkeley for The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture (2021). Currently, he is working on a monograph, Tang Poetry in Xu Yuangchong’s English and French Translations: A Comparative Study.