Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

pieces. The team of translators has done an
admirable job here. Take, for example, these
short passages from Julie Chiu’s renderings of
pieces by two different authors. The first excerpt
is from “Mothballs,” by Chen Kehua (Taiwan):
And so they don’t say another word. He
takes her hand and carries it into his
overcoat pocket. They walk off together.
Such cold, dry weather is rare in Taipei.
His tan overcoat, with its turned down
collar, gives off the faint smell of mothballs,
carried in the air by the wind. Only just
taken out of the closet, it seems. As she
leans close to his shoulder, she thinks: A
man’s body cannot smell any better than
this.
Clean, neutral, with few associations.
Contrast this with the opening of “Fad,” by
Zhang Zheng (PRC):
Tang Ying was obsessed with the
thought that her clothes weren’t hip enough.
She spent five or six reminbi a month
subscribing to magazines like L’Officiel,
Fashion, and Haute Couture but still felt
dissatisfied with her personal style.
The voices are quite distinct. Chen’s spare
sentences and fragments are remade in a
restrained English, while Zhang’s prose pours
forth in long, almost gushy sentences.
Some short-shorts, like the Ku Ling pieces
included in the anthology, depend on snappy last
lines for their effect. In these instances, the
translator faces the extra challenge of matching
that punch in English. Again, the translators
have met that challenge, as their fine renderings
of Ku’s “Family Catastrophe,” “Death Dream,”
and “Confession of a Photographer” amply
demonstrate. (I won’t cite any passages here,
lest I spoil the fun for future readers!) At other
times, it is subtler shifts that a story turns on, as
in “Empty Seat” by Yuan Qiongqiong; and the
translator’s smooth English has just the right
amount of finesse.
Although united by a single written
language, the tales in Loud Sparrows range far
and wide: from country to city, from past to
present, and over several political systems and
stages of economic development. Stories from
the early-1980s PRC portray a society bogged
down by bureaucracy, while in later pieces,
corruption comes more to the fore — and yet the
importance of guanxi remains unchanged. In
Hong Kong and Taiwan, the protagonists tend to
face problems more characteristic of the
developed world and the middle class. Indeed, I
felt that a sense of place was important to many
of these stories, and I wonder whether the
reading experience might have been even richer
if the editors had highlighted these regional
variations by noting the authors’ locations in the
main text. (This information is included in the
biographical notes at the back of the book.)
Cantonese transliterations might also have been
used throughout the stories from Hong Kong,
which currently include both Mandarin-based
pinyin and familiar Cantonese words like
Kowloon and Mongkok. Given the strength of
Hong Kong cultural and linguistic identity, such
a move might provide useful context. But these
are minor cavils, and I hope that the fine
translators of this collection will not take my
suggestions amiss. Above all, Loud Sparrows is
delightful, and each of the stories in it is a
pleasure to read.
In closing, I would be remiss if I did not
mention another of the treats found in these
pages. To introduce each thematically grouped
section, Howard Goldblatt has written a piece of
flash fiction. These are a lot of fun (my favorite
is the piece that introduces the section entitled
“(In)Fidelities”), and they are further evidence
in support of my long-held belief that every
good translator is a writer in his or her own
right.
Translation Review 79